The Eating Well Workbook: Managing Eating Problems Using Your Compassionate Mind

This self-help book explores the problems created by having ready access to high fat foods designed to taste good. Because we evolved in conditions of relative scarcity we have few natural food inhibitors and so most diet books try to encourage people to inhibit their eating by highly rule governed behaviours which have to be constantly worked at.

However, this can lead to various forms of self-criticism which can undermine efforts at self-control. As a result our relationship with eating can be complex, multifaceted and problematic. This workbook uses a compassionate therapeutic approach to help us understand and work with our urges and passions for food. We can learn to enjoy and accept food and pay attention to our biological and emotional needs.

The Eating Well Workbook is for people who have tried diets and found that they don’t work and will enable the reader to have a healthier and happier relationship with food and their body.

THE COMPASSIONATE MIND APPROACH
The self-help books in this series are based on the Compassionate Mind Approach (developed by series editor Paul Gilbert). This brings together an understanding of how our mind can cause us difficulties but also provides us with a powerful solution in the shape of mindfulness and compassion. It teaches ways to stimulate the part of the brain connected with kindness, warmth, compassion and safeness, and to calm the part that makes us feel anxious, angry, sad or depressed.

Kenneth Goss is the Head of the Eating Disorders Service at Gulson Hospital, Coventry. He was a student of Professor Paul Gilbert, author of bestsellers The Compassionate Mind and Overcoming Depression, and has worked within the compassionate-focused approach since the early 1990s. Dr Goss is on the Board of the Compassionate Mind Foundation and is one of the country’s leading experts on using Compassion Focused Therapy for the treatment of eating disorders.