Normal Eating is a program of recovery that enables people to free themselves from food and weight obsession, and manage the pressures that cause emotional eating. Resolving these issues lets you to eat according to body wisdom and return to your normal weight without dieting. Read more...

We live in a weight-obsessed culture. The obsession is like a contagious disease that we all catch shortly after birth. Our modern society views enjoyment of eating in much the same way as the Victorians viewed enjoyment of sex - dangerous, sinful, and out of control, something to feel guilty about. If you tell someone you've decided not to diet anymore, you risk an earful about what a dangerous mistake you're making, how natural appetites have no natural limits, and the only way to have control is through dieting. Read more...

People don't eat compulsively because they're insane or masochistic or lack self-control. People eat compulsively because it fills important needs that they don't know how else to fill. It's not reasonable to expect to be able to give up something that's filling key needs for you. That's why diets don't work - you can't just decide to live without having your needs met. The pressure from internal distress eventually causes you to fill the needs in the only way you know how - eating. Read more...

Some sort of feedback from others is usually necessary for the Normal Eating process to work. It's not something that most people can do on their own. The reason is the built-in resistance that people have to surfacing the issues that must be surfaced to stop the emotional eating. Read more...

Overeaters Anonymous (OA) is a 12-step program for people who suffer from compulsive overeating. Although most people in OA rely on a rigid food plan, this is not a mandated by OA World Services. Theoretically, each person can choose his or her own food plan, and this plan could be Normal Eating.

Normal Eating is very compatible with the OA philosophy. Both focus on curing compulsive eating versus weight loss per se. OA looks to a higher power for help, and Normal Eating looks to body wisdom, which is easily conceived as the voice of a higher power. Read more...

Both Why Weight and Normal Eating are programs for helping people to overcome compulsive eating, stop dieting, and eat normally, so of course there are some similarities. But there are also some very significant differences.

1. Why Weight focuses on weight loss.

The most important difference between Why Weight and Normal Eating is that Why Weight, like all Geneen Roth's books, focuses on weight loss as a goal. In fact, this is the biggest difference between Normal Eating and all other non-diet approaches. Focusing on weight loss as the goal is the single biggest reason that the non-diet approach doesn't work for people. Making weight loss your goal is the tail wagging the dog - it doesn't work. You can't listen to your body and trust what it's telling you if your mind is constantly trying to second guess it. Read more...

Some Dangerous Ideas

Normal Eating used to use the term "legalizing" to describe Stage 1, but I discovered through a discussion in the Support Group that Normal Eating's use of the term "legalizing" was widely misunderstood, because the same term is used very differently in Overcoming Overeating. For this reason Stage 1 is now called "Reframing" rather than "Legalizing". The Normal Eating viewpoint and advice on this is different in some very important ways from that of Overcoming Overeating. Read more...

Some people say that New Year's Resolutions are of no use at all because no one keeps them. But I think they are useful in that they make people think about their lives in broad terms - the long view. New Year's Resolutions are to-do lists for the year, versus the daily to-do lists that so many of us make. When we think about New Year's Resolutions, we're thinking about where we want our lives to be a year from now.

New Year's Resolutions can be useful, but that doesn't mean they are always useful. This issue's newsletter is about how to make New Year's Resolutions that work - resolutions that will continue to inspire and guide you for the rest of the year. Read more...