Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life  Originally published at the NYJB Reviewed by: Karen R. Koenig       Adultish is a comprehensive guide and workbook for learning to embrace your body no matter how it looks or how you wish it looked. In this highly readable compendium, researcher, educator, and multi-book author Charlotte Markey, PhD, speaks to those who let dissatisfaction with their bodies gnaw away at their happiness and prevent them from living their best lives. Her goal is to answer the question of how we can become more comfortable in our own skin, both literally and metaphorically, while improving our mental and physical health.      Although Adultish is intended for and is useful to all ages, it’s geared toward people on the cusp of adulthood, a time of seeking new ways to view ourselves and the world. The book is replete with questionnaires, self-assessments, Q and As, surveys,...

Originally published at the NYJB Whether you’re a fan of outspoken comedian Bill Maher, a political or culture junkie, or seek comic relief from the sturm und drang of this election season, you’ll enjoy the wit and wisdom of his new book which manages to be both hilarious and deadly serious. This compendium of “thought pieces with laughs” originally written over the past 20 years for HBO’s Real Time and ABC’s Politically Incorrect is meant for “those with an open mind, and those who recognize that, especially now, there’s ample crazy on both sides” of the political and cultural divide. Along with these shows and five previous books, Maher’s goal is to open our eyes, expand our minds, and move us past identity politics and toward making wiser choices for our country and world. He chose the book’s title, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, to mock the current spate...

(Originally published at New York Journal of Books) When we hear the word sociopath, our first thoughts are likely of malevolent, remorseless ne’er do wells whose behavior is manipulative and often criminal. A far less likely image is Sociopath’s author, Patric Gagne, PhD, an attractive, happily married mother on a therapeutic mission to upend our view of her diagnosis which she believes has been unfairly maligned and under-treated. Sociopath: A Memoir is not meant to be an autobiography in the strictest sense, as its author readily admits to inventing scenes and dialogue to convey her ideas and employing pseudonyms for some people in her life. Her goal is to educate the psychology community and general public about the true nature of sociopathy and provide self-help for others who carry her diagnosis. Gagne begins by telling us that, “I knew as early as seven that something was off. I didn’t care about...

Reviewed  by: Karen R. Koenig, LCSW for the New York Journal of Books   “a fascinating, esoteric treatise on gaslighting, which includes not only what this psychological tactic involves, but what it doesn’t, on both the micro and macro levels.” Kate Abramson, associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington, has written a fascinating, esoteric treatise on gaslighting, which includes not only what this psychological tactic involves, but what it doesn’t, on both the micro and macro levels. The book was born out of Abramson’s passion to correct the frequent misuse of the term in current culture and distinguish it from other forms of emotional abuse. This is no traditional self-help book, but an academic, in-depth examination of its subject—though it may well be instructive for people who are being gaslit, wonder if others are being manipulated in this way, or want to understand what makes gaslighters seek to destroy others in...

I’m years overdue blogging about my book, Words to Eat By: Using the Power of Self-talk to Transform Your Relationship with Food and Your Body, published in 2020. I wrote it based on the realization that all my clients with eating problems had the same barrier to eating “normally” and leading fulfilling lives: destructive self-talk. It's hard to believe how attached we get to negative thoughts that pulse through our minds. It amazes me how people think they’re the only ones with self-talk problems. All 8.1 billion of us on the planet have them. I often catch myself mired in irrational mental meanderings and need to reroute to rational thinking.  Words to Eat By is meant to help you rewire your brain around food and how you view yourself. In it, I explain in lay language how destructive self-talk gets stuck in our brains and how to unstick ourselves. Simply put,...

Reviewed by:  Karen R. Koenig  In Feel-Good Productivity, UK-based author, physician, and entrepreneur Ali Abdaal shows us that the key to successfully completing tasks we perceive as tedious, boring or just plain onerous is to connect with our positive feelings about them. Frustrated and disappointed in himself as a professional struggling with poor task management skills, he transformed himself through research and trial-and-error to become “the world’s most followed productivity expert” with 4.5 million subscribers and over 93 million total views on his YouTube channel. How many of us couldn’t use a leg up on how to get things done in any realm of life: work, eating, exercise, family time, hobbies, and getting the most out of our limited time on the planet? This is especially true of people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which, oddly, Abdaal does not discuss in the book when it’s precisely this group of people...

