Benefits you'll receive from Stop Eating Your Heart Out 

Stop Eating Your Heart Out speaks to anyone’s challenges with food, weight, and emotional eating, and then offers a multitude of effective self-help tools for overcoming them. As I disclose my very personal struggle with food and out-of-control eating, I am telling the story of millions of others who use food to self-soothe. The book’s focus, however, is on recovery. I am a licensed professional clinical counselor, and I discuss methods that have worked for me and my clients over the past twenty years. Tools for recovery include Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), Inner Child work, 12-Step recovery, journaling, creative visualization, meditation, gratitude, conscious living, and so much more. Compulsive overeating is conquerable. If you, or anyone you love, want freedom from emotional eating, this book is for you.

Available in 8 Formats

GENESIS OF THE BOOK

STOP EATING YOUR HEART OUT: The 21-Day Program to Free Yourself from Emotional Eating comes from my personal and professional experiences. I spent my first thirty years hoarding and hiding food, eating in secret, consumed with guilt and shame, unaware that I suffered from binge eating disorder.

As a youngster I saw the teleplay “Days of Wine and Roses” – which deals with the heartache of alcoholism and the recovery found in AA. I secretly wished that there was a place like that for me and called myself a “foodaholic” because once I started eating (in private) I had trouble stopping.

Fast forward to 1975, when a friend took me to my first 12-Step recovery meeting. After years and years of failed attempts at dieting, I was excited that such a place existed. But I hated the meetings. I felt like I was in church, and they were trying to convert me. Since I grew up in a family where only positive feelings were allowed, when I heard people expressing honest emotions, I felt like a fish out of water. Although I felt very threatened, I returned each week for two reasons:

1) I saw people losing weight and keeping it off

2) I was a soap opera junkie, and this was like a real-life soap opera

As we went around the room, people shared details about their lives. I wanted to know if Tony told his parents he was gay and did Brenda go out with the black man and did Joan’s adoption come through. I was hooked into returning each week to find out!

Working a 12-Step program was my initiation into so much:

Spirituality ~ finding a higher power who loves me unconditionally 4

Personal growth ~ that came through working the steps

Emotional recovery ~ When I stopped compulsive eating, many emotions came to the surface that I learned to name and embrace

Tools for healing ~ inner child work; self-empathy; forgiveness work; focusing on gratitude. All of these dramatically changed my life.

Because I successfully sponsored so many women, I decided to become a licensed counselor in 1990 and worked with the recovery population. I used all the tools I had discovered in the program plus the new energy tools that I began to study in the 1990s.

Knowing that I had effectively stopped emotional overeating myself and helped my clients do the same, I felt compelled to let others know. In Stop Eating Your Heart Out I disclose what I used to be like, what happened, and what I am like now. I was brutally honest in sharing my own story and also incorporated some of the experiences that my clients have had. The tools we used are presented in the 21-day plan and they work! I am grateful to have a published book that has the potential of helping so many others who suffer the shame and guilt of compulsive overeating.

Who should read this book?

1. Individuals concerned about being overweight.
2. People who want to change their relationship with food.
3. Those diagnosed with binge eating disorder.
4. Health care and mental health care professionals working with all of the above.
5. Families, friends, colleagues, and employers of the above.
6. Anyone who wants tools to change a habit or behavior —you can easily adapt the 21 days’ worth of tools to whatever habit or behavior you'd like to change.

I have also created the Stop Eating Your Heart Out Workbook which provides a unique and very personal approach to applying the tools for healing found in Stop Eating Your Heart Out.