Geneen Roth's Newest Book

"Women, Food and God" summarizes what Geneen Roth learned from her workshop participants over the past 30 years. I enjoyed reading her descriptions of workshop participants' reactions to her workshop exercises and ideas. While her previous book "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" explains the guidelines to intuitive eating, "Women, Food and God" describes how people resist using those guidelines and how they can use their resistance to learn about themselves and resolve eating problems.

I need to add that my impressions of this book are colored by my perspective: I've read every book Geneen Roth wrote. So I love her ideas and style of writing. I've eaten intuitively for 8 years.I am fairly thin, but want to improve my health and well-being. I'm a Christian, but I'm open to other's concepts of God, religion and spirituality.

As a Christian I was confused about Geneen Roth's concept of God and how that relates to food and eating. Eventually I understood her explanation that people often begin to eat emotionally after they stop believing that they deserve love and goodness in their life. They stop believing in what the concept of God offers and begin to numb their desperation, fears and hopelessness with food.

I especially liked the chapter entitled "Those Who Have Fun and Those Who Don't". Geneen observed from her students that "roughly half of them had never been successful on a diet. They weren't interested in rules or order or being told what to do. They told me about the nether world of glazy-dazy eating uninterrupted by restriction ... It became clear that not all bingeing is dirven by deprivation; in half of emotional eaters, bingeing (or, at the very least, consistent overeating) is a way of life punctuated by sleep, work, time with family."

Then Geneen goes on to differentiate the two most common types of compulsive eaters: permitters and restricters. I'd heard previously about those categories in GR workshop CD. However in this chapter Geneen explains why some people LOVE the 'eat whatever you want' part of intuitive eating but resist 'eat when hungry, mindfully savor each bite and stop when full', while others fear freedom to eat anything but feel safer when they obey hunger, fullness boundaries. Permitters hate rules and boundaries. Restrictors love rules and obundaries. Permitters numb. Restrictors control.

That difference helped me understand why people are drawn to different intuitive eating approaches. Some may LOVE legalizing food ala Overcoming Overeating and Intuitive EAting. Others prefer "Thin Within", "7 Secrets of Slim People" and even Geneen Roth's "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating", because those books emphasize the importance of obeying guidelines about hunger/fullnes cues and eating mindfully. Yet Geneen emphasizes that we can swing between permitting and resticting, but "both are subtypes of compulsive eating which is the metadefense."

In my opinion the most eye-opening chapter was "It's Not about the Weight and It's not NOT about the Weight". There Geneen says:

"Most people are so glad to read about, hear about and then begin any approach that doesn't focus on weight loss as tits main agenda that they take it to be license to eat without restraint. 'Aha!' they say, 'Let's eat. A lot. Let's not stop.'

"The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Of making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problm when the orginal problem becomes too uncomfortable."

"Sometimes people will say, 'But I just like the taste of the food ... I overeat because I like food.'

(Geneen responds to those comments by saying:) "When you like something, you pay attention to it ... You want to be present for every second of the rapture. Overeating does not lead to rapture. It leads to burping and farting and being so sick that you can't think of anything but how full you are. That's not love; that's suffering. Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life ... It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way--and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it."

I recommend this book to anyone who knows how to eat intuitively, but still struggles with intuitive eating; to anyone who loves legalizing foods, but resists waiting for hunger before eating and stopping when full; to anyone who has read Geneen Roth's "Breaking Free from Emotional Eating" but still eats emotionally; and especially to anyone who wants to use their struggles with food to improve their lives, health and well-being.