Food has the power to temporarily alleviate stress and sadness, enhance joy, and bring us comfort when we need it most. It's no wonder experts estimate that 75 percent of overeating is triggered by our emotions, not physical hunger. The good news is you can instead soothe yourself through dozens of mindful activities that are healthy for both body and mind. Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully, now offers 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, a collection of mindfulness skills and practices for relaxing the body in times of stress and ending your dependence on eating as a means of coping with difficult emotions. You'll not only discover easy ways to soothe urges to overeat, you'll also learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger. Reach for this book instead of the refrigerator next time you feel the urge to snack-these alternatives are just as satisfying!

Susan Albers, Psy.D. presents a groundbreaking three-step program for conquering emotional eating—a practical, prescriptive, proactive approach using Emotional Intelligence that will help you slim down, eat healthfully and mindfully, and keep the pounds off. Introduced by the author of the bestselling The Hormone Cure, Sara Gottfried MD, Eat.Q. goes beyond traditional diet books to explore the link between emotions and eating, revealing how, when you increase your Emotional Intelligence, you naturally increase your ability to successfully manage your weight. Explaining the link between a high Eat.Q. and a good relationship with food, clinical psychologist Dr. Albers guides you through the most common emotional barriers to healthy and mindful eating, and offers 25 tools and techniques you can use to tailor the plan to your individual needs. Grounded in dozens of clinical studies that associate a low Emotional Intelligence with poor eating habits—including eating past fullness, eating when your angry or bored, and overeating favorite foods—Eat.Q. offers hope and help that works for anyone, no matter how many times they've tried to manage emotional eating in the past.

Most of us are really, really good at devising reasons to indulge in foods that derail our diets and healthy eating plans. Who among us hasn’t thought, “I had a stressful day, so I deserve this chocolate,” or, “Buttery popcorn would go so well with this movie!” When we view food as a reward, emotional eating can be difficult to overcome. Most fad diets tell you to “control” your eating, use willpower, ignore your cravings, or just stop eating. Recall for a moment where this got you in the past. Feeling frustrated or hopeless? Maybe it led you to make more excuses? Perhaps you’re thinking I need to get control. This is a sign that the diet mentality may be deeply ingrained in you. Rest assured that there are alternatives to fad dieting and trying to “control” your body. In But I Deserve This Chocolate!, psychologist Susan Albers takes aim at the fifty most common self-sabotaging thoughts and excuses that keep you from eating right and looking great. This guide dismantles each excuse and offers a mindfulness exercise to help reroute your thoughts so you can meet your health goals. Whether you’re a man or woman, teen or adult, this book is for you if you are trying to eat more mindfully, manage your weight, lose weight, or take charge of your eating habits. Forget the chocolate and unwrap some truly nourishing habits you can feel good about—your body will thank you!

Presents tools for applying the principles of mindful eating to daily life, such as self-assessment questions and tables that track eating patterns and the emotions accompanying them.

In this much-anticipated follow-up to 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, renowned nutrition expert and New York Times best-selling author of Eat Q, Susan Albers delivers fifty more highly effective ways to help you soothe yourself without eating—leading to a healthier, happier life! If you’re an emotional overeater, you may turn to food to cope with stress and sadness, enhance joy, and bring a sense of comfort. But, over time, overeating can cause weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and many other health problems. In 50 More Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, you’ll find fifty more mindful and healthy activities to help you replace your need to overeat. Based in popular mindfulness practices, this book will show you how to slow down and be present during mealtime so that you end up making healthier choices. In addition, the activities in the book—such as yoga, aromatherapy, and breathing exercises—will help you gain a greater overall sense of well-being and appreciation for your body. If you’re ready to stop using food as an emotional crutch, and start feeling healthy, happy, and truly fulfilled, this book offers fifty more ways!

How common and effortless it is to eat in an uncontrolled, unaware, mindless manner. If you've ever continued to snack when you were full, cut calories despite being hungry, or used guilt to guide your eating, you've experienced mindless eating firsthand. Let's face it. Deciding what to eat is not an easy task. It's so tricky that in the United States eating concerns and weight obsessions have reached epidemic proportions, with serious health consequences for a large part of the population. What turns an everyday activity like eating into such an overwhelming process? The answer to that question is, of course, a complex one. Throughout the book, we will return to that question with some answers. But the bottom line is this: To make smart, healthy eating choices, your body and mind work together to send you essential clues about what you need and want to eat. These clues give you information about ''how much'' and ''what'' to eat. The sensations and emotions that signal when you're full, famished, or just wanting to eat something rich and delicious are a complex combination of bodily and emotional feelings. If you are attentive and responsive to these cues, your eating will be healthy, in control, and well regulated. Dieting and disliking your body are incredibly detrimental to your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. They inhibit your ability to accurately decode your body's messages and feedback. The dieting mindset is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body's only line of communication with your head. The dieting mindset can skew your knowledge of healthy eating so badly that you have no idea of what to eat. Mindless eating is then manifested in two ways. You can either ''obsess'' or ''ignore'' internal feedback from both your body and mind, rather than responding thoughtfully to your hunger and to your concern about your health. In this book, you will learn how mindlessness unknowingly corrupts the way you eat a meal, and how it manifests in a variety of eating problems. You will gain insight into why mindfulness, which is, of course, the opposite of mindlessness, can provide you with valuable skills to control the way you eat.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 There are two women, Jennifer and Cindy. They both have had a stressful day at work due to their critical and irrational boss. Jennifer begins snacking the moment she gets home, as a way to calm down. Cindy, on the other hand, calls a friend to vent about her terrible day. #2 Self-soothing is the ability to regulate your feelings. It is at the core of your well-being. You are able to tolerate things that get you really upset and stressed-out without crumbling or falling to pieces. #3 If you don’t have a strong set of skills already in place, it is important to develop them now. The good news is that it is possible to strengthen these skills. If your old ways are not adequate, you can learn new ways to comfort and soothe yourself. #4 Eating can be a substitute for self-soothing, and is often used to help us feel better. It can provide us with comfort foods that are mentally linked with emotions, and foods that are fatty and sugary.