As a writer of books on eating and weight, I’m always interested in reading what other therapist authors have to say on the subject. One book I highly recommend is HEALING YOUR HUNGRY HEART: RECOVERY FROM YOUR EATING DISORDER by Joanna Poppink, MFT. Though highly personal, HEALING YOUR HUNGRY HEART is not another memoir, but a smart how-to-recover book from a wise and caring teacher. Although the book seems primarily geared to women with bulimia and anorexia, binge-eaters and men with these problems will get a lot out of it. One of my favorite chapters is on early warning signs of having an eating disorder because it teases out the subtle ways—including cultural pressure—we con ourselves into believing we’re “normal” eaters when we’re not. Poppink’s chapters on Boundaries and Family are also enlightening. As a therapist, Poppink explains how troubled eaters allow their boundaries to become violated and how that can...

If you were to combine medical knowledge, nutritional advice, a guide to mindful eating, a self-care manual, and fitness suggestions into one book, you’d come up EAT WHAT YOU LOVE, LOVE WHAT YOU EAT WITH DIABETES: A MINDFUL EATING PROGRAM FOR THRIVING WITH PREDIABETES AND DIABETES by Michelle May, MD with Megrette Fletcher, MEd, RD, CDE. For those of you in either category, this is a book you won’t want to miss. Dr. May is well known in the field of dysfunctional eating as the author of EAT WHAT YOU LOVE, LOVE WHAT YOU EAT: HOW TO BREAK THE EAT-REPENT-REPEAT CYCLE (a book I heartily recommend). In this new book, she and Fletcher map out a plan for managing pre-diabetes and diabetes that is both sensible and doable. They emphasize curiosity, not judgment, and focus on empowering readers to get out of victim mode and take charge of their health. There...

What a delight to blog about THE SELF-COMPASSION DIET: A STEP-BY-STEP PROGRAM TO LOSE WEIGHT WITH LOVING-KINDNESS by Jean Fain, LICSW, a colleague from the Boston area, where I lived and worked for decades. Although I rarely focus on weight loss, this book has such powerful strategies for becoming a “normal” eater (and shedding pounds), that I want to spread the word. The premise of the book and CD is simple: by using self-compassion or “a deep awareness of one’s own suffering,” you can radically go from being a dysfunctional eater to a functional one. Fain describes self-compassion as composed of mindful awareness (a basic technique of keeping attention on the present moment), self-kindness (treating yourself with caring, understanding and validation), and common humanity (the awareness that suffering is part of the human condition and that others suffer in a similar way). I love that Fain considers self-compassion both a personality...

We Americans know how to do so many things well, but eating is assuredly not one of them. For that, it seems, we must cast our eyes across the Atlantic to France. In LOSING IT IN FRANCE: LES SECRETS OF THE FRENCH DIET by Sally Asher, we are transported to a land where enjoying food more leads to eating just the right amount of it. Part cookbook, part memoir, Asher teaches us how to enjoy food in all its facets—meal planning, shopping, cooking, serving and, of course, eating. Proving that you can judge a book by its cover, LOSING IT IN FRANCE has an enticing cover photo that looks distinctly French—bread nesting in a bicycle basket in front of a pastry shop. In the U.S., we’d look at this scene and start counting calories and carbs. We’d see the bicycle and think, Ugh, exercise. In France, bread and pastry are a...

I always get excited when I’m about to read another book by Geneen Roth and I remained excited after finishing her most recent foray into self-help, LOST AND FOUND: UNEXPECTED REVELATIONS ABOUT FOOD AND MONEY. I encourage you all to read it, whether your problems are in the eating or money arena, or both. For those of you who haven’t heard, Roth and her husband lost pretty much all their savings when Bernie Madoff was handcuffed and led away to prison for swindling investors in a Ponzi scheme. Roth writes about her devastation and gradual, painful recovery in a way that is so honest, it’s painful to read. Therapists talk alot about our job of helping people remove their “emotional masks” to reveal their authentic selves. Well, no one does unmasking as well as Roth, and it is her brutal honesty and clarity about herself which makes your heart catch—and teaches...

If you’re a fan of 12-step programs, STOP EATING YOUR HEART OUT: THE 21-DAY PROGRAM TO FREE YOURSELF FROM EMOTIONAL EATING by Meryl Hershey Beck, MA, MEd, LPCC will be right up your alley. Let me say at the outset that I don’t personally or professionally subscribe to or endorse 12-step or higher power programs for any kind of recovery, and that energy methods lack sufficient scientific evidence beyond the placebo effect for me to believe in their efficacy. That said, many of you who do believe in these approaches might find this book helpful. This is a user-friendly book. By sharing deeply of her personal struggles with food, depression, and being a “nice girl,” which so many disregulated eaters are, Beck lets you know that she understands what you’re going through and can help. She then moves on to various strategies disregulated eaters can use to end emotional eating and...

SOMEONE TO TALK TO: FINDING PEACE, PURPOSE, AND JOY AFTER TRAGEDY AND LOSS by Samantha M. White, LICSW, is the story about overcoming trauma, loss and psychic pain. Though the book is not about eating, food or weight, if you are a disregulated eater who is trying to fully heal from deep emotional wounds, this memoir gives you a recipe for getting from here to there and will speed you on your journey. Full disclosure: Samantha is a new friend whose book I offered to blog about if I liked it. I intended to browse through the review copy thoroughly enough to get a feel for it but, instead, was hooked from page one and read every word cover to cover. This memoir starts with the death of Samantha’s daughter in an automobile accident and moves on through the aftermath of tragedy. It chronicles the tortured break up of Samantha’s marriage,...

What a delight to be reviewing the 25th Anniversary Edition of BULIMIA: A GUIDE TO RECOVERY by Lindsey Hall and Leigh Cohn, the publishers of Gürze Books. This “completely revised and updated” edition is not simply a book about how to recover from bulimia. It’s a valuable read for all sorts of troubled eaters. Although I had recovered from 18 months of purging in my early 30s, by the time I read Lindsey’s original book decades later, it still spoke to my heart. By then, I was starting to counsel clients with eating disorders and I know it helped every client I lent it to. This expanded edition will help even more of you, not only those suffering with bulimia. First off, Lindsey’s personal account of her triumph over disordered eating and purging is nothing but inspirational. Her straight-from-the-heart honesty and courage shine through every page. Reading about her recovery will...

For years a client has been telling me about a book that helped with her food problems and anxiety and I finally bought a copy for myself. THE GIFT OF OUR COMPULSIONS: A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO SELF-ACCEPTANCE AND HEALING by Mary O’Malley is as helpful as my client says it is and I encourage you all to read it, whatever kind of food or weight compulsion has been plaguing you. O’Malley’s premise is simple: Your compulsion is not the enemy, but the entrance to healing old wounds and bettering your life. Most of us treat food compulsions as ingrates whom we can’t wait to get rid of. We say, “I hate it when I can’t stop eating even when I’m full,” “I’m disgusted with myself for throwing up after a meal,” “I’m sick of obsessing about weight and can’t stand how the scale owns me.” O’Malley wisely cautions that what we...

Although I don’t generally set explicit goals for myself yet do okay, that’s not the case for everyone. Disregulated eaters especially often have difficulty setting and achieving goals especially related to food and fitness. If you have difficulty achieving success, here’s a book that is definitely for you—MOVE! HOW WOMEN CAN ACHIEVE ATHLETIC GOALS AT ANY AGE by Catharine Utzschneider, Ed.D. who happens to be a colleague of mine from (when I lived in) Massachusetts. MOVE! Is written for athletes and non-athletes alike. Cathy understands that you have a busy life and that you’ve failed at achieving goals before and might be a bit gun shy of a repeat performance. But this doesn’t faze her in the least. As an athletic coach, athlete, and a mom, she knows what it takes to keep stretching yourself. In what she calls “deliberate practice,” this is exactly what you do—set and achieve a goal,...

For those of you who aren’t satisfied with simply working on changing your eating habits, but also want to understand the biology behind some of them, I recommend David J. Linden’s THE COMPASS OF PLEASURE—HOW OUR BRAINS MAKE FATTY FOODS, ORGASM, EXERCISE, MARIJUANA, GENEROSITY, VODKA, LEARNING, AND GAMBLING FEEL SO GOOD. The book deals with some complex concepts, but I found it enlightening and relatively readable if I was willing to go slowly and read through an occasional passage more than once. Linden explains why on a cellular level we become addicted to pleasure. Never mind family and cultural influences, insists this professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and editor in chief of The Journal of Neurophysiology, as he gets down to the nitty gritty of why and how our brains react to pleasure. The importance of his book lies in telling us that we’re not...

WELLNESS, NOT WEIGHT—HEALTH AT EVERY SIZE AND MOTIVATIONAL INTERVIEWING, an anthology edited by Ellen Glovsky, PhD, RD, LDN, is the rare book whose audience is both disregulated eaters and their treatment providers. I’m proud to have a chapter from my FOOD AND FEELINGS WORKBOOK included in it, and am glad to have this opportunity to tell you how comprehensive and useful this anthology is. As Glovsky explains in the introduction, the book is divided into three parts. Part One includes an overview of its main concepts: the mindful, non-diet approach for resolving eating problems; the Health at Every Size (HAES) model for achieving wellness; and the use of Motivational Interviewing, a set of techniques that is relatively easy to learn and can speed recovery. Parts Two and Three go into more detail about each of these concepts and how to put them into practice. This book is so rich in ideas...

In the interest of full disclosure, MY SECRET AFFAIR WITH CHOCOLATE CAKE—THE EMOTIONAL EATER’S GUIDE TO BREAKING FREE by Sunita Pattani, is a book for which I wrote the foreword. Pattani takes you by the hand and walks you through her journey from emotional eating to “normal” eating and effective emotional management. What I find refreshing in MY SECRET AFFAIR is that Pattani champions the idea of finding her own way through her eating problems and respects the reader enough to ask her or him to do the same. Although she doesn’t provide cookie-cutter answers, her deep-seated belief in our inherent wisdom and desire to do right by ourselves carries the reader along as she describes her recovery and how it might inform yours. Pattani begins with an assessment of where the reader is, underscoring three factors that form the foundation of realigning with appetite and natural body weight: 1) We...

After 30+ years of reading books on psychology and self-help, it’s unusual for me to come across a book that absolutely knocks my socks off. But that’s just what Anneli Rufus did in Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself (Penguin Group, NY, 2014). Truly, this is a life-changing book. First, it tells it like it is—like it really is—for people who suffer from self-hatred, through the words of an author who has been there and then some. Then it lays out a reasonable, comprehensive, doable plan for learning to value yourself. Plus it’s written beautifully with a down-to-earth style. Some highlights. Rufus asserts that someone stole your self-esteem. Bull’s-eye: you had it at one point and then it was wrongly ripped away from you. She says, “Maybe no one directly told us we were worthless, but we came to that conclusion anyway as the only rational explanation of how we were...

Lasagna for Lunch: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating by psychotherapist Mary Anne Cohen, is a book you’ll want to read and refer back to—as a sequel to French Toast for Breakfast or as a stand alone read. If you’re a compulsive or emotional eater, both books have a great deal of wisdom to offer you. First off, I like Cohen’s style and format. She talks about her own food problems and recovery, switches to her therapist hat and provides advice on how to stop abusing food and your body, then drives her point home as an educator by detailing anecdotes and case examples from her years of clinical experience. You can see the breadth and depth of this book in her chapter headings: Evolving from Impasse to Possibility, Frozen Grief and Emotional Eating, The Inner World of the Emotional Eater, Body Image and Culture, Childhood Attachments and Eating Disorders, The Family—from...

Are you someone who keeps ping-ponging between self care and “I don’t care”? If so, my new book, STARTING MONDAY—SEVEN KEYS TO A PERMANENT, POSITIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD (Gürze Books), will teach you how to resolve your mixed feelings so you can establish consistent self-care with food and your body. The book was born out of the laments I hear daily from troubled eaters who insist that they’re lazy, crazy, and defective because they don’t do what is best for themselves all, or even most, of the time. The fact is, when your intentions and behavior don’t align—you insist you want to eat healthfully or go to the gym regularly but don’t, or do it for a while, then quit—it’s not a sign of mental illness or moral depravity, but of mental conflict.  What you’re suffering from is a chronic case of mixed motivations which, when resolved, will open you up...

