Lasagna for Lunch, Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating

As a nutritionist and dietitian for the past 16 years, I work to help people get healthier, lose weight, and reverse medical problems through improving their nutrition. Learning to eat the right foods can strengthen a person’s body and optimize one’s well being. Most people are able to integrate my recommendations into their lifestyle to make themselves more fit and healthy.

However, many people are emotional eaters who misuse and abuse food when they are not actually hungry but because they are under stress and emotional pain. A woman may binge on cookies when she is really angry at her husband. A man may go on a restrictive diet and work out obsessively because he is depressed about his business. A teenager will make herself vomit in order to lose weight because she does not feel as pretty as her girlfriends.

Everything you want to know about emotional eating but were afraid to ask is described in Mary Anne Cohen’s latest book, “Lasagna for Lunch: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating.” Mary Anne Cohen is the Director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders in Brooklyn and we often collaborate to help people get healthy and whole again in their relationship with food and their bodies.

As Mary Anne described, “In 1982, I coined the term ‘emotional eating’ to describe the varied and conflicted, fluctuating and frustrating relationship many people have with food.”

• Emotional eating is when you are lonely in the middle of the night and you look for comfort in the refrigerator.

• Emotional eating is when you are angry at someone and you tear and chew into food when you really want to bite that person’s head off.
• Emotional eating is when you feel bored and empty inside and cannot figure out what to do for yourself, so you binge and make yourself throw up.
• Emotional eating is when you refuse to eat and starve yourself because you feel powerless and out-of-control over how your life is going.
• Emotional eating is about using food to distract, detour, or deny your inner emotions.
• Emotional eating is about being hungry from the heart and not from the stomach.

The women, men, and teenagers I work with battle compulsive overeating, body image dissatisfaction, bulimia, binge eating disorder, anorexia, and chronic dieting. Although people abuse food in many different ways—gorging, bingeing and purging, or starving—all emotional eaters use food as a drug that can soothe, comfort, and keep them company, or even as a weapon to sabotage and hurt themselves. No matter where they fall on the spectrum—from an 80 pound anorexic to a 450 pound binge-eater—their relationships with food and their bodies are fueled and driven by emotions too hard to digest—sadness and fear, depression, anxiety, grief, trauma, betrayal, anger, feelings of abandonment and rejection.”

“Lasagna for Lunch” describes Mary Anne’s journey as a therapist, working with emotional eaters, over the past 40 years. She is not afraid to share her personal story, which helps readers realize she walks the walk as well as talks the talk. Her in-depth descriptions of how people resolve their emotional eating come vividly to life in this book.

She describes the process of psychotherapy for eating disorders, and how the therapist helps the client cross over the bridge between emotional eating and the road to recovery.

And, in Chapter 10, “Food Glorious Food! Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating,” you will get to read my contribution about nutrition! You will learn about good and bad fats, the abundant benefits of fiber, preventing the blood sugar roller coaster, and a nutritionist’s perspective on how to manage food cravings in addition to other topics on healthy eating.

You can order Mary Anne’s two books, “Lasagna for Lunch: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating” and “French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating” at www.emotionaleating.org.

Laura Shammah is a registered dietitian. She has a private practice in Brooklyn where she helps many clients with a range of issues from eating disorders, emotional eating, diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight loss, weight gain, gestational diabetes, PCOS, Celiac, cancer and much more. She has been practicing for over 16 years.