(Originally published at NYJB)  For a slim book of 62 pages, All That Happiness Is packs a wallop. Full of insights into what this prized state is—and isn’t—Adam Gopnik’s reflections teach us how to free ourselves from the chains of expectations and let happiness find us. A long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, prize-winning essayist, and prolific author, he writes with wit and compassion and parses his theory of happiness down to the nitty gritty. Gopnik starts out by pondering whether the crux of our nation’s fixation on happiness might be that our Declaration of Independence guarantees only our pursuit of happiness, and not, sadly, its capture. Warning us about the illusion of enjoying ongoing, permanent happiness, he urges us to be satisfied with “bursts of delight” based on the understanding that “the pursuit is the happiness,” which is the theme of this book. At the age of 12, Gopnik stumbled upon happiness in the form of...

(originally written for and posted on NYJB) Whether you have ADHD or are close to someone who has it, are female or male, young or old, this book will brighten your outlook on it. Rather than focus solely on how to remedy its disadvantages, certified ADHD coach, attorney, and podcast host, Tracy Otsuka—who carries the diagnosis herself—offers an upbeat view of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and shows how understanding its brain-based causes and managing them effectively will set and keep you on the road to success.   Otsuka’s goal is to make this book for women with ADHD “fun and easy so that you feel good reading about it—and keep reading it.” Encouraging curiosity rather than judgment about what she views as this spectrum condition, she advises that those with it find their own unique ways of managing it rather than copying what works for others. She writes from the stance...

Consider the level of emotional safety you experience around people and in the world. Do you tend to feel edgy and reactive and use anger or anxiety to protect yourself? Or does reactivity cause you to withdraw and isolate to avoid wounding? If you use these coping strategies more often than you’d like and want to feel more in tune with yourself and in balance with the world, Polyvagal Practices: Anchoring the Self in Safety by Deb Dana, LCSW will help you reach your goals. Dana seeks to help you find your “way to the rhythm of regulation that brings you safety, connection, and joy.” She explains how, outside of our awareness, the autonomic nervous system controls bodily functions through three hierarchical response pathways: ventral, sympathetic and dorsal. “Each pathway brings its own set of thoughts, feelings, behaviors and bodily experiences.” At the top of the hierarchy is the ventral state...

Although The Eating Disorder Trap by Robyn L. Goldberg, RDN, CEDRD-S was written as “A Guide for Clinicians and Loved Ones,” much of it is equally useful to people with dysregulated, dysfunctional eating. So, feel free to learn from this book, pass it on to your therapist who may know little about the specialty of treating eating disorders (EDs), and encourage intimates to read what Goldberg has to say from her decades as a registered dietitian helping clients and their loved ones make recovery happen. Full of valuable information and insights, chapters are short and to the point with simple graphics, case examples, and research data and conclusions. The book begins by explaining how lack of accurate information about EDs in our culture lays the traps that unwittingly snare people into them. Goldberg shares the truth about BMI, what “normal” eating entails, why diets fail long-term, and how to decide the...

A client gave me a book on co-dependency which I’d never heard of, but it was full of wonderful insights and advice. A quick read, Co-dependency: Loves Me, Loves Me Not by Simeon Lindstrom, hits all the right notes on the subject.  It’s a must read if you: feel lost when you’re not in a romantic relationshipbelieve you’re responsible for others’ feelingsfeel pressure to rescue people who have problems or to make them feel betteroften are taken advantage of and are then outraged and feel like a victim tend to be attracted to and have relationships with people who end up hurting youhave difficulty ending relationships in which you’re hurt repeatedlyalways worry about what others think of youavoid hurting others’ feelings and end up hurting yourself This book explains the adult, mature, healthy mindset you want to have in relating to others: You’re independent, though sometimes you depend on people situationally. You...

My book review originally published at NY Journal of Books This life-altering book stands head and shoulders above the countless how-to guides aiming to teach couples how to repair broken relationships. Its brilliance lies in both its macro-analysis of how cultural over-valuing of the individual undermines loving partnerships, and its detailed strategies to get back on track by learning to hold the well-being of the union above the happiness of each member. Written in plain language, the author’s generous sharing of therapy sessions will make readers cry with his clients and laugh at themselves. Terrence Real, LICSW, internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and multi-book author, is the founder of the Relational Life Institute. The power of his message comes from professional wisdom, topnotch writing, deep introspection, and exceptional frankness about the challenges he’s faced to become not only the man his wife would like him to be, but the man he,...

I’m always interested in reading a book by a seasoned psychotherapist who, like me, has also recovered from emotional overeating. It’s the perfect combination to educate and counsel people who want to manage both their emotions and relationship with food. In Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food, Arlene Englander, MA, LCSW, offers a 5-point plan that, when diligently and joyfully followed, will change your relationship with food. She describes emotional eating as “eating neither to satisfy hunger nor for enjoyment, but in a desperate attempt to distract oneself from painful thoughts and feelings.” In short, when we emotionally overeat, we not only abuse food but also mistreat ourselves. To help readers understand and identify with what she says, she shares experiences from her own emotional eating days and uses case examples from her clinical practice.  Her major focus is to teach readers how to connect with themselves and...

Book review by Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, MEd originally published at the NY Journal of Books In Bittersweet Susan Cain explains why it’s crucial to embrace all our emotions, especially those that are bittersweet. She takes on this nation’s pursuit of perpetual positivity with the same gusto, erudition, compassion, and thoughtfulness that made her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a bestseller.   Cain describes the emotion of bittersweet as “longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world” along with recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.” She even provides a short quiz to help readers determine if they lean temperamentally toward sanguine or bittersweet or travel between the two states. A lifelong devotee of Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen, Cain uses examples from...

This book review was originally published at New York Journal of Books on 1/24/22.  Emotional Inheritance explodes the myth that what we don’t know can’t hurt us, at least when it comes to family legacies. It explores the subtle and often hidden ways we are impacted by what happened in the lives of previous generations, especially by the traumas family members suffered and the secrets they held. Psychoanalyst and multi-book author, Galit Atlas, PhD, describes “the many faces of inherited trauma, its impact, and how we move forward.” She intertwines the personal impact of her ancestry and experiences with case studies of her clients to help us understand that we are—for better or worse—far more than we think we are because of how the past lives on within us. This book will be helpful to clinicians treating trauma survivors as well as to anyone trying to unravel their identity and resolve...

The goal of Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices is to alter not only our individual eating habits, but to change society’s relationship with food. It is truly a book for our times and our appetites. (Originally published at New York Journal of Books) Author Jack A. Bobo, who has worked for 13 years as a senior adviser on global food policy and spent the last decade learning how behavioral science can improve our eating decisions, states at the get-go that his book is not about slimming down and confirms why weight-loss diets inevitably only make us fatter, saying, “The truth is that diets don’t work for most people . . . the research is pretty clear that a lack of self-control is not what’s making us fat . . . reducing obesity in America is not about diets or information. It’s not about reading labels or counting calories. Instead,...

This book review was originally published at New York Journal of Books on 2/14/22.  In The Expectation Effect, award-winning science writer David Robson answers these questions: “What are the beliefs and expectations that rule our physical and mental well-being? How do the body, brain, and culture interact so potently to produce these self-fulfilling prophecies? And how can we use these fascinating findings to our own benefit?” He explains how beliefs “shape your health and well-being in profound ways, and that learning to reset our expectations . . . can have truly remarkable effects on our health, happiness and productivity.” He also shares how he reset his own expectations regarding his anxiety and depression and how much better he feels and is faring since changing his assumptions about them and himself. The book is replete with studies and stories from around the world about how expectations affect us physically, mentally, and emotionally....

Savor Ever Bite: Mindful Ways to Eat, Love Your Body and Live with Joy by Lynn Rossy, PhD takes you by the hand and teaches you how to eat mindfully. More than that, it shows you how to be more mindful in all of life because you can’t simply choose one area to be mindful in and expect an improved relationship with food. Regarding eating, Rossy lays out five steps for becoming more mindful: Step 1: Slow down and explore your senses Step 2: Soothe (instead of eat) your emotions Step 3: Surrender limiting thoughts Step 4: Smile and create your own happiness Step 5: Savor every moment Think about these steps and how much sense they make. I’ve never met anyone who overeats or eats mindlessly who doesn’t tell me that they eat too quickly and get so absorbed in doing so that the whole world drops away. Rossy tells...

If the title of Catherine Gildiner’s Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery does not imply that the real-life psychological horror stories within it actually had happy endings, it might be almost unbearable to read. Oddly enough, quite the opposite is true.  Gildiner, a seasoned clinical psychologist and acclaimed author, knows how to provide readers with just enough detail to get them hooked into rooting for each patient, but not so much to make them recoil from their gut-wrenching histories. With gentle humor and welcome candor about her own therapeutic shortcomings, she draws us into patients’ lives, then helps us let them go, both of which she had to do as their therapist. Good Morning, Monster functions on several levels. Readers with a general interest in psychology and human development will appreciate well-told stories of five pseudonymously named patients over the span of many years as...

When a client newly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)— formerly known as ADD—asked me to read Delivered from Distraction—Getting the Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder, I thought I’d do it for my own edification. The book is a sequel to Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. and John J. Ratey, M.D.’s landmark book, Driven to Distraction, which I read when it first came out many years ago.  The book has important things to say about state-of-the-art treatment for ADHD, and for the authors’ reckoning of what constitutes mental health. For example, you might have a bright child doing poorly in school or might have had a parent who was so disorganized that they regularly lost jobs or “forgot” to attend your school events. Maybe your marital or relationship frictions are due, in part, to the other person having ADHD. I have at least one client with a rocky...

Although Embodiment and The Treatment of Eating Disorders, originally published at the New York Journal of Books, is a scholarly work for clinicians, understanding its premise and promise may help you overcome your eating disorder. Psychologist, author, professor and researcher Catherine Cook-Cottone, herself recovered from body obsession, dieting and overeating, bases her treatment approach on the concept that troubled eaters are dis-embodied and that the way to recover is to move in the direction of wholeness. Being disconnected from emotional and physical needs is exactly why you are often filled with internal conflict. What I mean by conflict is, for example, yearning to be noticed and cherished while remaining steadfastly emotionally tucked away, lest relationships lead to getting hurt; pursuing others’ approval while hating how infantile and dependent this makes you feel; knowing how you want your body to look but not who you are inside it; and driving yourself harder...

A client recommended that I read Kathryn Hansen’s 2011 book Brain Over Binge: Why I Was Bulimic, Why Conventional Therapy Didn’t Work, and How I Recovered for Good. She marveled that reading it had 100% stopped her 30-year habit of binge-eating and compensatory over-exercising. Another client who’d begun reading it feared that I wouldn’t care for it (I was waiting for my copy to arrive) because it was vehemently anti-therapy for treating eating disorders. By this point, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Now that I’ve read it, my feelings about it are wildly mixed. I think it has extremely valuable ideas for troubled eaters and people who are inclined to fall back into weight-loss dieting when harmful eating patterns are feeling too hard to give up. But Hansen is neither therapist nor ED researcher. She’s a long-recovered dieter, binge-eater, and over-exerciser who wrote a “recovery memoir” which...

How I wish I’d had a copy of Maryann Jacobsen’s book, My Body’s Superpower: The Girl’s Guide to Growing Up Healthy During Puberty, in my pre-adolescent and adolescent years. Although many decades have gone by since then, I still vividly remember how difficult it was to manage my feelings, my changing body and the world I lived in. If you have a female child who’s approaching or going through the changes of puberty, you’ll want to purchase a copy of this book to help guide her through it. The premise of My Body’s Superpower is that we all have secret powers that become superpowers once we discover, practice, and start using them regularly. The book begins with Jacobsen, a dietician, mother and author who writes about effective parenting, explaining what puberty is and describing its five stages. She describes early and late puberty and even has a short section for boys...

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone will teach you about yourself. Sure, it details author Lori Gottlieb’s journey with her therapy patients and her attempts to sort out her own mental health conundrums. But, as the subtitle implies, it’s also about “Our Lives Revealed,” because under all our class, ethnic, religious, educational, political, gender, and vocational differences, we’re all just struggling to paradoxically both know ourselves and hide from this knowledge at the same time. Although this book is presented as a series of stories involving the author, it’s really a teaching tale about how we create, assign meaning to and, if we’re lucky, change our own stories. Telling hers and those of her beloved patients, Gottlieb bares her soul often enough to make us cry, while also making us laugh as she offers herself up as a prime example of someone maneuvering the mind-bending ups and downs and in and...

As an eating disorders’ therapist, I can say unequivocally that partners of dysregulated eaters need to know what to do to help their loved ones struggling with food. Although they don’t think of it as “their” problem, it deeply affects them deeply. Whether they realize it or not, what they do or don’t do has a strong impact on their partner’s eating. From working with partners of dysregulated eaters, I know they often feel either overly responsible or powerless to fix their beloved’s dysfunctional eating. Loving Someone with an Eating Disorder: Understanding, Supporting and Connecting with Your Partner by Dana Harron, PsyD provides concrete, psychology-based strategies to help partners become more helpful and feel more confident in promoting healthy and effective dynamics to help their loved one resolve his or her dysregulated eating problems. Topics include feeling alone in loving someone who has an eating disorder, learning about different kinds of...

Reviewed by: Karen R. Koenig (Originally published at New York Journal of Books) https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/weight-being Kara Richardson Whitely’s double-entendre of a title, The Weight of Being, wonderfully captures her physical and emotional life as a person of higher weight. In spite of successfully having climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro at 300 pounds and survived a dysfunctional childhood that involved PTSD from sexual abuse, her father’s heartbreaking abandonment of the family, suffering as the target of fat stigma, near disabling self-doubt, body hatred, depression, and low self-esteem—all of which she writes about in lively prose with touches of self-deprecating humor—the one thing that she’s unable to do is to have a consistently sane, sensible relationship with food. Having begun dieting in middle school, she knows how to starve herself and lose weight, but the pounds always pile back on. The book describes the discomfort of moving around in a large body well enough to live...

How many minutes—or hours—do you miss in a day wishing that you were home when you’re out at work, yearning to do nothing when you’re busy doing something, feeling pressured to do something when you’re doing nothing, worrying about what you didn’t do yesterday or need to do tomorrow, wishing to sleep when you’re awake and staying frustratingly awake when you want to be sleeping. Your life doesn’t need to be this way. Since reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s classic, Wherever You Go, There You Are, in the late 1990s, I’ve attended a few meditation workshops and use deep-breathing to relax, mostly to fall asleep (an easy process that works like a charm). I picked up his newest book, Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important, to see what more he had to say on the subject. The evidence is in: meditation has great value. Meditation is...

Reviewed by: Karen R. Koenig  (Originally published at New York Journal of Books) https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/power-agency The Power of Agency: The 7 Principles to Conquer Obstacles, Make Effective Decisions, and Create a Life on Your Own Terms “If you’re looking for a read that spotlights exactly how to take control of your life, this book provides a tidy amalgamation of theory and practice that’ll get you up and running with the tools you need.”  The Power of Agency provides the essentials for managing your life by referencing and recapping the best ideas that have been written on the subject over the past few decades. The authors keep us engaged with brief, to-the-point case examples and studies, check-list suggestions at the end of each chapter, and readable language that explains theoretical concepts by getting right to the point. The book includes a handy inventory/self-assessment on the components of agency at the start of the book,...

Reviewed by Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed. and originally published at New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/elephant-room. The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America “The inspiring story of Tomlinson transforming his relationship with food may break your heart before it eventually lifts it.” The Elephant in the Room should be compulsory reading for people of every size. If you share Tomlinson’s love-hate relationship with food, you just may learn a thing or two that will set you on a path to more normal eating. If you’ve not battled with food or weight, he’ll paint you such a graphic picture that you’ll never look askance at a fat person again. And if you don’t feel compassion for his struggles, check for a missing piece of your heart. When it comes to being fat, Tomlinson tells it like it is: the stigma and shame,...

I wish I’d had The Intuitive Eating Workbook for Teens by Elyse Resch, MS, RDN when I was growing up. My dieting and binge-eating started in adolescence and back then I never gave a thought to these behaviors damaging my mental or physical health. I was ignorant and would have benefitted from knowing about intuitive eating in order to start focusing on appetite cues and valuing my body and stop focusing on weight. The workbook is geared for teens, without talking down to or above them. It covers a wide range of issues beyond what and how to eat. It begins with an explanation of why diets don’t work long-term and the dangerous pattern they set up for young minds and bodies. I love that it links the dynamic of deprivation to rebound eating, of denying ourselves food to rebelling against rules which can generate the desire to overeat. This is...

I have a special place in my heart for Geneen Roth’s books. Back when I was in the throes of my emotional and binge-eating, she was there to teach me that food wasn’t love, that I could honor my needs rather than gobble them away, and that I could enjoy a comfortable body weight without dieting and deprivation. And now she has a new book out that’s just as wise, witty, and inspirational as her others, the aptly named "This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide." As a writer myself, I’m a sucker for beautiful prose and Geneen’s liquid, lyrical style doesn’t disappointment. As a therapist, I’m thrilled that she’s finally stopped seeking answers from outside “experts” and now recognizes that she is her own font of considerable, ever-flowing wisdom. By writing from that point of view, she encourages us all to look inward to learn, as she says, what we already...

The title of Pavel G. Somov’s new book, Mindful Emotional Eating: Mindfulness Skills to Control Carvings, Eating in Moderation and Optimize Coping, provides a new slant to emotional eating. What if it’s not a bad thing to do? What if it’s a natural response to a stressful life? What if we could enhance emotional eating by doing it mindfully without guilt and perhaps, therefore, eat less? This may be a radical idea for many of you. This book focuses on harm reduction, the hurt done to body and mind from out-of-control emotional eating. It is written for eating disorder clinicians and their clients and has something for each audience. Disregulated eaters learn that self-loathing and guilt drive binge-eating, and that the only true path to stopping binges is self-acceptance. Somov distinguishes between mindful and mindless bingeing. We may consciously choose to have a nibble of this or a nosh of that...

I highly recommend Dr. David A. Kessler’s new book, THE END OF OVEREATING: TAKING CONTROL OF THE INSATIABLE AMERICAN APPETITE. He was the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 1990-7 and writes on eating and weight from a professional perspective, but also as someone who struggles with food himself. Some pertinent points from this very enlightening and readable book. Kessler begins by talking about why it’s hard to resist certain foods: our bodies crave the mixture of sugar, fat, and salt contained in most prepared foods. While we get a dopamine boost from each ingredient alone, the biggest rush comes from a combo of all three. Even the anticipation of eating them triggers a response in our brains, as does unconscious cuing which happens when anything in the environment creates an unconscious or conscious association with food—seeing grandma reminds us of her yummy brownies, cruising by Taco Bell...

My sixth book, Outsmarting Overeating: Boost Your Life Skills, End Your Food Problems, was just published by New World Library, and I’m excited to tell you about it. It’s like no other book because it’s less about food than, well, the rest of your life. In fact, it’s based on this basic question: What if your eating problems aren’t really about food? If so, then all the diets and fasts, carb and calorie-counting, deprivation and nutrition information in the world isn’t going to help you. My premise, based on 30-plus years of experience treating troubled eaters—and having overcome overeating half a lifetime ago myself—is that effective life skills lead to a more manageable life, and a more enjoyable, stress-free life makes it easier to eat “normally.” Makes sense, doesn’t it? Life skills are strategies and behaviors which we all needed to learn in childhood, but didn’t because our parents were teaching...

If you’re looking for a guide to become better acquainted with yourself and need a hand to hold while exploring your beliefs and perceptions, try Vironika Tugaleva’s book, The Art of Talking To Yourself: Self-Awareness Meets the Inner Conversation (Soulux Press, 2017). The premise of this wise mix of memoir, philosophy and psychology, written in an approachable manner is, paradoxically, to not trust self-help books, but to learn to trust yourself. Recovered from drug and eating problems, Tugaleva has suffered from depression and suicidality. She clearly learned some valuable life lessons on her journey of healing, many of which are applicable to dysregulated eaters. Rather than describe all that she covers in the book, here are some nuggets of wisdom from a book that is full of them: She extols the value of self-talk “Your inner conversation is more than the sum total of thoughts that roll around in your head from day...

I’m going to use blog space today to encourage you to read my second book, The Food and Feelings Workbook—A Full Course Meal on Emotional Health. My purpose isn’t to sell more copies (though that’s always nice!), but to share with you a powerful vehicle for learning about your emotional relationship with food. If you already know about the workbook, have read or are reading it, well, then you don’t need to continue on and have a few extra few minutes today to do something else. The workbook came about from my experience treating people who worked hard on becoming “normal” eaters but couldn’t get there because of how they used food to prevent or lessen uncomfortable feelings. It didn’t matter whether they were over- or undereaters or yo-yoed back and forth. The issue was how they turned to food to avoid and modulate emotional distress. The workbook explains the purpose...

I know that many of you read books about eating (like mine!) to help you resolve your food problems. However, other books that don’t specifically target eating can work wonders in moving you toward recovery. For now, here’s a taste of the wisdom from my favorite “self-help” books. From time to time, I’ll provide you with more titles. Two books by Daniel Goleman offer highly readable descriptions of emotions from a biological and sociological perspective. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ focuses on temperament, the biology of emotions, and the importance of really knowing your “feeling” self. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships provides a thorough education on the biopsychosocial chemistry of how and why we relate to others as we do. Another gem on the subject is The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux which tells explains how the brain...

Ever wish your therapist could help more with your eating and weight issues? Wonder why a counselor doesn’t pick up on your distress over food or body image or minimizes these issues when you start talking about them? Feel angry that the only response a therapist has to your being overweight is to tell you to go on a diet? Love working with your therapist, but wish he or she had a better understanding of your eating and weight frustrations? My new book, What Every Therapist Needs to Know About Treating Eating and Weight Issues, has the answers you’re looking for—and much, much more. Published by Norton Professional Books in September, 2008, What Every Therapist Needs to Know About Treating Eating and Weight Issues was written for general practitioners who have little or no training or experience working with these problems. Maybe they specialize in treating depression or anxiety or family...

