Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything »

No matter how sophisticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all.

If you suffer about your relationship with food — you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all — you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don't run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs.

It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning.

She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better.

Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings aboutlove, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn't stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.

With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for.

Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call "God."

Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body...and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life.

Library Journal

While "God" is in the title of this latest work by best-selling author Roth (When Food Is Love), she touches only lightly on religion, focusing instead on why some people use food to mask their emotions. Overeating numbs feelings and erases unpleasant life experiences, Roth says; eating ends up being about bloating and indigestion, not about enjoying food. Through a series of inquiries, Roth helps overeaters find the underlying reasons for using food as an emotional buffer. Roth also provides seven basic guidelines for eating (which do not include counting calories) and other therapeutic self-help tools. Whether the trap is eating brownies or shopping in excess, Roth's advice could be applied to any addiction. VERDICT This is an excellent book for anyone tired of quick-fix diets. Having experienced the ups and downs of emotional eating herself, Roth offers readers genuine and heartfelt advice. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/09.]—Phyllis Goodman, West Chester P.L., OH