Beyond a Shadow of a Diet: The Therapist's Guide to Treating Compulsive Eating (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: attuned eating, attuned eater, eating past fullness, New York, Changing the World, The Therapist Trap (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Learning to eat with hunger, to relish food and to enjoy ones body is our birthright. Beyond a Shadow of a Diet explains how the individual can begin to live in harmony with food and gives therapists the tools to better help those for whom eating has become, too often, a source of anguish into a pleasurable and reassuring part of life. - Susie Orbach, London School of Economics, UK

Product Description

This accessible volume will guide therapists of all disciplines through step-by-step treatment of compulsive eating. The authors introduce the new research related to health, weight, fitness and diet failure, and then discuss a treatment method which advocates eating as guided by physiological signal: eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full. The book offers tools for therapists to recognize compulsive eating patterns, use their training to address underlying psychological difficulties, and implement therapeutic principles for healing.

Beyond the Shadow of a Diet provides concrete steps for establishing a normal relationship with food and methods for understanding and treating the psychological aspects of compulsive eating.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (June 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415946093
• ISBN-13: 978-0415946094
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #178,188 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great resource for clinicians AND clients, September 5, 2004

By	socwkr "chicagolcsw" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This book is beautifully written and an easy read for clinicians as well as clients. In a very straightforward yet well researched manner, the authors excel at addressing issues related to eating, self-esteem and the fallacy surrounding "diets." Via poignant case examples and theoretical applications, this book is an outstanding resource that should be on every therapist's (and client's!) shelf. In addition, this book pushes clinicians to be aware of their own internalized ideas and issues related to weight. Highly recommended!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important addition to the clinical literature on compulsive eating, September 8, 2006

By	Peggy Elam, Ph.D. "www.peggyelam.com" (Nashville, TN USA) - See all my reviews

American women and girls (and, increasingly, men and boys) are bombarded with messages about ideal bodies and acceptable weights, "good" and "bad" foods and the health risks of "obesity." Toss in the wealth of other stresses related to contemporary life and a recipe for disordered eating is born.

The disordered eating often takes the form of socially sanctioned and even professionally encouraged dieting and weight-loss behaviors. At the turn of the millennium about 116 million Americans (55% of the adult population) were dieting, supporting a $50 billion weight loss industry.

Matz and Frankel cite evidence that dieting is hazardous to physical and emotional health. For instance, dieting and dieting-related weight cycling (yo-yo weight loss & regain) increases risks of cardiovascular disease & Type 2 diabetes, eating disorders, depression, and shame. Meanwhile, the health risks of anything but the extremes of fatness (or thinness) have been greatly exaggerated by the diet-pharmaceutical-medical industries in a campaign to persuade the public--and funding agencies--that a dangerous epidemic exists for which the only hope for cure is expensive weight-management-oriented products, programs and research.

Most research purporting to link "obesity" with health risks and increased mortality is actually inherently flawed in its failure to control for the effects of chronic dieting and weight cycling--not to mention the stress of fat stigma, prejudice and discrimination-- as well as almost always confusing correlation with causation. (Exercise physiologist Glen Gaesser, Ph.D. provides an excellent critique of the "obesity" related research in his 2002 book Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, published by Gurze Books.) In Beyond A Shadow of a Diet Matz & Frankel also point out that the health risks associated with being fat actually decrease with age, which is the opposite of what one would expect if "obesity" were truly a degenerative disease.

Matz and Frankel document the damage dieting and other weight-focused attitudes and behaviors can do to physical and emotional health, including ways they contribute to compulsive eating. They offer strategies to help clients identify ways in which uncomfortable feelings are channeled into "bad body" (or "fat body") thoughts and sensations, for which dieting or other forms of restrictive eating or weight-loss behavior are grasped at as possible solutions.

