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Outsmarting Overeating: Boost Your Life Skills, End Your Food Problems
Use Life Skills, Not Willpower, to Stop Overeating
The reason you turn to food when you’re stressed or distressed is that you don’t have better ways of managing life’s ups and downs. According to Karen R. Koenig, an expert on the psychology of eating, you can transform your eating habits — and your life — by developing effective life skills. When you have enhanced skills, you won’t need to turn to mindless eating to make it through the day and will get the best out of life rather than letting life get the best of you. With Koenig’s guidance, you’ll learn how to establish and maintain functional relationships, take care of yourself physically and emotionally, think rationally, and create a passionate, joyful, and meaningful life. When these behaviors take root and become automatic, food becomes what it is meant to nourishment and one of life’s many pleasures.
The reason you turn to food when you’re stressed or distressed is that you don’t have better ways of managing life’s ups and downs. According to Karen R. Koenig, an expert on the psychology of eating, you can transform your eating habits — and your life — by developing effective life skills. When you have enhanced skills, you won’t need to turn to mindless eating to make it through the day and will get the best out of life rather than letting life get the best of you. With Koenig’s guidance, you’ll learn how to establish and maintain functional relationships, take care of yourself physically and emotionally, think rationally, and create a passionate, joyful, and meaningful life. When these behaviors take root and become automatic, food becomes what it is meant to nourishment and one of life’s many pleasures.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 5, 2015
39 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
About the author
Karen R. Koenig
15 books21 followersKaren R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed., is a therapist, educator, eating coach, national speaker, international author, and expert on the psychology of eating—the how and why, not the what of it—with 30-plus years of experience teaching chronic dieters and overeaters the skills that "normal" eaters use naturally to maintain a comfortable, healthy weight for life without dieting.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 14, 2019
Endorsements:
“In Outsmarting Overeating, once again Karen R. Koenig engages the reader with new twists on critical issues like handling emotions, eating 'normally,’ and reaching goals. She clearly presents practical, accessible, and effective life skills for taking care of yourself.”
— Leigh Cohn, MAT, CEDS, editor in chief of Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention
“Essential self-care skills are usually the missing component of problematic eating. Outsmarting Overeating shows you how to effectively navigate life by focusing on key life skills that we all need — for decision making, problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and coping with emotions and stress. Readers will appreciate Karen Koenig’s friendly writing style. I highly recommend this book.”
— Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, coauthor of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
“Outsmarting Overeating does more than offer a solid, step-by-step approach to building a healthy relationship with food and eating. It offers a thoughtful, compassionate, effective path for healing your life, emotions, and relationships. Highly recommended!”
— Donald Altman, MA, LPC, author of One-Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity, and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World and Art of the Inner Meal: Eating as a Spiritual Path
“If you find that your relationship to food and eating is a problem and you want to find a way to change it without dieting, Outsmarting Overeating is sure to add some wonderful tools to your toolbox. Karen R. Koenig’s newest book elevates the self-help genre to a whole new level of writing that will benefit every reader!”
— Megrette Fletcher, MEd, RD, CDE, cofounder of The Center for Mindful Eating
“This is a nurturing, realistic system for developing healthy life skills and then applying them to eating behaviors.”
— Anna Jedrziewski, Retailing Insight
“In Outsmarting Overeating, once again Karen R. Koenig engages the reader with new twists on critical issues like handling emotions, eating 'normally,’ and reaching goals. She clearly presents practical, accessible, and effective life skills for taking care of yourself.”
— Leigh Cohn, MAT, CEDS, editor in chief of Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention
“Essential self-care skills are usually the missing component of problematic eating. Outsmarting Overeating shows you how to effectively navigate life by focusing on key life skills that we all need — for decision making, problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and coping with emotions and stress. Readers will appreciate Karen Koenig’s friendly writing style. I highly recommend this book.”
— Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD, coauthor of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works
“Outsmarting Overeating does more than offer a solid, step-by-step approach to building a healthy relationship with food and eating. It offers a thoughtful, compassionate, effective path for healing your life, emotions, and relationships. Highly recommended!”
— Donald Altman, MA, LPC, author of One-Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity, and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World and Art of the Inner Meal: Eating as a Spiritual Path
“If you find that your relationship to food and eating is a problem and you want to find a way to change it without dieting, Outsmarting Overeating is sure to add some wonderful tools to your toolbox. Karen R. Koenig’s newest book elevates the self-help genre to a whole new level of writing that will benefit every reader!”