There are so many pop psychology, clinical, and self-books written nowadays, that I can’t keep up. Most of the time I’m amazed at what, after 30 years in the field, I still can learn. However, occasionally I’m appalled by some of these books which can be detrimental to certain kinds of clients and reinforce their problems, not only with food and weight, but in other areas as well. Most self-help books are written for the general population—people who are having trouble changing their thinking and behavior in various settings—not for trauma survivors. Yet, more and more, the people I treat come from childhoods that are traumatic, at worst, and seriously dysfunctional, at best. Most already compare themselves intensely unfavorably with others, have major issues with self-esteem, self-worth and self-image, and have spent decades trying to improve their emotional health. considering their backgrounds, nearly all have made incredible strides, but too many...

BOOK REVIEW: Beating Ana: How to Outsmart Your Eating Disorder and Take Your Life Back by Shannon Cutts (HCI, 2009) Author Shannon Cutts has created a smart little book in Beating Ana for anyone struggling with eating issues. The theme of the book, which I whole-heartedly endorse, is developing relationships to replace eating disorders. Cutts couldn’t be more on target when she says that we need to “feed our minds and hearts with the empowering stories of others.” To extend the metaphor, the book is a most satisfying meal. The focus of Beating Ana is on mentoring. Cutts defines a mentor as “one who is recovering who understands and can give hope and support from an insiders’ perspective.” This concept is the foundation of the “Anonymous” organizations and works well for recovering from a host of problems and addictions. As Cutts underscores, it is precisely our isolation and shame that keep...

My fourth book, NICE GIRLS FINISH FAT—PUT YOURSELF FIRST AND CHANGE YOUR EATING FOREVER (Fireside Books, a division of Simon and Schuster), hits the shelves tomorrow, June 2! It’s the first book to link up doing too much and eating too much, and was written for all of you women who take care of others with your warm hearts and generous natures and take care of yourselves through multiple trips to the refrigerator. “Nice” men who abuse food will benefit from reading the book as well. NICE GIRLS FINISH FAT developed from my gradual realizations about the excessive niceness of the women I treat for food problems—smiling all the time, dutiful about keeping appointments, guilt stricken when they can’t pay me on time, apologizing for half the session for coming a few minutes late, and spending much of our time wailing about how much they have to do, how imperfect they...

A trio of books by Barbara Small, MA on subjects near and dear to the hearts of disregulated eaters—assertiveness, effective communication and self-talk—belong up there on your bookshelf. Small, a reformed overeater and “nice girl,” counselor, and life coach from Victoria, BC, has lots of insightful and instructive things to say about how to get your head on straight, get out of behavioral ruts, and speak your needs. In WHAT ABOUT ME, WHAT DO I WANT: BECOMING ASSERTIVE she focuses on how to get what you want in life. Starting off with communication styles, she moves on to discuss how we learn to communicate poorly and how to use cognitive restructuring to turn around your thinking with hands-on suggestions to become more assertive. The book is filled with self-assessment exercises, practical advice, and humor. In fact, it’s a mini-workbook written in clear, cogent language that teaches you exactly what you need...

An enlightening new book, THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF: STORIES OF PERSONAL TRIUMPH FROM THE FRONTIERS OF BRAIN SCIENCE by Norman Doidge, M.D., is not about eating per se, but I recommend it because it is all about mental change. Although the title may sound daunting and dry, the book is anything but. THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF teaches us about how plastic—malleable and changeable—the brain is. For most of history, it was thought that the brain’s workings were fixed and permanent, that because we’re hard-wired, that’s how we stay. Although we do have instincts and a good deal of hard-wiring inherited through our DNA, there is much about ourselves and our lives that can be altered by thinking differently and taking actions in ways that reshape and rewire the brain’s neural pathways. One relevant chapter in the book is devoted to stopping worries, obsessions, compulsions, and bad habits. Doidge writes,...

Ever think that there must be another way to work on your eating problems? FINDING YOUR VOICE THROUGH CREATIVITY: THE ART AND JOURNALING WORKBOOK FOR DISORDERED EATING by Mindy Jacobson-Levy and Maureen Foy-Tornay (Gürze Books, 2010) offers an approach that encourages you to use creativity to access your innermost thoughts and feelings about your disregulated eating. As the authors, both art therapists and professional counselors, say, “Art bypasses the flow of thoughts and words that continually run through our heads. Although words can be meaningful…they can also serve as a façade that masks true feelings. This is particularly true for individuals with chaotic eating patterns whose negative self-talk has become a habit and focal point.” This workbook taps into the non-verbal part of your brain, using creativity to help you shut off those pesky thoughts and teach you to recognize exactly what you’re feeling. The authors maintain that disregulated eaters too...

