Emotional Eating "Breaking Free From. Emotional Eating Part II."

Reviewing Geneen Roth's Book, Breaking Free of Emotional Eating continues with chapter III titled "Distractive Eating--It Doesn't Count if You're Not Sitting Down. This chapter is basically about how much energy many overweight people put into sneaking food, eating while they are distracted with music, TV..., emotional discussons and so on. The guidelines are introduced about eight weeks into her Breaking Free Program to stop eating while standing or being distracted by anything else. This all makes perfect sense but can simply be summed up with one hypnotic suggestion.

So it's like in the first two chapters full reign to eat whenever you desired is given and now she begins reeling you in with guidelines.

Chapter IV is about When Enough is Enough. The first part of the chapter is about listening to a voice that says, "enough is enough." But quite frankly much of it was confusing other than through all the confusion eventually you'll hear that voice. She went into the "Kids in India are starving," "Clean your plate" beliefs and ended with suggesting that we remember doggie bags in restaurants, practice leaving a few bites on your plate and even practice throwing away some food.

The closest she gets to discussing emotions is to ask yourself while you are eating what you'd rather be doing. Actually I phrased it that way back in the late 70's. She phrases it a little differently but it's basically the same question in what you're looking for in terms of emotional comfort.

Chapter V is about binging. She give you permission to binge and then provides advice such as if someone catches you binging, don't hide it; talk to the food; notice the texture, color, etc...; go to a mirror and touch your face, arms... She includes a section on food allergies which is poorly covered.

Even though she covered some important and interesting points, I'm still not impressed with the approach or the organization of the program. More to come

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotional Eating "Breaking Free From. Emotional Eating."

After the first two chapters of Geneen Roth's Breaking Free from Emotional Eating I must say that I am not impressed so far. Her approach is one that worked initially for her personally and that was to stop all dieting and self limiting behavior when it came to food. Simply eat whenever you're hungry.

I take exception to this because in reality (and maybe it's semantics, but I don't really think so) to achieve physical hunger it would require 6 weeks of fasting. In fact if you were to fast for twelve hours or so, you will no longer feel hungry. And fasting for a week-end now and then can be a great thing that actually helps you cleanse your liver.

Nevertheless, when she did this she gained fifteen or so pounds over a few months (I believe) and then got rid of 30 pounds over two years. Great for the result.

I use a similar suggestion in the work that I do and it's like this, "You eat anything you want and are amazed to find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever dreamed possible." Who cares about making up for twenty years of dieting by pigging out on as much chocolate or ice cream as you can consume until you're fed up? If you can get turned onto healthy eating by suggestion and find that you can really care less about the candy and ice cream, why plague yourself with gluttony?

Plus if you do eat ice cream and or candy or whatever, wouldn't it be great to "fill up on flavor and taste" and not have to gluttonize yourself into gaining any weight at all--much less fifteen pounds? Ironically, her approach is the same as mine but 180 degrees different--completely opposite. Does that make sense?

So far, not impressed, hopefully there will be some real gems yet to be revealed in dealing with Emotional Eating as the title suggests.

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotional Eating "Taming of the Chew Pt V"

Part II of Taming of the Chew by Denise Lamothe, Psy.D., H.H.D. continues with a chapter title Healing the Emotional Self in which she reviews the many emotional hurts we often go through as children and how children assume the blame. She explores the confusion of sexuality and it's impact on one's psyche leading to the Chew running rampant.

For the today person, she provides infomation on building self confidence, setting healthy boundaries (minimize being taken advantage of by others), becoming assertive, and learning to laugh.

The last chapter of Part II is Healing the Spiritual Self in which she suggests things such as:
1. Designing your environment to be pleasing.
2. Living in the Here and Now rather than the guilts of the past.
3. Moving beyond emotional pain in life to learn and benefit from it.
Then I discovered there's a Part III which is a summary of the book. It's about making conscious choices--rather than count calories, be aware of the consequences of the cookie.
Then she suggests many tips to manage stress along with tips for avoiding the binge, i.e. before letting the Chew have it way you will do one of a dozen different activities such as:
1. Calling a friend,
2. Locking yourself in the bathroom with a bubble bath.
3. Take a walk or ride a bike
and the list goes on and on.
She provides a self talk scenario where if you make a mistake and eat too much or binge you can possibly learn from it.
Then I discovered there's a Part IV titled Summing It All Up starting with the importance of making a Committment. She then wraps up her book with several pages of repeating passages from the book as a summary of the important messages.

My take on the book is that it is definitely worth reading. I believe that she could have done much more with the emotions specifically. In the summaries, she basically recycles a lot of techniques that have been used for decades rather than 0ffering a new approach to embrace emotions.

I know it might sound self profiting, but I'd recommend reading my book first and the her book for grounding. While she has covered the emotional hurting that contributes to low self esteem, my book is a lot more effective at tackling emotions which is what mastery of emotional eating is all about. We both agree on the importance of building self esteem and confidence, however, my approach is about learning how to feel good about you even on a "bad hair day." Her book is available through Amazon.com for around $10.00.

My next post will be about Geneen Roth's book titled Breaking Free from Emotional Eating.

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotional Eating "Taming of the Chew Part IV"

Part II of Taming of the Chew by Denise Lamothe, Psy.D., H.H.D. begins with Chapter 6 which is a few pages about being responsible for making the necessary changes.

Chapter 7 begins with finding an appreciation for our physical body through moving it as in exercise is fun. She then tackles robotic eating by becoming more aware of when you are eating and appreciative of the food you do eat. She suggests that if your goal is to lose weight have one day a week with nothing more than juice.

In this chapter is also a section on Self Love where she suggests looking in a mirror every day and finding things you like about you. Then go to war (not her words) against the substances which have caused you trouble like alcohol, sugar... But stop beating yourself up for making mistakes and she then suggests some healthy substitutes such as stevia instead of sugar.

She suggests counseling to deal with addictive behaviors such as alcohol. She then provides a rather extensive list of alternative healing approaches such as biofeedback, acupuncture, rolfing, hypnosis, polarity...

In my next post I'll cover the next chapter about Healing the Emotional Self. I'm getting excited about finishing this book because I just received another book titled Breaking Free of Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth.

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotionial Eating "Taming of the Chew Part III"

This is the third post about Taming of the Chew by Denise Lamonthe Psy. D., H.H.D.
Chapter IV is Understanding The Social Reasons for Over Eating and begins with self esteem--how we let our self esteem be determined by other's opinions about us, what we think others think of us, measuring up to be the perfect looking man or woman... The result of many being that they are obsessed with their weight, what they eat, and so on. She asks an interesting question, What would we be thinking about if we weren't obsessed with thoughts about food, our appearance, weight...?

She writes about how we focus on what we don't have as opposed to being grateful for what we do have. Even fairy tales affect us in how we think of ourselves.

The book was initially written for women and she goes on to notice how boys are viewed as being more important than girls and how men have more important jobs such as being doctors whereas women become nurses. Of course this is the mind set of the 50's and 60's and thus women had limited options in life. Women were expected to put others' needs before their own.

Chapter 5 is titled Understanding the Spiritual Reasons for Over Eating. Oh, by the way, the Chew is the devious part of us that drives us to overeat. Back to the spiritual reasons. She says basically that when we are out of touch with our spiritual selves, we are more numb and then tend to eat to compensate for the lack of our spiritual connection.

This chapter ends Part I of the book--more to come.

Again, you might disagree with me, but so far I'd say that the book is not laid out very well. She attempts to lay out part I of the book as Physical, Emotional and Spiritual. She mixes in how our self esteem drives us to be compulsive in our needs to diet and be skinny.

I find it more important to focus on the types of eating--habitual and emotional and deal with them directly rather than assume everything is emotionally driven.

In my next post I'll begin to review Part II.

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotional Eating "Taming of the Chew Part II"

This is my second post on the book Taming the Chew by Denise Lamothe, Psy.D., H.H.D. If you're wondering what H.H.D. stands for it's a degree for being a Holistic Doctor

Chapter II is titled Understanding Physical Reasons for Over Eating. It starts out with the programming we've received since childhood relating food with emotions or emotional situations. It then goes into substances that are harmful and should be eliminated from the diet such as alcohol, artificial sweeteners, caffeine, diary, and salt.

I agree it's beneficial to minimize most of them, however, I would not make diary one of them. She could just as well tackled gluten. but didn't. True it's probably healthier to eliminate diary, however, to shed weight it's not an important issue unless there's a food addiction or allergy to diary.

Chapter III is titled Understanding the Emotional Reasons for Over Eating and is about our short comings affecting our self esteem, the negative affect of growing up in abusive dysfunctional families, and what she describes as our "sub selves' which is about how we think about our eating behavior and how we handle it.

You might disagree with me, but so far I'd say that the book is not laid out very well--not organized very well. She touches on a lot of things you'll find in my book, but thus far she only touches on them. In my next post I'll review the next chapter or two which should put me at the end of part I of the book--the half way point.

Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.

Emotional Eating "Taming of the Chew"

I ordered three books about overcoming emotional eating and the first to arrive is Taming the Chew by Denise Lamonthe, Psy.D., H.H.D.

In the Introduction she says, "This book is not about being thin. It is about loving yourself just the way you are and eating in ways that feel nurturing.--not compulsive or self destructive. You will lose weight if you implement some of the suggestions on the following pages. If you wish to do so, that is fine--but helping you to lose weight is not my primary goal."

I don't see why you can't do both, discover how to love yourself and also drop all the weight you desire. In other words, have it your way.

So far I've gotten through the Intro and the first chapter. She definitely has a powerful understanding of how some emotional eaters use their excess weight to keep from being successful and steps right into that in the first chapter. Personally I believe that jumping into that issue is a bit premature. It's better described as a specific type of emotional eating as it involves only one emotion. In my book I jump into the issue much later in the book and cover it in far greater detail. But maybe I'm jumping the gun, maybe she revisits the subject later.

More to come.


Not sure you're an emotional eater? Click here and take the quiz.

Want to a cure for emotional binge eating and discover how to identify emotions, embrace them and feel them? You can purchase the, The Scale Conspiracy, (in e-book form) emotional eating now for only $14.95. It's a $39.00 value.