Author: Arlene B.Englander,

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN: 978-1-5381-1119-2


Arlene B. Englander, author of Let Go Of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food, is a licensed social worker with an MBA. (2018, inside back cover) She has been a psychotherapist in North Palm Beach Florida for twenty years. She has devised programs for law firms, hospitals, and other organizations to help them alleviate stress and stop overeating.

One of the things that Englander does with regularity is conduct a seminar on “Love My Food”. She states that most people think that if they overeat they love their food too much, but she says that frequently it is quite the opposite. In these seminars she helps those people to learn to savor their food and control their weight. Englander confesses that she herself was a “compulsive overeater”. (2018, p.1)

Englander says that diets help to create compulsive overeaters and binge eaters because oftentimes people seeks what is quick and simple. Simply exchanging one food for another is not a viable solution to this dilemma. Instead, she suggests that you become aware of your habits and do not judge yourself in this process. Then she says to eat only that which pleases you. Don’t stuff yourself, but rather savor it.

This process employs life changing behaviors such as finding other things that you find pleasurable, getting a new perspective on life in general, letting your thoughts and feeling to flow without judgment. Englander says all of this will help you grow as a person.

Stress appears to be a common denominator for people who overeat and have other heath issues too. Lessening your stress can go a long way towards helping you to stop compulsive overeating. Englander is a proponent of childhood experiences shaping our adult behaviors. To which she adds you must understand what happened in order to overcome it.

Overcoming stress and moving forward to combat overeating Englander says begins with your ABC’s A is to become aware of your various emotional states. B stand for taking a break before beginning to determine what is amiss. And C is change. Change can also trigger stress because it requires us to make course changes. D means depression, but also deciding what to do next. Depression takes us back to overeating. Deciding to not wallow in that depression can bring us to a point where we no longer seek food as an antidepressant that actually depresses us further. The alphabet continues and I do not want to give the entire book away.

While some of this may seem over simplistic, there is a lot of background information that Englander provides as you read through this book.  If you or perhaps someone you know suffers from chronic overeating please give this book and her seminars a try. It cannot hurt and it just may be the fix for what ails you.