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.