Divided into four sections devoted to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual "selves", "Healing the Hungry Self" shows readers how shaping new behaviors leads to healthier eating while avoiding unhealthy dieting. The comprehensive workbook includes case histories, checklists and questionnaires, exercises, and charts for keeping a daily routine.
Answers the need for help among the five million American women who suffer from eating disorders. "An inspired psychoanalytic meditation on contemporary female identity and eating disorders."--Phyllis Chesler
An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships. Does this sound painfully familiar? Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop. Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships. The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.
Although eating disorders are usually talked about as diseases of the young, 1 in 5 women of all ages in the U. S. suffers from one. Now psychotherapist Joanna Poppink offers healing and recovery for women 30, 40, 50 or beyond. Her step-by-step program helps you identify early warning signs of an eating disorder, common pitfalls of recovery, your triggers, and the effect the disorder is having on your health and relationships. Then, she steers you toward healing.
It’s not about willpower, and it’s not about the food. Most people blame their eating behaviors on a lack of willpower. Eating intuitively hasn’t worked. Eating less and moving more? Trying to change your body image? These only last so long. Many people are worried that they can never have a healthy relationship with food. Peace with Self, Peace with Food looks past all that, and gets to the heart of what causes our battles with food. Through her years of training and practice in trauma healing — as well as her own reconciliation with food and self — Galina Denzel has developed a program to help readers embark on their own journey to healing. Personal and ancestral traumas inform behaviors around food, and Peace with Self, Peace with Food will help you identify patterns laid down even before you were born. Patterns that have long contributed to your eating behaviors, and continue to affect your relationship with food today. Through the exercises in Peace with Self, Peace with Food you will come to understand your eating habits and the neurobiological network that has held them in place until now. What’s more, you will see food, your mind, and your body in a new light. Not as enemies to be tamed, but as allies that can teach you how to care for yourself, and for your health, with love.
A “thought-provoking and powerful” study that reframes everything you’ve been taught about addiction and recovery—from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Myth of Normal (Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog). A world-renowned trauma expert combines real-life stories with cutting-edge research to offer a holistic approach to understanding addiction—its origins, its place in society, and the importance of self-compassion in recovery. Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with people with addiction on Vancouver’s skid row, this #1 international bestseller radically re-envisions a much misunderstood condition by taking a compassionate approach to substance abuse and addiction recovery. In the same vein as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts traces the root causes of addiction to childhood trauma and examines the pervasiveness of addiction in society. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout—and perhaps underpins—our society. It is not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects but rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs and behaviors of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness. Dr. Maté argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and how they perpetuate the War on Drugs. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.
A yoga-centric approach to dealing with disordered eating—like overeating, food addiction, and stress eating—and the resulting emotional distress such behaviors can cause Yoga philosophy and practice are increasingly being used therapeutically to help people overcome disordered eating patterns—like overeating, food addiction, and stress eating—and the resulting emotional distress they can cause. Sarahjoy Marsh offers a program using yoga to address food-centered behaviors and body image issues. She illuminates the nature of addiction and offers a methodical approach to recovery that is neither dogmatic nor rigid; rather, it is compassionate, hopeful, and deliberate. Full of clear, empathic advice and photographs of the step-by-step practices, this book will help alleviate the isolation that people with food-oriented issues and body image problems feel; offer strategies for changing the behaviors; and give clear guidelines about the processes of recovery and the development of new life skills.
We've all been there-angry with ourselves for overeating, for our lack of willpower, for failing at yet another diet that was supposed to be the last one. But the problem is not you, it's that dieting, with its emphasis on rules and regulations, has stopped you from listening to your body. Written by two prominent nutritionists, Intuitive Eating focuses on nurturing your body rather than starving it, encourages natural weight loss, and helps you find the weight you were meant to be. Learn: *How to reject diet mentality forever *How our three Eating Personalities define our eating difficulties *How to feel your feelings without using food *How to honor hunger and feel fullness *How to follow the ten principles of Intuitive Eating, step-by-step *How to achieve a new and safe relationship with food and, ultimately, your body With much more compassionate, thoughtful advice on satisfying, healthy living, this newly revised edition also includes a chapter on how the Intuitive Eating philosophy can be a safe and effective model on the path to recovery from an eating disorder.
For nearly fifty years, Sara Somers suffered from untreated food addiction. In this brutally honest and intimate memoir, Somers offers readers an inside view of a food addict’s mind, showcasing her experiences of obsessive cravings, compulsivity, and powerlessness regarding food. Saving Sara chronicles Somers’s addiction from childhood to adulthood, beginning with abnormal eating as a nine-year-old. As her addiction progresses in young adulthood, she becomes isolated, masking her shame and self-hatred with drugs and alcohol. Time and again, she rationalizes why this time will be different, only to have her physical cravings lead to ever-worse binges, to see her promises of doing things differently next time broken, and to experience the amnesia that she—like every addict—experiences when her obsession sets in again. Even after Somers is introduced to the solution that will eventually end up saving her, the strength of her addiction won’t allow her to accept her disease. Twenty-six more years pass until she finally crawls on hands and knees back to that solution, and learns to live life on life’s terms. A raw account of Somers’s decades-long journey, Saving Sara underscores the challenges faced by food addicts of any age—and the hope that exists for them all.
A wrenchingly honest, eloquent memoir “about true nourishment that comes not from [eating] but from engaging on a spiritual path."—Los Angeles Times In this brave and perceptive account of compulsion and the healing process, Bullitt-Jonas describes a childhood darkened by the repressive shadows of her alcoholic father and her emotionally reclusive mother, whose demands for excellence, poise, and self-control drove Bullitt-Jonas to develop an insatiable hunger. What began with pilfering extra slices of bread at her parents' dinner table turned into binges with cream pies and pancakes, sometimes gaining as much as eleven pounds in four days. When the family urged her father into treatment, the author recognized her own addiction and embarked on the path to recovery by discovering the spiritual hunger beneath her craving for food.