Books that tell you to change unwanted attitudes and behaviors by “just doing it” don’t generally work for readers with traumatic childhoods. That’s why I like It’s Not Your Fault: How Healing Relationships Change Your Brain and Can Help You Overcome a Painful Past by Patricia Romano McGraw, Ph.D. She explains in readable language and through case-based examples what happens to a child’s brain growing up in a stressful, dysfunctional (ie, traumatic) environment and describes how therapy can actually change the brain and heal the heart. As so many disregulated eaters are trauma survivors—whether you recognize yourself as one or not—this book will help you understand why it’s so difficult to establish and maintain new eating habits. McGraw presents the concept of templates—models or patterns on which things are based—that are physically laid down in the brain through childhood interactions we have with caretakers, primarily our parents. Because neural pathways grow...

I read as many psychology and self-help books as time permits to keep expanding my knowledge base and make targeted suggestions when clients need help. Some books relate directly to eating, others have a peripheral link. As you probably know by now, food and weight problems are connected to many facets of life. Here’s a review of a relatively new book about mothers and daughters which has been helpful to my clients. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Karyl McBride, Ph.D., is a terrific addition to the literature written about the clinical diagnosis of narcissism and how having a narcissistic parent can detrimentally affect you throughout life. Written by a psychology professional and daughter of a narcissistic mother, the book explains: what a narcissist is (and isn’t), the underlying causes of narcissism, why and how daughters of narcissistic mothers suffer, and what they can...

WOMEN, FOOD AND GOD: AN UNEXPECTED PATH TO ALMOST ANYTHING, Geneen Roth’s new book, is a must read. You might wonder, as I did, what she could possibly have to say that she hasn’t said already after penning some half dozen bestsellers. The answer is lots. Although there’s nothing so new and startling that it will knock your socks off, she still has wisdom to impart from her own food struggles and recovery and from studying and pursuing emotional/psychological health for decades. First off, for all you secularists (of which I am one) who fear that this book is some sort of religious or spiritual tome, let me put your mind at rest. When Roth speaks of God, she’s not talking about the concept in the traditional sense—to her, God can be anything or nothing. Her intent is for you to discover and hold dear the divine in yourself. Second, she...

I had such a good time reading Sharon Begley’s new book, Can’t. Just. Stop. An Investigation of Compulsions (Simon & Schuster, 2017), that I was sorry when it ended. For a serious science writer, Begley can be surprisingly funny, which is rather fortunate when dealing with the painful topic of why we simply can’t stop doing things that we hate doing and hate ourselves for doing. Like mindless, emotional, compulsive, binge or over-eating, for example. If you’re looking for easy answers on how to stop compulsions or addictions, you won’t find them in this book. However, if you’re looking for a greater understanding of why you’re driven to do whatever it is you do (while not wanting to do it), you’ll learn a lot. First off, Begley describes the difference between compulsions and addictions, which are often used interchangeably though they do not mean the same thing. Throw in the term “poor...

Ever on the lookout for books to help people feel better about their bodies, I found one in Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!) by Connie Sobszak, co-founder of The Body Positive. Sobszak begins by explaining that, “When we become ‘embodied’—choosing to live consciously in our bodies and thereby giving our spirits a physical home—we can experience love for our ‘flawed’ human selves.” The Body Positive model moves away from trying to fix what you perceive is wrong with your body to a “practice of improving and maintaining self-care behaviors that are motivated by positive rather than punishing forces.” Act from your “wants,” she’s saying, not from someone else’s “shoulds.” The book is divided into five competencies. In “Reclaim Health” Sobszak offers a weight-neutral, pleasure-focused approach to getting and staying healthy. She encourages readers to find pleasure in self-care rather than see it as a...

I’m delighted to be blogging about BODY SHOTS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE CULTURE OF EATING DISORDERS, a new book by my colleague Emily Fox-Kales. Among her numerous professional achievements, she is the executive director of Feeding Ourselves (http://www.feedingourselves.com/), a Massachusetts program that teaches troubled eaters to stop obsessing about weight and become “normal” eaters. BODY SHOTS critiques how what we view on the big (and small) screen teaches us the precise wrong messages about food, eating, and our bodies. As stories go, this tale of Hollywood’s distortion of women’s bodies and promotion of an irrational ideal of thinness has a tragic ending—starvation, malnutrition, overeating, a cycle of yo-yo dieting and binge-eating, self-hatred, preoccupation with weight and shape, and questing for the perfect body above all else. Fox-Kales reveals the subtext of TV makeover shows that leave women feeling that their bodies are burdens that need to be transformed: “These shows enact the...