It’s Not About Food
It’s Not About Food gives you the tools and the understanding to break the destructive cycle of bingeing, dieting, and self-starvation. By using the proven techniques developed in the Beyond Hunger workshops, you will be able to transform your relationship not only with food, but also with your body and yourself. These exercises and meditations will help you determine the differences between what your body craves to eat, what your mind thinks you should eat, and what your emotions are driving you to eat. This non-diet approach goes beneath the symptoms of eating disorders and explores the cultural pressures women face, along with the physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns that create the need to overeat or undereat in the first place.
Carol Normandi and Laurelee Roark have discovered, through personal experience as well as working with many women, that for the individual with an eating disorder, every unfelt feeling, every unresolved problem, has a way of turning into overeating or controlling food. It’s Not About Food will help you break that cycle by abandoning dieting forever and understanding that the probable reasons for your eating disorder lie much deeper than just what and how you eat every day. When you stop trying to control food and weight, you can start to listen to the wisdom of your body, take care of yourself emotionally, feed your soul, and break free from eating disorders successfully.
Praise For It’s Not About Food:
“In this unique, courageous book, Carol Normandi and Laurelee Roark teach women the essential skills to access their own power and inner guidance in order to overcome eating disorders. Readers will learn how to reach full recovery by looking internally and towards themselves instead of externally and towards sociocultural influences, which attempt to regulate female hunger. It’s Not About Food is an important part of the growing movement to return women’s bodies to their rightful owners.”
– Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth
“Women who read this book will be inspired to throw away their diets and scales and pick up on the nurturing, caring voice presented in these pages.”
– From the Foreword of It’s Not About Food by Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter, authors of Overcoming Overeating and When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies
“…Normandi and Roark are like patient coaches detaching women from their obsessions with food, deprogramming societal and family messages about acceptable weight, offering tools and exercises to transform destructive behaviors into opportunities for self-reflection.”
– San Jose Mercury News
“In a frank and vibrant voice, Roark and Normandi translate into words the pain and isolation women express silently through body hatred and eating problems. They provide company and encouragement for women to identify the real sources of their distress and take action to make changes in their world instead of their bodies.”
– Elizabeth Scott, LCSW, Body Positive
Over It
Every year, desperate parents try to save their daughters from starving themselves to death. Yet every year, more girls eat less to look like their favorite supermodels. With this sobering fact in mind, Carol Emery Normandi and Laurelee Roark developed this book based on their ongoing workshops and the feedback of hundreds of young women. They look at the behaviors that may lead to eating disorders and the cultural, emotional, and physical reasons girls obsess about weight and eating. They go on to offer girls and their parents a map and a method for finding a realistic and livable balance. Stories and quotations from girls who have struggled with eating disorders give the book immediacy, and exercises and writing suggestions steer girls toward a healthy self-image and wholesome eating patterns.
Review: by rebeccasreads.com from Washington State:
Over It looks at cultural, emotional & physical reasons why girls obsess about weight and eating, then goes on to show how it can be different. Each section guides readers toward understanding their feelings, acknowledging their fears and concerns without judgement and recasting their thoughts and habits toward a healthy self-image and eating patterns.
That said, this is not a dry book of recriminations, self-flagellations & hopeless stories; rather it is an elegant, lively, informative text book that offers you a lot to occupy your mind and a lot of different ways to look at your life.
In Amber’s story you learn how compulsive eating can start; you’ll see how Bulimia Nervosa took over her mind and took her off on a dangerous detour. Laurelee’s story about Anorexia Nervosa tells how it got a hold of her and wrecked her young life. Carol and Laurelee explain both disorders in clear yet clinical descriptions.
There are sections about boys & eating disorders & for parents who provide the food for the family and how their lifestyles also contribute.
Carol and Laurelee have founded Beyond Hunger, a nonprofit organization, after recovering from their own eating disorders. Beyond Hunger offers support groups, workshops & education for adults and teen with eating disorders and body image disturbances. Do check out my lively eInterview with Carol and Laurelee – I think you’ll be amazed!
Praise for Over It:
“An important book for any teen who has ever struggled with an eating disorder.”
– Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth
“Over It teaches young women the language of healthy body image and natural eating and gives parents the skills to guide their daughters toward self-esteem and contentment. This much-needed book will help young women understand their feelings and learn to love and care for their bodies.”
– John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
“An important book about an important topic. This isn’t small stuff.”
– Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
“If you’re smart, you’ll read this book, get over it, then pass it on to your girlfriends and your mom. Life changing advice!”
– Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter, authors of Overcoming Overeating and When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies