Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder [Paperback]

Joanna Poppink MFT (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2011

10 million people in the U.S., including 1 in 5 women, suffer from eating disorders. While this issue has long been associated with teenage girls, doctors are now reporting that a growing number of women are also developing these disorders later in life or have hidden these problems for years. For women in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond, issues of loss from divorce, death, and empty nest syndrome as well as marriage and career pressures can trigger an eating disorder.

Psychotherapist Joanna Poppink offers a comprehensive and effective recovery program for women with eating disorders, based on her thirty-year professional practice treating adults with anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. She shares her personal struggles with bulimia, along with stories from a wide-range of clients she has counseled. Poppink primarily addresses women who have been suffering with eating disorders for years while they manage their careers, marriages, and families.

Healing Your Hungry Heart offers a step-by-step program that identifies:

* Early warning signs

* Challenges to early recovery

* Triggers to emotional eating

* Impact on sex life and family relationships

The program includes journaling, meditations, exercises, quizzes, and resources to support and speed the recovery process. For women struggling with emotional eating, this book offers hope, understanding, and real solutions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book offers a variety of valuable tools and practical ways for those with eating disorders to nourish both their bodies and their spirits. It also offers real solutions and hope for its readers." -Christine Hartline, M.A., Founder and Director, Eating Disorder Referral and Information Center, EDReferral.com

"Joanna Poppink's Healing Your Hungry Heart answers two questions I frequently hear from troubled eaters: "How do I begin my recovery and what can I do to sustain it?" Her chapter on the warning signs of an eating disorder is especially helpful to those who aren't sure if their relationship with food is unhealthy or not. Other chapters gently guide the reader in an exploration of what is needed to recover from deregulated eating--mindfulness, self-reflection and honesty, bona fide emotional nourishment, and daily practices for skill acquisition and moving toward true fulfillment. I would certainly recommend this book to my clients and students." -Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed., author of The Food and Feelings Workbook and Nice Girls Finish Fat

"Finally--a book that speaks beyond the stereotype of eating disorders as the 'little girl's disease,' reaching out to women who have lived with these devastating disorders for years, and offering practical, sound, and insightful advice on how to begin, and sustain, real recovery." -Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

About the Author

Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in treating adults with eating disorders. She studied psychology at UCLA and the Saybrook Institute and received her master's degree from Antioch University. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her at: EatingDisorderRecovery.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Conari Press (August 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573244708
• ISBN-13: 978-1573244701
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In her work and writing Joanna Poppink draws both on her clinical experience and her personal experience in healing from bulimia. She corresponds with women throughout the world via her website and Skype video in her ongoing efforts to support eating disorder recovery. Visit Joanna at: http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com.

Joanna Poppink, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist with more than 25 years experience in helping adults find recovery from eating disorders. She studied psychology at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Saybrook Institute and received her M.A. from Antioch University.

Joanna lives in Los Angeles where, in addition to her private practice, she finds time for improvisational theater games, gardening, writing and playing on the beach with her family.

More about Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from you eating disorder

Joanna writes frank descriptions of the often secret emotional and personal challenges of living with an eating disorder and how to use them as opportunities for healing.

Using stories from her personal struggles with bulimia along with stories from a wide-range of women she has known, Joanna Poppink offers a path to eating disorder recovery.

She writes to adult women in their 30's, 40's, 50's and beyond as they struggle to manage their careers, marriages, and families. She offers hope, inspiration and practical tools.

Through a rich assortment of exercises, quizzes, journal prompts, specific mindfulness tasks and other creative healing activities Joanna steers the reader toward healing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not just another Eating Disorder recovery book!, August 10, 2011

By 

Susan Bishop "KymL" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder (Paperback)

Healing Your Hungry Heart is like no other eating disorder recovery book I've ever read (and I've read a lot!). I've been following Joanna Poppink's blogs on her website for the 18 months since I started my recovery work. Her wisdom and honest approach in her blogs became a life line during my "Great Terror" moments (as she describes them in the book). I had high expectations for this book and she has surpassed those expectations. This isn't another "eat this" and "do this" book, or a book that paints recovery as sunshine and roses if you just have the right attitude. This book is honest. The way she describes life with an eating disorder could only done by someone who has fought this horrible disorder herself. This book paints a realistic picture of what needs to happen for true recovery, what the struggle is going to feel like, but also what rewards are waiting on the other side of the battle. Joanna doesn't want her readers to settle for gaining control over their eating issues, but rather pushes her readers to take a holistic view of their entire Life. I suggest this book to those just starting recovery as well as those, like myself, who have already traveled away down the road of recovery.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book -- inspiring and accessible, August 10, 2011

By 

Heidi J. Dalzell, PsyD - See all my reviews

This review is from: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder (Paperback)

I am a practicing psychologist specializing in treating eating disorders. I often suggest books for my clients, and plan to make Healing Your Hungry Heart a frequent recommendation. I have had clients read the book and they love it as much as I do, especially the personal stories and meditations. I think readers will find the book to be accessible, and discover many "take-aways" that will aid in their recovery. The response from my clients so far: "Great book! I finally understand ... ". Thank you Joanna!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars enlightening & supportive, August 7, 2011

By 

Shh - See all my reviews

This review is from: Healing Your Hungry Heart: Recovering from Your Eating Disorder (Paperback)

I'm half way through Healing Your Hungry Heart, and finding the book so enlightening - Joanna's story of her own recovery journey makes you warm to the author and makes you feel that she is more than just an experienced eating disorders therapist. But this isn't an autobiography, it's a genuine, self-help book - the chapters and exercises on secrets and boundaries help to reveal so much about yourself and what drives your eating disorder, several times already they have hit on things that have reduced me to tears, but healing tears, positive tears that help me to understand myself and acknowledge things. This book is definitely worth a read if you are serious about tackling your eating disorder, in fact it's the kind of book that you will revisit over and over again!