EmotionalEating.org | French Toast for Breakfast




	Receive a free self-help tape when you purchase my book, French Toast for Breakfast. Order Now!	Sample Chapter INTRODUCTION Declaring Peace is an Inside Job "Now that my ladder is gone, I must lie down where all ladders start, In the foul rag and bones shop of the heart." -- W.B. Yeats A colleague of mine, a psychologist, was describing to me how he uses hypnotherapy to help patients resolve their bingeing problems. "This is what I do," he began. "I tell my patients to imagine their favorite binge food. Very often it is chocolate. Then I lead them into a hypnotic trance, and while they are in the trance I advise them as follows: ‘If you ever put a piece of chocolate in your mouth again, little eggs in that chocolate will crack open, and tiny worms will come out. These worms will crawl all over your mouth and into your stomach, ripping it apart. You will never be interested in eating chocolate again.’ " As he sat back, pleased at his inventiveness, I realized we were worlds apart in our thinking about how to help people heal from eating problems. In that moment, this book was born. This is not a book about worms in chocolate. It is about learning to embrace food with pleasure. This is not a book about deprivation but about satisfaction. It is about journeying together to the "foul rag and bones shop of the heart" in order to uncover those forces that have kept you chained to bingeing, purging, chronic dieting, or starving. It is about discovering your own unique path to finally declaring peace with emotional eating. Many years of my own life were taken up with the agony and the ecstasy of my relationship with food. Half of the time I spent sneaking food and bingeing. The other half of the time I was filled with repentance and would diligently watch my calories, weighing everything I ate on a postage scale so small it fit in my pocketbook. Only when I began my own inner journey to understand and unravel my relationship with food did my recovery begin. In this journey I discovered that I was recruiting food to help me solve the emotional problems of living. I also came to recognize during the course of this journey that no chocolate chip cookie is smart enough to know how to truly comfort me. Today I eat with pleasure. I regard food as my friend and nourisher. But most of all, I have arrived at an inner peace with myself, my food and my body. It was not always like this for me. As a child I loved food with an intense passion and always felt that I could never get enough good things to eat. I developed a needy relationship with food and began to sneak it. When I was six years old, I wore a size 6X. The X meant I was too big for children’s sizes that ended at just plain 6. It meant I was Xtra large, Xtra greedy, Xtra different from the other girls, and, therefore, should be Xtra ashamed of myself. Now when I look at old pictures of myself, I see I really was not fat at all, although that was how I felt. I was plump, with dimples on my elbows, dark pigtails down my back, and I was cute. Today, over twenty years since the beginning of my own journey, I am the director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders and have worked with hundreds of people to help them declare peace with their emotional eating. What I have learned is that each person’s journey is as unique as a fingerprint. The complexity of eating disorders is such that no single cure works for all people. What works for one may not work for another. For this reason, many people fail to resolve their eating problems because they keep trying to mold themselves to an approach that is not congruent with their inner self, their own true inner core. In French Toast for Breakfast we will work together to tailor an individualized approach that can work for you. French Toast for Breakfast is a book about emotional eating -- being hungry from the heart, not from the stomach. Emotional eating is when you are lonely in the middle of the night and you look for comfort in the refrigerator. Emotional eating is when you are angry at somebody and you tear and chew into food when you are really wanting to bite that person’s head off. Emotional eating is when you feel bored and empty and cannot figure out what to do for yourself, so you binge and make yourself vomit. Emotional eating is when you refuse to eat and starve yourself because you feel powerless and out-of-control over how your life is going. Emotional eating is using food to distract, detour, or deny your inner problems. Emotional eating is the domain of the compulsive eater, chronic dieter, bulimic and anorexic. Although each uses food in a different way gorging, bingeing and purging, or starving all are using food as a drug that can soothe, comfort, and keep them company or even punish and hurt them for their guilty feelings. French Toast for Breakfast is also a book about declaring peace with emotional eating and healing your eating problem. Healing an eating problem means learning that food is not your enemy, that food was put on this earth to give you pleasure and to satisfy your hunger. True healing has to do with your inner state of mind. It means learning other nourishing ways of comforting and soothing yourself. Healing an eating problem means feeling at home in your body, treating it as a friendly ally rather than an object to be yelled at or criticized. This healing has little to do with thinness or fatness and can be achieved by people of all shapes and sizes. Healing an eating problem is about reclaiming the vitality of your inner self that has been hidden by your consuming relationship with food. Most of all, healing is about hope. It is about cultivating a deeply rich relationship with your inner self, your hunger for food and your hunger for life. A word about the title: I have been struck by the number of my patients who have expressed to me a yearning for French toast for breakfast! They seldom satisfied this yearning because it seemed too much of a forbidden treat. My hope is that through this book, you will learn to make peace with all foods and begin to nurture yourself in other satisfying ways as well. French Toast for Breakfast will help you sink your teeth into life not into your obsession with food!

Mary Anne Cohen, CSW, BCD The New York Center for Eating Disorders 490 Third Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215 (718) 788-6986 www.EmotionalEating.org macohen490@aol.com

Sample Chapter