— Megrette Fletcher, MEd, RD, CDE, cofounder of The Center for Mindful Eating
“This is a nurturing, realistic system for developing healthy life skills and then applying them to eating behaviors.”
— Anna Jedrziewski, Retailing Insight
March 13, 2023
The basic premise of this book is that people overeat because they lack life skills in other areas of their life. The author identifies eight life skill areas such as Wellness and Physical care, Emotion Handling, Work and Play Balance, and so on. For each area, she defines it and describes how a lack of adequate skills in that area leads to overeating or non-hungry eating. Finally, for each area, she provides guidance on how to develop the lacking skills.
The premise of the book makes sense but I struggled with the presentation. Coming from a strong analytical and fact-based mindset, I frequently find statements in books like this to be vague and flimsy. As well, I have a hard time agreeing with conclusions that seem to be based on just one point of view (when there are other equally valid points of view that lead to other conclusions) or on anecdotal evidence. There were several places where these sorts of things were happening and I just had to plow through. This was mostly on the strength of my dislike of leaving a book unfinished and a hope that there would be a gem hidden in the fluff somewhere.
In the end, I did find a couple good gems which made it worth it to read the book. I had to laugh at the Work and Play Balance chapter because her description of the situation sounded like a word for word transcription of a conversation that I had had with my wife just a few weeks ago. So that chapter was spot on for me and I found some valuable information there.
I suspect that other chapters will resonate strongly with other people so if the premise sounds interesting to you, it is worth reading this book.
The premise of the book makes sense but I struggled with the presentation. Coming from a strong analytical and fact-based mindset, I frequently find statements in books like this to be vague and flimsy. As well, I have a hard time agreeing with conclusions that seem to be based on just one point of view (when there are other equally valid points of view that lead to other conclusions) or on anecdotal evidence. There were several places where these sorts of things were happening and I just had to plow through. This was mostly on the strength of my dislike of leaving a book unfinished and a hope that there would be a gem hidden in the fluff somewhere.
In the end, I did find a couple good gems which made it worth it to read the book. I had to laugh at the Work and Play Balance chapter because her description of the situation sounded like a word for word transcription of a conversation that I had had with my wife just a few weeks ago. So that chapter was spot on for me and I found some valuable information there.
I suspect that other chapters will resonate strongly with other people so if the premise sounds interesting to you, it is worth reading this book.
August 25, 2015
Love this book not only for the sage advice in it, but also Karen Koenig's writing style. Karen is witty, straight forward, encouraging, and breaks her suggestions down into bite-size chunks you can easily digest. I delighted in the fact that this book hardly mentions food and is really a practical guide for how to take care of yourself and manage the daily challenges of life.
The 8-life skills Karen covers seem so simple, yet most of us never learned how to apply them consistently because our parents didn't either. Karen gives terrific examples and compassionately guides you how to bring your life back into balance. And, you gotta love that one of the skills she includes is making time for pleasure and play. This is a book you can turn to again and again for support, encouragement, and emotional nourishment, which is really what we're all craving at the end of the day.
The 8-life skills Karen covers seem so simple, yet most of us never learned how to apply them consistently because our parents didn't either. Karen gives terrific examples and compassionately guides you how to bring your life back into balance. And, you gotta love that one of the skills she includes is making time for pleasure and play. This is a book you can turn to again and again for support, encouragement, and emotional nourishment, which is really what we're all craving at the end of the day.
March 14, 2017
I loved the title which drew me to read it while searching for another title at the Public Library. However, this book did not meet my needs or what I was expecting. Therefore, I did not like it.
There were so many other things that I felt didn't refer to overeating, or tactics to outsmart overeating issues, only series of questions and scenarios that did not satisfy my curiosity and help me with overeating as a whole.
I was able to complete it in a couple readings.
There were so many other things that I felt didn't refer to overeating, or tactics to outsmart overeating issues, only series of questions and scenarios that did not satisfy my curiosity and help me with overeating as a whole.
I was able to complete it in a couple readings.
February 3, 2016
I think this is a very helpful book for anyone struggling with food and weight issues. The author focuses on developing life skills to help you make better decisions in your life, especially when it comes to food. It is NOT a diet book. Now comes the hard task of working to improve MY life skills so I make better decisions in all areas of my life, but especially, when it comes to food.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews