Breaking Free from Emotional Eating – Geneen Roth

The isn’t a book about restrictive dieting, or even willpower. Rather, it’s about making the unconscious conscious, and changing your relationship with food from being one of compulsion, to one of choice, wherein you also get the choice of saying “no”.

Roth takes us through the various ways in which life seems to conspire to take consciousness away from eating, from obvious distractions such as TV, to less obvious ones, like “it doesn’t count if you’re not sitting down”. She also tackles other psychological aspects, such as those people get from parents—which can be a big factor for many.

Importantly, she teaches us that when it comes to “have your cake and eat it”, you can also, in fact, have your cake and not eat it. That’s an option too. Its mere presence in our house is not the boss of us. However, overcoming the “this then that” automatic process that goes from having to eating, is something that Roth gives quite some attention to, offering a number of reframes to make it a lot easier.

The style is friendly, conversational, pop-science, and the format dates it a little—this is very much a book formatted the way pop-science books were formatted 20–50 years ago (the book itself is from 2003, for what it’s worth). However, a lack of modern format doesn’t take away from its very valuable insights, and if anything, the older format rather promotes reading a book from cover to cover, which can be beneficial.

Bottom line: if emotional or compulsive eating is something that you’ve found tricky to overcome, then this book can help make it a lot easier.

Click here to check out Breaking Free From Emotional Eating, and indeed enjoy a freer life on your own terms!