Koenig - Outsmarting overeating : boost your life skills, end your food problems

Praise for Outsmarting Overeating

Outsmarting Overeating does more than offer a solid, step-by-step approach to building a healthy relationship with food and eating. It offers a thoughtful, compassionate, effective path for healing your life, emotions, and relationships. Highly recommended!

Donald Altman, MA, LPC, author of One-Minute Mindfulness and Art of the Inner Meal

If you find that your relationship to food and eating is a problem and you want to find a way to change it without dieting, Outsmarting Overeating is sure to add some wonderful tools to your toolbox. Karen R. Koenigs newest book elevates the self-help genre to a whole new level of writing that will benefit every reader!

Megrette Fletcher, MEd, RD, CDE, cofounder of The Center for Mindful Eating and coauthor of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes

This is a nurturing, realistic system for developing healthy life skills and then applying them to eating behaviors.

Anna Jedrziewski, Retailing Insight

Praise for Karen R. Koenigs Previous Books

What [The Rules of Normal Eating] offers is a perspective on working through some of the many misbeliefs and setbacks that prevent many of us from eating a normal diet. Karen outlines what each rule would look like in real life, and gives practical advice for how to start to change lifelong habits into healthier ones.

Rebecca Bitzer, The Nutrition Experts, EmpoweredEatingBlog.com

Using humor, plain talk, examples from her clinical experience, reflection exercises, case studies, and homework, Koenig lets troubled eaters know that their yo-yo patterns of eating and self-care are due to conflicts. She shies away from easy answers and, instead, provides hope and concrete actions to developing a permanent, positive relationship with food.

Midwest Book Review

Since women, at least those of us in the Western World, are socialized to be pleasers, Karen Koenig has written a wonderful book to help us save ourselves from ourselves.... [Nice Girls Finish Fat] is deceptively simple and chock-full of stories to help readers see themselves in the lessons she teaches. She is a master clinician.

Dr. Beth Erickson, author of Marriage Isnt for Sissies

What Every Therapist Needs to Know about Treating Eating and Weight Issues is a wonderful tool for therapists to gain more insight on the occasional eating and weight problems in clients.

International Journal of Psychotherapy

Outsmarting
Overeating

Also by Karen R. Koenig

The Food and Feelings Workbook:

A Full Course Meal on Emotional Health

Nice Girls Finish Fat:

Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever

The Rules of Normal Eating:

A Commonsense Approach for Dieters, Overeaters, Undereaters,

Emotional Eaters, and Everyone in Between!

Starting Monday:

Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food

What Every Therapist Needs to Know
about Treating Eating and Weight Issues

Copyright 2015 by Karen R. Koenig

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for educational purposes only. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koenig, Karen R., date.

Outsmarting overeating : boost your life skills, end your food problems / Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, MEd.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60868-316-1 (paperback)

1. Eating disordersPsychological aspects. 2. FoodPsychological aspects. I. Title.

RC552.E18K634 2014

616.85'26dc23 2014034245

First printing, January 2015

ISBN 978-1-60868-316-1

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother

I bet you picked up this book with a groan of disbelief, thinking, here you are, again, reading yet another book to improve your eating habits. Perhaps you have been struggling for decades to make peace with the refrigerator and the scale. You forge a bit of progress, only to see it vanish into thin air as a crisis strikes or as you get fed up with working so darned hard to eat normally. You may be sick to death of thinking about food all the shoulds and shouldnts, all the instructions telling you to eat this and dont eat that that youre ready to throw up your hands in despair and accept your relationship with food, no matter how crummy it is.

Almost. The fact that youre reading these words means you still feel a spark of optimism that maybe this book will turn your eating habits around once and for all, that it will tell you why you keep snacking when youre not hungry, eating past the point of being full, obsessing about food and weight, and choosing foods that endanger your health and happiness. So here you are, hoping against hope that this book will tell you how to put your eating problems behind you and leave them there.

It will! because Outsmarting Overeating isnt a diet book. Its not even primarily about eating. Its about the rest of your life, the part that has been mucking up your relationship with food. Read on to discover the real reasons you have an eating problem and to learn a tried-and-true approach to putting food in its rightful place while simultaneously creating a better life for yourself.

During my three decades of working with troubled eaters, its become glaringly obvious to me that a persons misguided relationship with food is a symptom of deeper, darker problems. The truth is, biology and heredity aside (and both can play a huge role in determining eating patterns and weight parameters), if you engage in unwanted, unhealthy eating with such frequency and ferocity that it ruins your self-esteem and damages your health, youre likely lacking a set of essential skills needed to better manage your life. Sure, you can benefit from nutritional information and behavioral techniques that will help you eat more healthfully. But youll never succeed if the skills you use to cope with lifes ups and downs are so weak and ineffective that eating has become your major strategy for facing your daily challenges, and if food is your greatest source of pleasure, most loved reward, most pursued passion, days highlight, and bosom buddy.