The Appetite Awareness Workbook: How to Listen to Your Body and Overcome Bingeing, Overeating, and Obsession with Food

People with normal eating patterns eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full. But people struggling with binge eating relate very differently to this most basic need, often risking depression, gastrointestinal problems, and even death because of their problems with food. The Appetite Awareness Workbook offers an eight-week, cognitively based program to help you learn to pay attention to hunger cues, keep track of your feelings about food, and develop an eating schedule that discourages binge eating.

In a series of easy exercises, the book guides you toward taking control of eating habits. First, gradual changes help you eat only when hungry or when a mealtime is scheduled. Then, awareness exercises help you stop eating when moderately full. Finally, by using cognitive techniques to control the tendency to eat for emotional reasons and journaling exercises to stay motivated and on track, you'll learn how to retrain yourself to maintain normal and healthy eating habits for life.

Linda W. Craighead, Ph.D., is professor of psychology and director of the Clinical Psychology Training program at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO. She is also clinical director at La Luna, an outpatient eating disorders treatment center, and clinical supervisor for eating disorder treatment at Psychological Health and Psychiatry in the CU student health center. Her research is done through the Eating and Weight Concerns Clinic at the University of Colorado's Raimy Psychological Clinic. She consults at Duke Medical Center with weight management programs. She received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in clinical psychology. She has written many articles and presented papers, and she has taught many professionals about appetite awareness training, the intervention she developed to address a broad range of concerns about eating and weight.