When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy

“A life-changing book.” — Oprah

In this moving and intimate book, Geneen Roth, bestselling author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, shows how dieting and emotional eating often become a substitute for intimacy. Drawing on her own painful personal experiences, as well as the candid stories of those she has helped in her seminars, Roth examines the crucial issues that surround emotional eating: need for control, dependency on melodrama, desire for what is forbidden, and the belief that one wrong move can mean catastrophe. She shows why many people overeat in an attempt to satisfy their emotional hunger, and why weight loss frequently just uncovers a new set of problems. But her welcome message is that change is possible. This book will help readers break destructive, self-perpetuating patterns and learn to satisfy all the hungers—physical and emotional—that make us human.

Geneen Roth is a writer and a teacher who has gained international prominence through her work in the field of eating disorders. She is the founder of the Breaking Free workshops, which she has conducted nationwide since 1979. She is also the author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, and When Food is Love. A frequent guest on television and radio programs, she has written for and been featured in Tie, Ms., New Woman, Family Circle, and Cosmopolitan. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous anthologies. Born in New York City, she now lives in northern California.

When Food Is Love Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. When Food Is Love

Chapter 2. Being In and Out of Control

Chapter 3. The Comfort of Suffering

Chapter 4. Wanting What Is Forbidden

Chapter 5. The One-Wrong-Move Syndrome

Chapter 6. Grieving for the Lost Years

Chapter 7. Being a Victim, Being Powerful

Chapter 8. Being Strong in the Broken Places

Chapter 9. When Love Is Love