From Publishers Weekly
This is the fourth book ( Feeding the Hungry Heart, etc.) generated by the seminars Roth conducts at her Berkeley, Calif., home for people who believe that if they were thin, they would be happy. But the author makes clear that losing weight doesn't automatically gain one success, respect and love. Roth's personal story and those of her clients as related here exemplify the need to discover why the overweight are addicted to food. Citing her own deprived childhood, the author demonstrates that gluttons seek the reliable comforts of eating instead of closeness with humans who might become abusive (like her mother) or vanish (like her father). Those bent on self-improvement will find that the book merely repeats well-known principles in a melodramatic fashion. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship between Eating and Intimacy ANNOTATION
In this uplifting, revealing book (a bestseller in hardcover), Roth examines the link between eating disorders and the need for intimacy they often unmask. She shows why many people overeat in an attempt to satisfy their emotional hunger and reveals how to stop the cycle of compulsive behavior.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
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 compulsive eating often become a substitute for intimacy. Drawing on painful personal experience as well as the candid stories of those she has helped in her seminars, Roth examines the crucial issues that surround compulsive 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 the cycle of compulsive behavior can be stopped. This book will help readers break destructive, self-perpetuating patterns and learn to satisfy all the hungers - physical and emotional - that make us human.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This is the fourth book ( Feeding the Hungry Heart, etc.) generated by the seminars Roth conducts at her Berkeley, Calif., home for people who believe that if they were thin, they would be happy. But the author makes clear that losing weight doesn't automatically gain one success, respect and love. Roth's personal story and those of her clients as related here exemplify the need to discover why the overweight are addicted to food. Citing her own deprived childhood, the author demonstrates that gluttons seek the reliable comforts of eating instead of closeness with humans who might become abusive (like her mother) or vanish (like her father). Those bent on self-improvement will find that the book merely repeats well-known principles in a melodramatic fashion. (Mar.)