Women, Food and God and Oprah
Celebrity endorsement is almost always guaranteed to increase the sales of any product and when the endorsement comes from a celebrity as famous as Oprah Winfrey the guarantee becomes virtually rock solid. Just imagine how good that endorsement becomes when Oprah tells the audience that the book “Women, Food and God” by Geneen Roth “is an opportunity to finally end the war with weight and unlock the door to freedom and I’m telling everyone to read it now."
So who is Geneen Roth. She is the author of eight books including "When Food is Love", “Breaking Free from Emotional Eating”, “Feeding the Hungry Heart”, and “Why Weight? A Guide to Ending Compulsive Eating” . She is well known for her work in the area of emotional eating. She lives in northern California with her husband and apart from writing she has been teaching workshops and running retreats for over thirty years.
Her expertise in the subject has been gained from her own bitter personal experiences. Her obsession with food started early at the age of just eleven and since then she has gained and lost more than one thousand pounds. She has been both dangerously over and underweight and suffered from various eating disorders and followed many different unhealthy diet plans. She has even attempted suicide.
So what is it about this book which struck such a deep and meaningful chord with Oprah. There is certainly some similarity between Roth’s and Oprah’s struggle with weight as we have all witnessed Oprah’s upsizing and downsizing. Oprah now believes that she has now found something which will allow her to leave this losing battle and give her an opportunity to win.
Roth believes that “Women, Food and God” goes to the core all her work and experiences to date and that by dieting we are focusing in the wrong area. Rather than diet she thinks we should be concentrating on our inner selves and working to positively improve our minds and bodies. ”, She thinks that the way we eat is inseparable from our core beliefs about being alive and these beliefs often fuel an obsession with food.” To understand why we overeat, we have to examine how we think about ourselves. Do we think that we are damaged or that we don’t deserve good things to happen to us.?
Roth provides more details about her book in the video below.
Oprah has realised that she has been addicted to food and has used food as a drug to dull her senses and hide from her feelings. She now believes that she has to channel her energies into loving and understanding her real self rather than torturing herself because she can’t fit into a certain size dress. This is because the more you recognize your inner problems, the better your relationship will be with food and your soul. As a result of this you will be happier, and weight loss will occur more naturally.
The video below is a short reading by Roth of an excerpt from her book.
So this book is not a diet plan nor does it tell you what you should or should not eat. It encourages you to experience life and become self aware so that you listen to your body and choose food to eat consciously based on self care and nourishment.
You should
• Eat only when you are hungry
• Eat sitting down in a calm environment which does not include your car
• Eat without distractions such as the radio, television, newspapers, books or music
• Eat what your body tells you it wants
• Eat until you are satisfied
• Eat as if you would be in full view of others whether this is actually the case or not
• Eat with enjoyment, gusto and pleasure
The book has nothing to do with God in the religious sense. Roth uses this word to explain the longings we have in life and the moments of awe and wonder that we experience.