They point out that grasping at weight loss as a solution is no more a healthy (or potentially successful) strategy for truly fat women (or men) than it is for those who merely think they're fat, or who are just a few pounds over the societal ideal. And this, I think, is an important addition to the clinical literature. While many girls and women who are of average weight are encouraged to embrace and accept their bodies as they are--even with a little pudge here and there--attitudes toward body acceptance often change when a very fat (or "supersize") man or woman walks into a therapist's office. Even, sometimes, when the therapist is experienced with the treatment of eating disorders, he or she may erroneously assume that all fat people are compulsive eaters of that their fatness stems from emotional issues.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Matz & Frankel's work is their unhooking weight (and fatness) itself from eating and emotional issues. They point out that compulsive eaters "come in all shapes and sizes," including large people who do not eat compulsively and thin people who do. Whether a person is actually fat or erroneously thinks she's fat, they point out, the treatment of choice is the same: Teaching attuned (intuitive) eating in which one learns to recognize true hunger, to identify the foods one is hungry for, and to eat them when one is hungry for them, regardless of one's body size.

For people who have become alienated from their natural appetites (and appetite regulation) due to the externally focused eating of dieting/weight management practices, learning or relearning natural eating and appetite regulation is tremendously liberating.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Resource - Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt!, September 27, 2008

By	Pavel Somov, Ph.D., Author of Eating the Mome... (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) - See all my reviews

"Beyond a Shadow of a Diet" is an important guidebook for clinicians and therapists. The book summarizes and clinically pre-packages the so-called Non-Diet approach to helping clients manage their compulsive overeating. The Non-Diet approach, also known as physiologically attuned eating or "intuitive eating" (Tribole & Resch) or normal/natural/naturalistic eating (Craighead), is premised on the notion that people can be entrusted to self-regulate their eating on their own without the exoskeleton of dietary restrictions and constraints. As such, the book offers a highly humanistic path towards non-disordered eating.

The book, to my knowledge, is the first truly comprehensive non-diet approach guidebook for clinicians. "Selling" clients on a non-diet approach to managing compulsive eating is not simple clinical task. Most clients seeking assistance with weight issues have been heavily propagandized to believe that diet is the only way to recover control over their eating.

Matz and Frankely do a nicely nuanced job of highlighting the intricate complexity of helping clients shift from diet mentality to non-diet mentality. And (!) they begin this process on the clinician's side of the couch - in their second chapter, entitled "The Therapist Trap," the authors guide clinicians through an evaluation of their own (therapists') attitudes about the diet paradigm. This isn't merely a clever narrative angle at educating providers and clinicians about the pitfalls of dieting. Instead, it is an important reality check of the unconscious biases that might unwittingly inform clinical decision-making.

The main strength of the book is the wealth of practical guidance that it offers clinicians for both anticipating and neutralizing conceptual resistance from clients. Towards this end, the authors hand-hold clinicians throughout the book with offering a running sub-section entitled "presenting the concept." In addition to highlighting various subtleties of transitioning - or shall we say, detoxing - clients from diet mentality, the book offers numerous case vignettes and clinician-client transcripts for processing clients' ambivalence as well as clients' abuses of the proposed strategies. In similar vein, the book skillfully assists the clinicians in making sure that the humanistic position of entrusting the client with self-regulation is not misperceived by clients as a permission to over-indulge.

Perhaps, the biggest accomplishment yet, in my opinion, is the fact that the authors manage to avoid radical non-dietism, to coin a term. While they unequivocally condemn dieting, they also - rather wisely - acknowledge that "there are clients who are uncomfortable with some of the guidelines suggested by non-diet experts. As social workers, we are trained to `start where the client is.'" (p. 98). In this truly enlightened Harm Reduction thinking, Matz and Frankel model willingness to be clinically flexible and not pedantic about treatment protocols.

In sum, "Beyond a Shadow of a Diet" is - beyond a shadow of a doubt - an invaluable clinical tool.


Pavel Somov, Ph.D.
Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, 2008)