Overview of Normal Eating

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.

It doesn't work in reverse. Losing weight doesn't enable you to let go of the obsession and manage your life better, as many Normal Eating Support Group members can testify. And if your goal is to lose weight so you can like yourself, it will never happen. If you don't feel good about yourself, you will never give yourself the gift of normal weight. Humans have a tendency to live up or down to their view of themselves. Besides that, an obsessive desire to lose weight interferes with Normal Eating by drowning out the whisper of body wisdom.

This results in a Zen-like paradox: If your goal is to lose weight, you can't lose weight. Your very desire gets in the way. To get where you want to go, your goal has to be health, self-love, self-care, and peace of mind. Becoming a normal weight follows naturally from that.

Not Just a Description - A Map to Get You There

If you've tried attuned eating before but just couldn't make it work, don't despair! A lot of people who loved Geneen Roth's books but just couldn't do it have success with Normal Eating, because Normal Eating doesn't stop at describing the goal - it includes very effective tools to help you get there.

It's fairly obvious that if you eat only (or mainly) when you're hungry you will become your normal weight, but this is much easier said than done if you eat to meet emotional needs. An emotional eater has to do a lot of internal work to be able to "just eat when hungry", and most people find it difficult or impossible to do that level of internal work without any guidance.

Normal Eating makes the goal more accessible by breaking it up into stages - subgoals - with each stage building on the previous stage. Normal Eating's stages mirror what happens naturally when people succeed in learning to eat according to body wisdom.

Each stage in Normal Eating has a primary learning goal, and includes exercises to help you achieve it. That lets you focus on one thing at a time, which makes the task much more manageable, and greatly improves your odds of success of success. There's a natural resistance to this level of introspection, so it's very easy to stall or stray off track. The exercises and the support group keep you focused in the direction that will pay off.

The four stages of Normal Eating, the learning goals at each stage, and the exercises for achieving these goals are laid out in the ebook that you have access to after becoming a member.