Customer Reviews

The Food and Feelings Workbook: A Full Course Meal on Emotional Health

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After reading Karen Koenig's "Normal Eating" book and loving it, I bought this book in the hopes of further exploring her concepts of addressing the emotions behind eating disorders.

This book is challenging: it forces you to face your feelings over and over again, as well as going back to your past to face some of your most uncomfortable emotional moments. But this is the whole point: most people with eating disorders are avoiding or pushing away those uncomfortable memories and the fear of those emotions.

Karen's book teaches you that no emotion is wrong and we can handle any emotion that comes our way. The exercises in the book give you opportunities to face each difficult emotion, break it down and show us they're normal and survivable.

Some of the best things in this book are the relaxation techniques and the examples of rational beliefs when it comes to emotions and food. I have been able to put several of her strategies into practice in my everyday life and it has been helping me immensely to figure out many of my emotional responses to situations, as well as keeping me on track with my quest to become a normal eater.

I recommend this book to anyone who is seriously committed to breaking free of the tyranny of diets or eating disorders and is willing to do some tough emotional work. It has definitely changed my outlook on life.

Karen Koenig has done it again. Written a lovely book for people with an uncomfortable relationship to food. The Food and Feelings Workbook assists the reader to separate out eating for nutrition or pleasure from eating to drown feelings. Eating-challenged people (my words), she says, grow up in an atmosphere where feelings are taboo, where they were taught by example that it was not okay to express even the smallest bit of anger, disappointment, or sadness. Instead, they were taught to push it under the rug and in our culture, a great way to do that is with food...too much or too little.
Koenig has organized this convenient workbook into sections that reflect 7 difficult feelings: guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, and loneliness. She uses "Stop and Feel" questions throughout the book to help people exercise those seldom-used feeling muscles. She includes "Change Boosters" to practice new behaviors about feelings and eating. So, she gets you practicing this new skill, which you've avoided all your life. And she does it all with her usual wit, personal style, and generous helping spirit.
An example of her writing that I particularly like is from the Introduction: "This workbook...will encourage you not to bury your emotional pain until it turns into a toxic waste dump,but to put on your hip boots and slog through it, detoxifying one emotion at a time no matter how long it takes."
As a life coach and psychotherapist, I've recommended this book to clients who are slogging through it slowly...the way it needs to be used...and starting, little by little, to live with their feelings, rather than continue their obsession with food, weight, and body image.

I bought this book several months ago, and finished it last month. It takes a while to actually do the book, but it is worth the time. I learned a lot. The book works for those who are eating too much and those who are eating too little. We all have similar problems and are trying to get into the middle of the spectrum.

This book is set up as a workbook. I didn't write in it because I had a lot to say, so I answered the questions in my computerized journal. There were questions that didn't pertain to me, and some I just plain did not want to do. When I got to those I put the book aside for a few days and returned to it. If I felt the same way, I just turned the page and continued to go forward. As I result I got to issues and questions that I did need to work on right now.

If you are having trouble normalizing your relationship with food, take a look at the emotions that are coming up when you eat, or when you refuse to eat.

Insightful, probing, wise, instructive, loving...and so many more words can describe this workbook. Overcoming emotional eating doesn't happen from passive reading. It happens from hard work with a therapist or with this workbook.

When I read it I got so excited that I started a new Yahoo! Group, named after the book, just for people who want to grind through the book together. The book's author, Karen R. Koenig, has now joined, and is a contributor.

I guess you could say this book has turned into a movement.

As a psychologist who has treated eating disorders for over 30 years, I have read countless books about food and feelings. Miraculously, Karen Koenig's new workbook has found a fresh and creative way to pull together tools for self- awareness, wise and compassionate understanding of human emotional upheavals, as well as healthy behavioral alternatives to "eating one's heart out!"

I picked up this book a few months ago to help myself with my disordered eating. While I do not have a formal eating disorder, I have found since I stopped dieting it's hard to eat food without feelings of guilt and shame. For me, this book has been a great tool for getting back to a more normal way of eating.

This book provides a deep dive into the feelings behind disordered eating so you deal with the root causes, not just the symptoms. It does so through a series of journaling and creative exercises around food and feelings organized by chapter. The exercises are very similar to techniques done in cognitive behavioral therapy, but work very well as self-guided exercises. All the exercises are very different and creative and although there were some I was skeptical of, by suspending my disbelief and doing them I found they were actually quite helpful. The questions did a great job of getting me to reflect on my behaviors and were so helpful that my therapist is now requesting her own copy of the book.

There are a few things to keep in mind though if you do decide to purchase this book:

1. It does take time. I have found that each chapter takes me about an hour to work through so I find myself doing about one chapter per week. If you're not willing to commit that much time this is probably not the book for you.

2. It's very writing intensive. There are some exercises that involve drawing, visualization, and other means but for the most part it is a lot of writing. If you find this is not therapeutic for you again this book may not be the best choice

Overall I think this is a fantastic book and one that has really helped me to reflect on my feelings and develop a healthier relationship with food. It is time consuming to work through but you are learning so much throughout the process that it is worth the time invested. I highly recommend it.

I've just received my copy and am SO excited! I've been working in it every night. I've always known that my eating is connected to emotions, but I really couldn't figure out anything deeper than that. This workbook helps you get to the "under layers" of whats going on..... identifying what feelings specifically you are trying to avoid and helping you to understand WHY you've been doing this for so long. It also addresses reviewing where your old beliefs come from and creating new ones to help you behave differently now. I was excited to see this come out, since I have such a great opinion of Karen's book "The Rules of Normal Eating", which at times was so close to the truth of how I think and operate- I laughed out loud. If you're willing to get serious about addressing the emotional reasons for your eating habits, I'd certainly recommend investing in this workbook.

I would highly recommend this workbook. I could not connect the dots, I knew how to diet, I knew what I should eat but why I was bent on self destruction and why I was not able to control my eating I could not understand. This workbook helped me connect the emotions I was experiencing with the need to overeat. It helped me to gain control back and reduce my dependence on food. I can not say enough. If you have a diagnosed eating disorder, you probably need to seek a good eating disorder councelor but this book is a wonderful tool to assist you. It helped me to control my emotional eating and put me in the right direction.

As a woman who has been in recovery for a long term eating disorder, I have found this book to be one of the most valuable tools I have used in conjunction with my therapy. I was terrified of all emotions and this book has helped me understand the purpose of my emotions and helped me to embrace that part of myself. I have learned to enjoy all the different feelings I was created to feel by applying the principles Karen has laid out in her book.

Over the past 20 years I've read almost every book published on the subject of emotional eating, but none "clicked" until the Food and Feelings Workbook. My emotional eating is now almost non-existent. I took about 6 months to work thru the book and did every exercise, and am now re-reading the book. I think this book could help anyone to recognize and deal with their emotions - not just those of us with eating issues!