French Toast for Breakfast has been described as a warm and compassionate guide. Clearly written for people with compulsive eating, chronic dieting, bulimia, and anorexia, French Toast for Breakfast will help readers come to see food as their friend and nourisher, not their enemy.

This book is filled with dialogues from actual therapy sessions, an in-depth comparison of treatment options, and an exploration of how to resolve the obstacles to success. French Toast for Breakfast also looks at relapse, how to prevent it, and what to do if it occurs. It also includes a unique questionnaire to help readers determine which path to peace is best for them.

My new book, Lasagna for Lunch, chronicles my experiences as an eating disorder therapist over the past forty years. This book is an intimate account of what goes on behind the scenes between client and therapist to resolve emotional eating.

A person’s eating disorder is a creative solution to inner turmoil. The therapist helps expand the creativity of the client to find solutions that are emotionally nurturing, not hurtful. Every patient’s needs in therapy are special and personal. The thrust of this book is to explore the ways our relationships with ourselves and others can go awry and lead us to conclude that trusting food is safer than trusting people. 

I also discuss how the relationship with an empathic therapist can help us find the path back to healing, health, and wholeness.

“Healing an emotional eating problem is about helping our clients cultivate a deeply rich relationship with their inner self—their hunger for food and their hunger for life.”

Mary Anne Cohen, LCSW, director of the New York Center for Eating Disorders, brings over 40 years of experience working with clients struggling with an eating disorder. In this engaging and compassionate book, Cohen teaches therapists how to fearlessly reach out to the heart and humanity of each client, illustrating how the therapist–client relationship -- with its sharing of tears and laughter -- makes treatment a deeply healing experience.

Integrating over 200 case examples, Cohen explores the two worlds of the binge eater, bulimic, and anorexic: the inner and the outer. In part 1, she delves into the inner world of frozen grief, depression, abuse, and early attachment. She presents attachment theory, how to conduct an eating disorder evaluation, how to blend psychotherapy and cognitive–behavioral strategies, the role of medications, and the ingredients needed for a healing therapeutic relationship. In part 2, she demonstrates how clinicians can develop multicultural, gender, and social media competency. Literacy in these three areas brings us a deeper understanding of the impact that this outer world has on the eating disorder patient and how to intervene to modify the harmful effects.

Every person’s eating disorder is as unique as a fingerprint, and there is no “one size fits all” approach to healing. The goal for the social work therapist is to create an individualized and comprehensive treatment approach in collaboration with clients that will help them break the chains of emotional eating and body image distress.

This is a book about hope. Hope that we can become more empathically attuned to our clients, hope that they can become more trustworthy of human relationships to heal their inner selves, and hope that our clients can ultimately declare peace with emotional eating.