After 35 years of torment, Laura successfully ended her struggle with food. By teaching herself to go on a "thought diet" and using inquiry to challenge the misguided food thoughts that had kept her eating and weight issues in place, she healed them for good. In her new book, Skinny Thinking: Five Revolutionary Steps to Permanently Heal Your Relationship with Food, Weight, and Your Body (www.SkinnyThinking.com) she shares the five simple steps that worked for her in an effort to help others see the whole truth about food and what's been going on in their relationship with it.
Laura believes that food is the most emotionally based of all the addictions. If people don't learn to break their emotional tie with it by going beyond the mind and emotions, their weight will keep yo-yoing indefinitely, she says. They will continue to look to food to give them things it was never designed to provide, such as comfort, reward, excitement, companionship, or entertainment. Skinny Thinking teaches readers how to break this tie with surgical precision—and to replace their old, destructive relationship with food with a healthy, new one.
Diets don't work because, by their very nature, they're temporary, Laura adds. People lose weight on a diet, but when the diet is over, they go back to eating their favorite foods, and the pounds pile back on. "The bottom line is: changing your diet only works if you change your thinking at the same time," she says.
People are looking for a quick fix, Laura explains. They buy in to the promises of the diet du jour and perhaps hit their goal weight, but then their weight bounces right back up again. Laura guides readers through the process of fundamentally and permanently changing their relationship with food by changing the way they think about it. By following the Five Steps, readers will finally be able to stop yo-yoing, heal their relationship with food, and reach a healthy, natural weight that they'll get to keep for the rest of their lives.
The Five Steps are:
"In order to permanently heal eating and weight issues, we have to do two things: change our diet and change our relationship with food," says Laura. "We have a tendency to overeat when we're not paying attention. The key is bringing more awareness to food thoughts, eating triggers, and the experience of eating itself. Once we do this, we begin to see the whole truth about food and to let go of our illusions about it: then, the way we think about it changes."
Visit www.SkinnyThinking.com to sign up for more information and the e-newsletter to be notified of upcoming workshops.
About the Author:
Skinny Thinking grew out of Laura Katleman-Prue's desire to heal the eating, weight, and body-image issues that plagued her for 35 years. She discovered that the root of her problem was the way she thought about food, and that changing her diet was irrelevant if she didn't also change her thinking habits. By teaching herself to go on a "thought diet" and transform her relationship with food, she experienced permanent healing. This motivated her to write Skinny Thinking and to lead Skinny Thinking Workshops to help others heal their eating issues as well.
Introduction from Skinny Thinking Five Revolutionary Steps to Permanently Healy Heal Your Relationship with Food, Weight & the Body
There's a way of thinking about food that's a problem, and a way of thinking about it that isn't a problem, and the problematic way corresponds to feeling out of control around food and to having a heavier body. Your relationship with food, which is based on how you think about it, makes all the difference. You have different relationships with your mother, your brother, your friend, your boss, and your lover, and you think about all of those people differently. In the same way, you have an easy or challenging relationship with food, depending on the way you habitually think about it.
Let's begin to explore this. How do you relate to food? As a lover, a friend, a god, an enemy, a source of nutrition? What is your image of yourself in relationship to food? What are the thoughts and self-images that mediate between you and food? When you remove all of the thoughts and images that mediate between you and food, what's left? Just a simple, pragmatic relationship with food. That is the goal of Skinny Thinking: to help you develop a simple, pragmatic relationship with food.
We bring so much baggage about food into the present moment that it distorts our view of food, causing us to think about and relate to it in an unhealthy way. The exercises in this book will help you unpack that baggage and see the truth about food so that you can have a simpler, wiser, and more practical relationship with it.
I know firsthand about this baggage because food has always been my Mount Everest. If folks were ever deluded into believing that I had it all together, all they had to do was share a meal with me. If they dug a little deeper, discovered my history of dieting, and looked at the range of clothing sizes in my closet, they didn't have to be Columbo to figure out that something was off. Not only did I not have a handle on how to eat, my overeating hid a myriad of other problems, namely, repressed anger, low self-esteem, and a propensity for people pleasing.
In this book, I've included many snippets from my journey toward moderate eating and attaining a healthy weight and body image. Yet this book is not about formulating a newfangled eating or exercise plan that will deliver the perfect body to please the ego, like so many other diet books are. It is about forming a new, rational relationship with food, weight, and your body that is free from past suffering and worries. The good news is that Skinny Thinking is not a new fad or trend. If you put the Five Steps that you will soon learn into practice, you will keep your healthy, thinner body permanently and end the yo-yoing forever
Laura's 91-Day Challenge
Laura invites ABC 7 viewers to sign up for her 91-Day Challenge on her Skinny Thinking website. Spend 5 minutes a day for 91 days to learn how to "knock out your emotional craving crazies" and end weight struggles for good.
You can join Laura's Facebook group fan page at www.facebook.com/SkinnyThinking.
