How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever [Paperback]

Linda Moran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2004

Are you a Diet Survivor? Maybe your whole life seems to revolve around diets and weight focus. Perhaps even attempts at intuitive eating failed. This book will help you find your own inner wisdom, and a path to normal eating.

Binge eating, emotional eating, stress eating, and just plain overeating are often made worse by dieting, not cured by it. External changes just aren't enough. That's why even intuitive eating can backfire.

Unlike willpower, the work lies instead in changing how you think about food, stress, and emotions. And happily, you can stay in the present day. No need to delve into childhood memories or deep emotions.

Using principles of cognitive therapy, you will learn to adjust the self-talk that accompanies dysfunctional eating. Self-talk such as "I must drink this diet soda in order to get thin," "my children must not have junk in the house," "my emotional eating will never end," and "I canÂ’t tolerate stress," have little basis in reality and lead to failure.

After some work at replacing your beliefs with facts, you will start to find your own food wisdom again. Maybe you havenÂ’t had this wisdom since you were a baby, but itÂ’s still inside you. And you will learn to think in shades of gray, instead of the black and white thinking that is typical of folks with dysfunctional eating.

Learn how to know when you are hungry and full, and how to be a picky eater, perhaps for the first time in your life. With practice, you will find that small, perfect, delicious portions do satisfy. Just as importantly, learn how you can cope with stress and emotions without running to the refrigerator. Learn to apply your mind to rational thought.

No longer will you feel that your body has betrayed you. You will once again be able to trust your body and mind to lead you to your ideal weight. You will never again have to bow to a diet as if it were some kind of god. Instead, any diet you choose will be your slave, not your master. In fact, as you finally free yourself from your attachment to food and dieting, your body will seek its ideal weight with no formal diet at all.

Regardless of whether or not you are overweight, if you have any kind of food issues such as emotional eating, stress eating, eating in secret, exercise addiction, using food for control, night eating, diet addiction, scale addiction, or binge eating disorder, this book is for you. Eating issues are more hidden than people realize, and are not always evidenced in oneÂ’s appearance. Indeed, eating issues reside in our hearts and minds, not our stomachs.

This book is a fun, easy read that could change your life. Join the growing club of Diet Survivors.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Food will finally take its rightful place as a sustainer of your life, not a controller. -- Dr. Joan Henry, Ed. D., Family Therapist

I enjoyed Moran's personal style and her approach to coping with stress. Terrific! --Dr. Michael R. Edelstein, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Past President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy, and author of Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

From the Author

I know your eating secrets. You can’t hide them from me. That's because I'm a Diet Survivor myself. I know how insane it can be. You may have been trying for a long time to recover. Perhaps you’ve tried diet plans, joined a club, or read about different kinds of diets. Or maybe you’ve tried therapy. Maybe you've even tried non-dieting, also called "normal eating."

But you still feel different from normal eaters. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you all better? Perhaps the answer is that you haven’t been looking in the right place—inside yourself. Yes, you have the inner wisdom and judgment to know what and how much you need to eat, but you’ve lost track of it.

After my fourth baby, I innocently went on a diet, and ended up with an eating disorder for my troubles. Fortunately, I knew how to use a branch of psychology called cognitive therapy, and my recovery was fairly quick. In this book I’ll share with you where I went wrong in my own dieting life, and how I got on the right track permanently.

I will explain to you in simple terms all the principles of cognitive therapy that you will need to become a "normal eater" again. Sound too easy? It does require work, but not the tiresome work of willpower, nor the dreary work of digging up the past. This internal work is current, fresh, and gratifying. You might find yourself applying it to other areas of your life!

Let this be the self-help book that changes your life.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Betterway Press (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974939609
• ISBN-13: 978-0974939605
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,124,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At Last - Common Sense, February 25, 2006

By 

Stella Nemeth (Macungie, PA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever (Paperback)

I've lost over 100 pounds on the South Beach diet, so what am I doing here talking about a book that isn't about diets? After two years I just couldn't diet anymore. And I was very frightened that I was going to gain all that weight right back, and more to boot, because that is what 95% of the successful dieters out there do.

I like this book because it isn't a new diet plan. It isn't about giving up everything you learned while you successfully dieted. It is about keeping all of the good stuff you learned, and moving on to new good stuff, so you can keep off the weight you've already lost, and maybe even get the weight loss moving again, if you still need to lose, or accepting you've reached your correct weight if you don't need to lose anymore. And it looks like that is happening to me too after almost a year of very slow weight loss I've begun to lose again.

This book is about learning to listen to your body and finding out just how much you really need to eat to be happy and satisfied. And just how little you really want can be a shocking experience when you've always been afraid of being hungry on a diet.

This book is about NOT beating yourself up.

But what if you haven't already been successful on a diet. This book is for you too. It is very likely that with this book you don't ever need to go on a formal diet. You probably just need to learn these lessons we all were born knowing, and forgot.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The truth will set you free, February 17, 2006

By 

Rob Stevens (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever (Paperback)

Linda Moran's book is a must read for anyone who is fed up with dieting as a way of controlling their weight. Linda's viewpoint is that instead of focusing on what you eat or how much you exercise, your focus should be on listening to you what your body is telling you it needs to sustain itself, to guide your eating.

It has been my contention for a long time that behavior therapists, like Linda are the best resources to go to for anyone who struggles with their weight, not to a diet or exercise guru. Because overeating, the source of weight gain, is a learned behavior. We all started out with our innate connection to hunger (eating barometer) in tact, until we learned to disconnect from it, override it and gain weight. Dieting keeps us disconnected from our bodies...because we keep listening to someone else's advice about what, when and how much to eat, NOT to what our own stomachs are telling us we really need at any given moment.

Our bodies only really want enough food to satisfy our physical need for more fuel, and no more. When our thoughts or emotions dictate our eating, rather than responding to what our stomachs are telling us we actually need to sustain ourselves, we overeat and gain weight. And if you really tune in and listen to your stomach, instead of your head or emotions, you'll discover it doesn't take a lot of food to make your hunger disappear.

We learned to adopt overeating behaviors, like emotional eating. So we can learn new behaviors around food and eating, like eating to satisfy physical hungers, not emotional ones, which will have us be thin.

I highly recommend you read Linda's book. It will give you the possibility of weight loss without dieting. And you'll discover new freedoms around food and eating that you never before thought possible.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sensible, honest, 'tried and tested' concept., June 4, 2006

By 

AB - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever (Paperback)

I've suffered from eating disorders for three years, I'm tired of unsuccessful dieting and eating foods that taste chemical: this book has given me a choice.
Linda's sensible approach gently encourages the reader to take responsibility for their eating habits, to learn to recognise the body's signals and to take control of their food mentality.
Anyone who has ever experienced a helpless or out-of-control feeling about their diet or their weight needs to read this book, because it is such a relief to know that there is another way.