Whether you have a child or know of children 12 and under who are unhappy “feeling fat”, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Breaking the “I Feel Fat” Spell, by Andrea Wachter, LMFT and Marsea Marcus, LMFT, will help them develop a more loving, accepting view of their bodies. I was delighted to find out about this book, wishing that my clients who are dissatisfied with their body size would have had something like it growing up. Heck, I wish that I had read this book as a chubby, thin-obsessed child back in the Fifties! The idea of a spell being cast on young children is apt. People who are under a spell don’t realize it until the spell gets broken. In this case the thin-is-beautiful and fat-is-ugly spell is cast by culture, the media, our families, and our peers, unbeknownst to us at a young age. The book leads off with...

As soon as I read about Traci Mann, PhD’s book, Secrets from the Eating Lab—The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again, I rushed out and bought it. I thought it might be a bit dry, filled with jargon I didn’t understand, and overrun with facts I’d never remember, so imagine my delight when I found her writing style to the point and highly humorous. I several times embarrassed myself by laughing aloud reading it in an airport terminal during a five-hour layover. Mann starts out by presenting scientific evidence debunking the value of diets and goes on to write about how they’ve made us fat. I could share the points she makes, but I assume that if you’ve been reading my books, you’re already not a big fan of diets. Next she tackles why we can’t depend on willpower to restrict our...

If ever there were folks who’ll drive you to eat (and do whatever else), it’s Narcissists, with their self-centeredness, unbridled self-importance, empathy deficits, need to be right, and lack of interest in what others think, say or do. Whether the Narcissist in your life is a spouse/partner, adult child, parent, boss or co-worker, Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad—and Surprisingly Good—About Feeling Special by Dr. Craig Malkin, will help you deal with him or her rather than eat over the distress they’re bound to generate. What is so fascinating and instructive about this book is that Malkin not only covers the subject of narcissism thoroughly, but makes the point that many people who were raised by Narcissists are their total opposites, what he calls Echoists (from the myth of Narcissus). As described by Malkin, Echoists are characterized by having no voice of their own, feeling and acting invisible, having little sense of self...

Many people stay in unhappy, unhealthy relationships for a long time—sometimes until death—because they can’t decide if they should remain or go. For years, I’ve recommended that clients with this conflict read Too Good to Leave, Too Bad To Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship by Mira Kirshenbaum. I heard about the book when it was published in 1996 and it’s become a classic, a must read if you’re undecided about whether to stay in or leave a relationship. The book is based on research that psychotherapist Kirshenbaum did with Dr. Charles Foster on what makes it worthwhile to stay in a relationship and what indicates that it’s time to let go and move on. Full of case studies from Kirshenbaum’s clients over the years, it presents guidelines based on specific criteria for why you might want to stay...

Relief: Release Stress and Harmful Habits and Awaken Your Best Self by Sasha Loring is full of strategies and techniques to help people with eating problems improve their relationship with food and enjoy a happier, more peaceful and satisfying life. You can find out more about Sasha, the book, and her work at http://www.sashaloring.com. Relief starts out by describing our brain functions, focusing on how they affect our nervous system, including an explanation of why we overreact to fears and how we can respond more appropriately to our automatic reactions. My experience with troubled eaters over the decades is that they react rather than respond, that is, they don’t choose how to think and feel about a situation, but automatically do what they’ve always done without considering other options. Loring explains how to break this cycle in order to make better decisions around food and in life. She describes commonplace actions...

The Therapeutic “Aha!”: 10 Strategies for Getting Your Clients Unstuck by Courtney Armstrong, M.Ed. is too good to share with only therapists, so I decided to blog about it for my lay readers. First, I’m hoping that those who are in therapy will be intrigued enough to share this book’s ideas with their therapists (clients often mention psych or self-help books they’d like me to read in order to help them—and occasionally even buy the book for me!). Second, this book is so full of vital healing information, I thought that psychologically-minded readers might want to purchase it themselves. The premise of the book is that we can reconsolidate—or clear—traumatic, unhappy, disturbing, or upsetting memories without spending years in therapy and do it in such a way that we are completely healed from them. I have been (minimally) trained by one of the therapists whose approach is seminal to Armstrong’s, Dr....

