Clean Comfort (Paperback)

This cookbook-memoir tells the story of the author's rocky relationship with food, how the dieting hamster wheel ballooned her weight to 345 pounds, and how she ultimately made her way back to balance and sanity - while loving food. It was when Morris finally made peace with herself, healed her inner wounds, and accepted she was a dyed-in-the-wool food lover that she was finally able to release herself from the dieting-gluttony cycle and develop a non-adversarial relationship with food. The first part of the book is a memoir that recounts her early years surviving bullying at school and low self-esteem and how she used food as a salve to distract from unpleasant emotions such as sadness and anger. When she topped out at her highest weight at the age of 44, it was, ironically, a former professional wrestler who ultimately provided the Ivy-League-educated writer her ticket to salvation.

Stacey Morris is a journalist, food writer, and a self-described Recovering American who dropped 180 pounds without dieting, surgery, or "any of the miracle-gimmicks pedaled to the masses of Americans trapped in the cycle of overindulging and dieting," she explains. If a diet and exercise plan were really what I needed, the weight would have been gone decades ago," she says. "As someone who loved food far too much, to the point of misusing it, I knew the weight would never stay off until I dug into the reasons I was drugging myself with it," Stacey reveals. "Daring to go where I never wanted to changed my life forever." She doesn't deny that she'll always be a food-lover, and admitting that is a key part of why she's kept the weight off for more than four years. "I enjoy food more than I did when I was a binge-eater, but it's a different ball game. I eat with awareness now...no longer in a trance," she says. Stacey's writing nowadays is dedicated to more than just the brass tacks of how she got rid of the weight and is keeping it off. She touches on subjects ranging from the rights to respect and dignity for people of size, how the shame from being bullied at school often results in eating for emotional comfort, and her outrage over fast food chains and food corporations "inventing foods designed to addict us." Stacey's blogs appear regularly in the Huffington Post's Healthy Living section at http: //www.huffingtonpost.com/stacey-morris Her website is www.staceymorris.com Twitter: @StaceyMorris11 Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Hungry-For-The-Truth-Stacey-Morris