Food has the power to temporarily alleviate stress and sadness, enhance joy, and bring us comfort when we need it most. It's no wonder experts estimate that 75 percent of overeating is triggered by our emotions, not physical hunger. The good news is you can instead soothe yourself through dozens of mindful activities that are healthy for both body and mind. Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully, now offers 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, a collection of mindfulness skills and practices for relaxing the body in times of stress and ending your dependence on eating as a means of coping with difficult emotions. You'll not only discover easy ways to soothe urges to overeat, you'll also learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger. Reach for this book instead of the refrigerator next time you feel the urge to snack-these alternatives are just as satisfying!

Food has the power to temporarily alleviate stress and sadness, enhance joy, and bring us comfort when we need it most. It's no wonder experts estimate that 75 percent of overeating is triggered by our emotions, not physical hunger. The good news is you can instead soothe yourself through dozens of mindful activities that are healthy for both body and mind. Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully, now offers 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, a collection of mindfulness skills and practices for relaxing the body in times of stress and ending your dependence on eating as a means of coping with difficult emotions. You'll not only discover easy ways to soothe urges to overeat, you'll also learn how to differentiate emotion-driven hunger from healthy hunger. Reach for this book instead of the refrigerator next time you feel the urge to snack-these alternatives are just as satisfying!

Eating is a common coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, and emotional turmoil, but the ramifications can be significant. This guide is designed to help these millions of people find simple, quick strategies for easing emotion-driven hunger.

How common and effortless it is to eat in an uncontrolled, unaware, mindless manner. If you've ever continued to snack when you were full, cut calories despite being hungry, or used guilt to guide your eating, you've experienced mindless eating firsthand. Let's face it. Deciding what to eat is not an easy task. It's so tricky that in the United States eating concerns and weight obsessions have reached epidemic proportions, with serious health consequences for a large part of the population. What turns an everyday activity like eating into such an overwhelming process? The answer to that question is, of course, a complex one. Throughout the book, we will return to that question with some answers. But the bottom line is this: To make smart, healthy eating choices, your body and mind work together to send you essential clues about what you need and want to eat. These clues give you information about ''how much'' and ''what'' to eat. The sensations and emotions that signal when you're full, famished, or just wanting to eat something rich and delicious are a complex combination of bodily and emotional feelings. If you are attentive and responsive to these cues, your eating will be healthy, in control, and well regulated. Dieting and disliking your body are incredibly detrimental to your emotional, mental, and physical well-being. They inhibit your ability to accurately decode your body's messages and feedback. The dieting mindset is akin to taking a knife and cutting the connection that is your body's only line of communication with your head. The dieting mindset can skew your knowledge of healthy eating so badly that you have no idea of what to eat. Mindless eating is then manifested in two ways. You can either ''obsess'' or ''ignore'' internal feedback from both your body and mind, rather than responding thoughtfully to your hunger and to your concern about your health. In this book, you will learn how mindlessness unknowingly corrupts the way you eat a meal, and how it manifests in a variety of eating problems. You will gain insight into why mindfulness, which is, of course, the opposite of mindlessness, can provide you with valuable skills to control the way you eat.

The complete program for mastering your "hanger," from mindful-eating pioneer Dr. Susan Albers -- with 45 tips to turn hanger into happiness. It happens to all of us. One minute you're happily going about your day, and a few seconds later you're a snappy, illogical version of yourself. The culprit? Hanger. We're living busier lives than ever before, and when we forget to eat -- or accidentally overeat -- hunger can make us angry, unreasonable, and dull, with big impacts on our emotional and psychological well being. And hanger can become a cycle. When we get too hungry, we're more likely to make food decisions we regret, which sets us up for another hanger crash later on. The good news: when we make better decisions about food, we think more clearly, connect better in our relationships, and improve our performance. Hanger Management is the book that can help you break this cycle and create healthy habits that fuel and empower you. In Hanger Management, New York Times bestselling author and clinical psychologist Susan Albers sheds light on the causes of hanger, and shares 45 of her best tips for managing it well. By learning to stay on top of your hunger cues, cultivating a better understanding of your appetite, and creating a better overall relationship with food, you'll become happier -- and healthier -- for life.

Most of us are really, really good at devising reasons to indulge in foods that derail our diets and healthy eating plans. Who among us hasn’t thought, “I had a stressful day, so I deserve this chocolate,” or, “Buttery popcorn would go so well with this movie!” When we view food as a reward, emotional eating can be difficult to overcome. Most fad diets tell you to “control” your eating, use willpower, ignore your cravings, or just stop eating. Recall for a moment where this got you in the past. Feeling frustrated or hopeless? Maybe it led you to make more excuses? Perhaps you’re thinking I need to get control. This is a sign that the diet mentality may be deeply ingrained in you. Rest assured that there are alternatives to fad dieting and trying to “control” your body. In But I Deserve This Chocolate!, psychologist Susan Albers takes aim at the fifty most common self-sabotaging thoughts and excuses that keep you from eating right and looking great. This guide dismantles each excuse and offers a mindfulness exercise to help reroute your thoughts so you can meet your health goals. Whether you’re a man or woman, teen or adult, this book is for you if you are trying to eat more mindfully, manage your weight, lose weight, or take charge of your eating habits. Forget the chocolate and unwrap some truly nourishing habits you can feel good about—your body will thank you!

Presents tools for applying the principles of mindful eating to daily life, such as self-assessment questions and tables that track eating patterns and the emotions accompanying them.