Health at Every Size—The Surprising Truth about Your Weight by Linda Bacon, PhD was a groundbreaking book based on the concept that a high weight doesn’t necessarily lead to illness and early death, as we’ve been repeatedly told. Now, Bacon has co-written another cutting edge book with Lucy Aphramor, PhD, RD: Body Respect—What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight. If you want factual data on the relationship between weight and health, you’ll find it here, along with information on diets and “normal” eating. I’ve been in this field for more than 30 years and I learned a lot from Body Respect. For instance, I no longer use the term “overweight.” As the authors point out, the term is meaningless. Over what weight? Better to say high weight or fat. But, no, you might insist, the word means above what a healthy poundage...

Whether your romantic relationship leaves lots to be desired or could simply use a tune up, you’ll learn therapeutic wisdom and practical strategies for getting the love you want in Power Snuggles: Your Path to Vibrant and Lasting Love by Jon and Beverly Meyerson. Although they’re friends of mine, I’d write the same stellar review of this guide to lasting love if I’d never met them. The goal of Power Snuggles is to turn universal power struggles into growth and healing opportunities. Of course, one of you can’t simply read this book and fix the relationship single-handedly. Two will need to tango for your relationship to maximize its potential. But don’t underestimate how one person making small changes can have a huge effect on a partner’s actions and reactions. You can learn a lot from Power Snuggles. After nearly 30 years of marriage and being a therapist, I did! The book...

An anxious client of mine discovered a book, originally written in 1969(!) which has helped her reduce panic attacks—and she even gave me a copy. Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Dr. Claire Weekes is an enlightening book about how to decrease anxiety or what the good doctor calls “nervous” suffering. Her approach is simple, straightforward, and eminently doable, and I highly recommend it. After all, in many cases, reducing anxiety and fear decreases unwanted, mindless eating. Weekes’ premise is that the meaning you mistakenly make of feelings and symptoms of panic and anxiety are your real problem, not the feelings and symptoms themselves. Typical indications of “nervous” suffering are foggy confusion, derealization, dread, fatigue, internal shakiness, racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, irregular heartbeat, and stomach fluttering. When we’re tired and under pressure or physical or emotional stress, says Weekes, we sometimes develop these manifestations. They generally come and...

My seventh book is out! Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating—Psychological Strategies for Doctors and Health Care Providers is co-authored by Paige O’Mahoney, M.D., CHWC. Don’t be fooled by the title and think that the book is only for health professionals. It has two audiences: health care practitioners and patients who want their providers to understand and truly help them with their weight or eating concerns. Based on the psychology of eating rather than on the biology of weight-loss, the book aims to educate doctors, nurses, dieticians, health coaches, and diabetes educators on why it’s crucial to stop using a moralistic, restrictive, fat stigmatizing, weight-loss diet model for treating eating problems. Instead, it maps out compassionate, empathic, empowering, lasting wellness and self-care strategies. The book’s goal is to put providers and higher weight patients on the same page and to start a positive conversation about eating and weight by describing why both parties...

Image by Debbie Digioia One of the reasons I looked forward to reviewing The Intuitive Eating Workbook: 10 Principles for Nourishing a Health Relationship with Food by Elyse Resch, MS, RDN and Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN is because I remember so clearly when their first book, Intuitive Eating, arrived on the eating disorders’ scene in 1995. Although I’d pretty much turned around my wildly disordered eating by then, I was still scouting out books on the subject to make sure that I’d covered all the bases. Intuitive Eating reinforced how much I never wanted to diet again and laid out the basic principles of appetite-attunement in a relatable way that helped me easily explain the process to others. The authors’ new Workbook expands on their original premise: Giving up weight-loss dieting and connecting—really connecting—to body signals involved in eating is the only way to establish a permanent, positive relationship with food and your...