End Emotional Eating: Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Cope with Difficult Emotions and Develop a Healthy Relationship to Food

If you eat to help manage your emotions, you may have discovered that it doesn’t work. Once you’re done eating, you might even feel worse. Eating can all too easily become a strategy for coping with depression, anxiety, boredom, stress, and anger, and a reliable reward when it’s time to celebrate.

If you are ready to experience emotions without consuming them or being consumed by them, the mindfulness, acceptance, and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills in End Emotional Eating can help. This book does not focus on what or how to eat—rather, these scientifically supported skills will teach you how to manage emotions and urges gracefully, live in the present moment, learn from your feelings, and cope with distress skillfully.

This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit — an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.

Jennifer L. Taitz, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and director of the dialectical behavior therapy program at the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York, NY. She is a certified diplomate of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy and is a founding board member of the New York City Association for Contextual Behavior Science. Her expertise lies in emphasizing simultaneous acceptance and change and providing tangible tools to help people get “unstuck” so they are better able to regulate their emotions. She has presented at conferences internationally on mindfulness and acceptance. Visit her online at drjennytaitz.com.

Foreword writer Debra L. Safer, MD, is codirector of the Stanford Adult Eating and Weight Disorders Clinic and coauthor of Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Binge Eating and Bulimia. Her clinical interests include working with patients who struggle with eating disorders and obesity, designing interventions for post-bariatric surgery patients, and using computer-assisted therapies to increase the dissemination of evidence-based treatments for eating disorders.