Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever - Hardcover

Emotional eating is by far the most common cause of weight gain. As you'll learn in Shrink Yourself, all the diets, exercise regimens, and surgical procedures in the world will not free you from this vicious cycle. Why? Because they don't address your reasons for overeating.

Shrink Yourself, a supportive, unique, and ground-breaking guide written by a world-renowned therapist who has helped thousands of people lose weight and keep it off, gets to the heart of the problem. Shrink Yourself gives you the equivalent of eight expensive sessions with the best weight-loss therapist in the world for the price of a single book.

Yo-yo dieting is an endless cycle. You diet and lose weight. Then you eat "comfort food"—that piece of cake, huge bowl of ice cream, or enormous bag of potato chips you devour to smother your feelings of fear, anxiety, stress, anger, boredom, loneliness, frustration, or so many other feelings. The comfort doesn't last long. Soon you feel guilty for breaking your diet, so you displace the guilt with another helping. Before long, you're unpacking your fat clothes again and berating yourself for your lack of willpower. Then, warily, you contemplate the next diet.

With Shrink Yourself, renowned psychiatrist and emotional eating expert Dr. Roger Gould offers the first step-by-step analysis of the connection between eating and emotion. Dr. Gould explains why the connection is so powerful and shows you how to break the emotional eating cycle, shed all your excess pounds, and keep them off for good. Based on Dr. Gould's unique method and his work involving more than twenty thousand people, this revolutionary eight-session program reveals that your uncontrollable hunger is connected to feelings of powerlessness in your life. You'll discover the five layers of powerlessness and you'll learn how to recognize and cope with each of them by:

• Conquering the feeling phobia

• Waking up from the food trance

• Challenging your self-doubts

• Defeating your defeatism

• Creating real safety

• Dealing positively with anger

• And more

Food may be a relatively inexpensive "over-the-counter tranquilizer," but its side effects can be devastating. So before you rush to try the next fad diet or start binge eating after a stressful day, ask yourself, "Is this the way I want to live?" Then read Shrink Yourself and learn how to take control of your emotions to slim down permanently? without ever counting calories again. You can truly shrink yourself.

Praise for Shrink Yourself

"In Shrink Yourself, Dr. Gould offers a simple but profound truth: hunger originates in your mind, not your belly. This empowering book will allow you to lose weight by recognizing the psychological stumbling blocks in your life that contribute to your emotional eating. If you're fed up with yo-yo diets that leave you feeling frustrated, confused, and powerless, you owe it to yourself to read the wisdom in this book."
—Joseph J. Luciani, Ph.D., author of Self-Coaching: The Powerful Program to Beat Anxiety and Depression

"Some things in life we can change; some things we can't. Our weight is definitely something we can change and control if we follow Dr. Roger Gould's brilliant method. Every time I'm tempted to reach for that extra sugar fix, I think about what I learned in Shrink Yourself—and I just keep on walking."
—Maud Adams, actress and model

"Obesity is an epidemic in America, and numerous experts have tried to identify its causes. Drawing on his background in psychiatry, Roger Gould makes a major contribution to our understanding of it by identifying the basic emotions that give rise to unhealthy eating habits and offering a manageable step-by-step program for readers to combat it."
—Senator Edward M. Kennedy

"It's important for long-term weight loss to change your eating habits to include healthy, whole, natural foods in your diet, but in order to motivate yourself to lose weight for the long term you need to change the way you think about eating—and about yourself. Shrink Yourself gives you the equivalent of eight therapy sessions with a brilliant psychiatrist who coaches you step by step to stop emotional eating and start feeling and looking great."
—Fred Pescatore, M.D., author of The Hamptons Diet and The Hamptons Diet Cookbook

"In this motivational, fascinating, and practical new book, Roger Gould shows readers how to lose weight by stopping and reversing the emotional eating habits they have developed over a lifetime."
—Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and author of Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork

"This is a masterpiece: the only serious and practical guide for anyone serious about losing weight."
—Warren Bennis, University Professor at the University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader