Excerpt from Eating the Moment

• Counting Craving Thoughts
• It’s Just a Craving, for Crying Out Loud!
• Craving-Control Chair
• Craving-Control Success Record

excerpt from Overcoming Night Eating Syndrome

As a night eater, this pattern of eating may seem foreign to you. You probably wake up in the morning with little or no appetite. Some night eaters force themselves to eat a little something to try to stay on some type of normal eating schedule. But even if you skip breakfast, you may not have an appetite even at lunchtime. By dinnertime your interest in food has returned and you will eat a great deal during and after dinner. You will not only keep on eating after dinner, but you often may continue eating until late at night. Perhaps you may even postpone your bedtime just to eat some more food. You may find it hard to fall asleep, and then you make wake up not long after going to sleep, and again later in the night. During these awakenings you may feel not only the need to eat, but also the fear that you will not be able to get back to sleep unless you eat some more.

Excerpt from The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bulimia

As you think about bulimia nervosa, it’s important that you understand that each of the symptoms interacts with every other symptom. Typically, when you’re struggling with bulimia, your weight and body image have a very strong effect on how you feel about yourself. Therefore, if you believe your body isn’t perfect, you then decide that you’re not a valuable person, and you feel bad about yourself—embarrassed, guilty, angry, sad, and so on. This self-invalidation and negative self-evaluation leads you to feel compelled to change how you look so that you can feel better about yourself. Through the messages of Western culture (for instance, “You’re not in the healthy weight range” or “You look different from the women in magazines or on television”), you have learned to invalidate yourself and now believe that losing weight is one powerful way you can feel better.

Excerpt from The Binge Eating & Compulsive Overeating Workbook

Melinda, a patient, says of her binge eating disorder, “I eat and eat and I know that I should stop, but I can’t. I eat so much that I want to throw up, my stomach hurts, and I have to lie down. Sometimes, I feel like if I don’t eat everything I can get my hands on, I’ll explode.” Her words highlight the anguish that many people feel when food controls their lives.

Both binge eating disorder (BED) and compulsive overeating (CO) are conditions in which food is typically used for unhealthy reasons. People with BED or CO tend to feel powerless, and often lose hope that their behavior can change.

Excerpt from Biting Anorexia

That’s it. That’s it. My hair is stuck to my cheeks with tears. A whole part of me has finished. A feeling of heady liberation and utter redundancy. Speech night: over. School: over. My speech as head prefect to two thousand parents and girls and teachers: over. To all those who failed to support me, who told me to just give up and drop out of school to save myself the effort, who cared more about asking me to “pull up my socks” than how I was, as I stumbled, bone-thin and gray, down school corridors… this speech was as much for them as it was for anyone else.

Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross, author of The Binge Eating & Compulsive Overeating Workbook, on Fox31's Everyday with Libby & Natalie:

Excerpt from The Binge Eating & Compulsive Overeating Workbook

Two disturbing trends in the modern diet are also contributing to our culture’s food issues: our reliance on packaged prepared foods high in partially hydrogenated fats and the extensive use of high fructose corn syrup. These trends, along with a lack of physical exercise, have resulted in the current obesity epidemic in our country.