Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Studies show that the reason why many people gain weight—and keep it on—is emotional eating, not physical eating. Now Dr. Roger Gould, a psychotherapist and a leading authority on emotional eating, shows how to overcome fear, anxiety, and other stresses and stop using food as an over-the-counter tranquilizer that can cause weight gain. With 12 practical ways to stop emotional eating and an eight-session program, Dr. Gould helps you become your own eating therapist and shrink yourself for good.

Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

The thoughtful evening and diet solution May 17, 2007
64 out of 66 found this review helpful

I stumbled upon Dr. Gould's book after listening to a radio interview he gave promoting his book. I am glad I wrote his name down because I could not remember the title. (A little gimmicky) I was skeptical that a psychiatrist could really help you lose weight through therapeutic techniques. I mean, just start exercising and eating less, right? I read the Beck Diet Solution and found it rather dull.

Anyway, I could not put his book down, I finished it in 2 days...which for me is huge. And I have been on my best eating behavior. I am now consciously controlling my appetite...no binge eating and no late night snacking. I think Dr. Gould gave me great advice on how to understand the signals that lead to fill yourself with food. I think it would work for other applications as well, but I guess that is for another book. BTW, There are practical lessons in chapter 3 that I keep re-reading.

Now I bought it for some co-workers who I thought would benefit.

5 out of 5 stars

A Permanent Solution July 19, 2007
41 out of 45 found this review helpful

It's really wonderful to see a book that offers an intelligent approach to permanent weightloss, that explains why diets don't work and offers solutions.

We eat, in many cases, to stop the pain. We learned this most basic food instinct in infancy, and we've refined the concept of pain to include physical and emotional pain. It is really helpful to understand that when you are nervous, you grab something to eat, in part, because one of your oldest memories is of feeling better after your bottle.

And when you understand that years of eating has programmed us to know that food equals relief and comfort, then it's easy to understand why we return to that behavior in times of stress. Fortunately, in this book, you will learn how to change those behaviors by identifying the specific stressor-prompts that cause you to over-eat, and how to disempower them.

This is a powerful must-read book for anyone who wants to lose weight.

5 out of 5 stars

staying healty May 7, 2007
30 out of 41 found this review helpful

Dr. Gould's book offers an easy and practical way to stop over eating. Most people know at least one person who struggles to stay healthy or who struggles with eating. This insightful approach helps you understand how to break free from those bad habits. It gets to the root of emotional eating, and gives you tools to manage your eating. This is a good and interesting read.

5 out of 5 stars

best so far (40 years) in many ways May 26, 2008
27 out of 28 found this review helpful

First, I thought it was very interesting that when I searched for this just know, Amazon suggested to pair it with The Beck Diet Solution, which I discovered last summer and am using as well. Dealing with emotional eating is where I thought Beck fell short. This book fills that gap and so much more. I did a two-weekend training course on stopping emotional eating 27 years ago, but there was no follow-up, and it involved a lot of gimmicky things like 'selling" your right to overeat, and affirmations that would somehow magically make you act differently. Thousand of affirmations later-no such luck.

I definitely disagree with a few reviewers who said that it doesn't have any solutions. It has one of the best sequences of recommended activities that I've seen. The problem is when it comes right down to it is that a person is going to have to choose not to eat sometimes when he/she really, really wants to! No one can make you do that, unless firearms are involved, and that would be a temporary fix anyway. The book does a good job of helping someone realize that it is really more painful to continue emotional eating than it is to stop it, no matter how hard it seems at the time. A person must also choose to do something else besides eat. That is the bottom line. I've known both of those truths for a long time, yet somehow this book helped me actually implement the behavior.

Another plus is that he does not recommend any certain diet. It's up to each person to determine what foods will allow her/him to eat amounts that provide the peace we are looking for. (Beck says research shows few people maintain weight loss without some kind of systematic plan, but regimented systems are contraindicated for healing emotional eating. To each her path.) He also doesn't recommend substituting some low-cal food to replace the junk we want to eat when we aren't hungry. Drinking a lot of water, trying to fill up on celery, all those tactics, in my opinion, just make things worse later. Bite the bullet and face not eating at all until you are hungry for real food! Eating is not going to solve the problem!

In my years of trying to diet (I actually stayed on them only a few times, but I learned a lot about what healthier foods taste delicious to me and let me eat amounts I want often enough), I have changed what I eat for meals so much that I can't imagine putting a bag of chips in with my lunch, but you could do it, if that's what pleases you most. My downfall wasn't meals; it was a bag of chocolate kisses at a time, or 3/4 of a carton of ice cream, or a package of cookie dough-many of you know the drill. And it wasn't necessarily mindless, I KNEW I was eating the whole package. When I was in the middle of it, I couldn't imagine what it was going to take for me not to do it. But it has happened, for now, at least.

I've not binged for nearly two weeks (okay, I know that is a short time, but I've been working up to it, not just jumping in for the honeymoon), and I've been more active. I'm more comfortable in lots of clothes, and there is even a pair of fallback cords that are very close to going to the thrift store pile. I used to adore Geneen Roth, the queen of emotional eating writers, and definitely credit her with my having a much gentler attitude toward my body and habits, plus with eating, even overeating, everything without guilt, which I think also helped lay the foundation, but Gould brought it together. Finally, without his even mentioning anything religious, his approach dovetails quite well with a spiritual practice i've been implementing in other areas of my life. I'm very grateful I found the book.

I will say that i do recommend trying to find a support group in your effort, either live or online. I haven't done his online program, so I can't speak for that, but I joined (for free) Sparkpeople.com and got on a message board team called Living Binge Free that has also helped me have a place to kick around ideas and share success, as well as be lovingly made accountable. There is also a team there devoted just to Shrink Yourself which I and another person are trying to build.

Good luck in your quest. If you had given up for awhile, I think this will be your best bet to return to the issue. maybe your last.

5 out of 5 stars

Do You want to Get Better? October 31, 2007
26 out of 28 found this review helpful

this is the first time I have ever written a review for a book before. I have read tons of diet books, been on just about every diet there is, have reached my highest weight yet, and was just about to give up!

I bought this book with some skepticism. I knew I ate for emotional reasons, but just was so tired of failing time after time. I cannot tell you this book has changed my life, but I have some real hope that it will. It is not a diet - in that it doesn't tell you WHAT to eat. But it will help you identify WHY you eat.

I was so tired of white knuckle diets that I could never maintain for a lifetime. In church one day, the homily was about spiritual growth. What does this have to do with losing weight? Well, it was compared to a diet, in that so many of us start a diet, and then end up at some point going off of it, returning to our old "habits" and end up regaining most all of the weight back, and then some. For lasting change, it requires CONVERSION, a change of heart, a change in lifestyle!

This book is not easy. But it is about transformatiom, creating a new life. One where food returns to its correct place in our lives - for fuel, not for tranquilizing. For once, I have hope that I can do the work necessary, and change my life for the better. What about the weight? Well, I trust that it will slowly come off as I do the work to change the reasons I eat in the first place.

I feel like a tightly closed bud of a flower, and as I do the work to change and grow emotionally, it will open up and become a beautiful flower. Need another analogy? I am a caterpillar, locked into a cocoon that food has placed me in. As I learn new habits and release old fears, I will break open the cocoon and finally be FREE!

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