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Summary
Summary
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Women Food and God
"A life-changing book."--Oprah
In this moving and intimate book, Geneen Roth, bestselling author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating , shows how dieting and emotional eating often become a substitute for intimacy. Drawing on her own painful personal experiences, as well as the candid stories of those she has helped in her seminars, Roth examines the crucial issues that surround emotional eating: need for control, dependency on melodrama, desire for what is forbidden, and the belief that one wrong move can mean catastrophe. She shows why many people overeat in an attempt to satisfy their emotional hunger, and why weight loss frequently just uncovers a new set of problems. But her welcome message is that change is possible. This book will help readers break destructive, self-perpetuating patterns and learn to satisfy all the hungers--physical and emotional--that make us human.
Author Notes
Geneen Roth was born in New York City. She is a writer and a teacher who has gained international prominence through her work in the field of eating disorders. She has written several books including Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, When Food is Love, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, and Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money. Her books focus on the link between compulsive eating and perpetual dieting with deeply personal and spiritual issues that go far beyond food, weight and body image. She has written monthly columns in Good Housekeeping Magazine and Prevention Magazine.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is the fourth book ( Feeding the Hungry Heart, etc.) generated by the seminars Roth conducts at her Berkeley, Calif., home for people who believe that if they were thin, they would be happy. But the author makes clear that losing weight doesn't automatically gain one success, respect and love. Roth's personal story and those of her clients as related here exemplify the need to discover why the overweight are addicted to food. Citing her own deprived childhood, the author demonstrates that gluttons seek the reliable comforts of eating instead of closeness with humans who might become abusive (like her mother) or vanish (like her father). Those bent on self-improvement will find that the book merely repeats well-known principles in a melodramatic fashion. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Roth's memoir of how she freed herself from both compulsive loving in order to write books such as Feeding the Hungry Heart (1982) and Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating (1984), to conduct seminars for other compulsives, and to develop an intimate relationship with a man. Using herself as a model, Roth describes how the same deprivations and abuses of childhood that led to her compulsive eating prevented her from achieving intimacy with a man in her adult life. Excluding cultural or biological explanations for these problems, Roth explains that because of childhood experiences, the adult compulsive eater is afraid of intimacy, of asking for what she needs, and of failure, requiring both a sense of control that destroys relationships and an excessive dependence on fantasy that creates unhealthy ones--such as her two-year affair with a mercurial lover who left her to take a course in gourmet cooking. Much of the book, however, explores two relationships in which her behavior contradicts her own advice. She defies her stepfather by publishing this work that exposes her mother's early delinquencies, disregarding the damage she may be inflicting on her mother's new life on the justification that public confession, using real names, will help her heal, which takes priority over the pain she will cause everyone else. The healthy relationship she explores involves her lover, Matt, to whom the book is dedicated, a man whose childhood she envies because his mother made his shoes and on whose forbearance she depends to sooth her fears and resentments (often directed toward him). Enlivened by Roth's smart, vivid, epigrammatic style; but less than persuasive, with its confused messages and apparent end-justifies-the-means route to healing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Like Roth's previous works (e.g., Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, Why Weight?), this book is about women, by a woman, for women. It's a self-help book of sorts, exploring the relationships between food and love and why food, for many, has become a shield from living. No psychobabble here; Roth painfully exposes her own life and those of her clients in Breaking Free workshops to explain why suffering is comfortable, why the forbidden is desired, how to overcome the victim syndrome, how to grieve for--and acknowledge--lost years. In no way is this a breakthrough in understanding why Weight Watchers and other diet plans all too often fail; professionals, after all, have recognized for decades that lack of positive self-image is the root of many psychological problems. But by caring, and with warmth, Roth conveys sympathy, reassurance, and hope. ~--Barbara Jacobs
