Find your recovery from Food Addiction and have a life beyond your wildest dreams
Available Now!
about the Book
What blocks us from having a voice, living authentically, and demonstrating our best, most confident selves to the world? Why do we prevent ourselves from accomplishing our goals? Why do we continue to engage in the same destructive patterns that hold us back from living in our potential? In The Big Book of True Recovery from Food Addiction and Beyond, Dianne Schwartz offers the answers and the ultimate solution to the struggles we all experience.
The purpose of this book is twofold: 1) to explain why most people’s out-of-control eating behavior is addiction, and 2) to present the solution. Many individuals who suffer from out-of-control eating behaviors have gone to great lengths to find an answer, including various weight-loss programs, visits to doctors and nutritionists, going on umpteen diets, taking diet pills (both prescription and over-the-counter), stomach surgery (gastric bypass or sleeve, and now, the “safer” alternative, lap band), various forms of induced purging (vomiting, laxatives,exercise), and the hope of all hope, psychotherapy.
The reason these approaches fail is that the problem is not the weight! It’s addiction—food addiction, a biochemical illness. Addiction does not resolve with therapy. I have never met any addict among the thousands of addicts I have encountered who was “therapized” out of addiction.
If it's not broccoli, what is it?
If the food plan I discuss in Chapter 11 were to identify broccoli as a trigger to craving and you therefore eliminated broccoli, you would not experience broccoli withdrawal. There is nothing in broccoli that taps into the brain’s reward circuit to create physical dependency—ergo, no withdrawal symptoms.
At the point of crash, you are feeling really awful, and you will look to some food/drink to make you feel better. You will not want broccoli! (Hence, the subtitle of this book.) Most likely you will turn to something sugary/floury, such as candy or a candy bar, cake, ice cream, coffee, juice, soda, Red Bull—something that will quickly bring your blood sugar up again
Based on a unique education series designed to help people understand the changes necessary to recover from addiction and regain their health, this book presents the surprisingly simple solution to not only food addiction but also secondary conditions, including substance abuse, resulting from it. In simple and straightforward language, Schwartz deconstructs the pathology of all addictions, with a focus on how biochemical and neurological processes of the brain's reward circuitry is at the foundation of every addictive disorder.
The Big Book of True Recovery
from Food Addiction and Beyond
is Available Now!
Dianne Schwartz
DIANNE SCHWARTZ, CASAC, CPA is the Director of the Food Addiction Treatment Program at Realization Center. She joined forces with Marilyn White in 1988 to actualize the development and expansion of Realization Center, now the oldest and largest outpatient addiction treatment center in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York.
A CPA in her first career, Dianne is now a seasoned clinician, and because of her own recovery, her interest and passion is food addiction treatment. She developed the sixteen-week lecture series and program upon which The Big Book of True Recovery from Food Addiction and Beyond is based, detailing the relationship between one's eating behavior and alcoholism or drug addiction, how one's eating affects sobriety and the potential for relapse, and how it all began.
Over time, as the reputation of the Food Addiction Treatment Program grew, people who had eating problems but did not use alcohol or drugs entered the program and realized treatment success in food addiction recovery. Dianne can be found in the Center daily, devoted to helping people recover and lead fulfilling, productive lives.
Excerpt
What Is Food Addiction?
Food addiction destroys. It robs us of our dreams.
It isolates and alienates us from friends and family.
It can even kill. But our food addiction doesn’t have
to keep us from having a long, fulfilling life. Finding
the solution begins with identifying the problem.
We all have to eat; it’s the way we survive. Food is the fuel for our bodies. Eating is a fundamental activity of life. So how can it be an addiction? Let’s discuss what happens when a person can no longer control how much or what they are eating or not eating—which is addiction.
Some “eating disorder” professionals and institutions reject the very idea that food could be an addiction. They see it as an emotional/mental disorder and strive to help their patients or clients eat in moderation. They believe that they can help a person eat, for example, one cookie, then stop and want no more, or one brownie and stop. I don’t believe this is possible for someone who has lost control. As you are aware, I believe that eating problems are addiction, and are first and foremost based in the brain chemistry of the suffering individual.
TESTIMONIALS
Thank you for teaching me life is not about food. Your love, commitment and inspiration will always be a touchstone for me.
Christine P.