Starting Monday: Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food

Starting Monday is based on the simple premise that when our behaviors don’t align with our expressed intentions, we’ve got a conflict going on, often outside of our awareness. The book helps readers dig deeply into their psyches to figure out what mistaken beliefs and needless fears are holding them back from achieving their health and fitness goals. The polarized feelings for disregulated eaters to identify and resolve fall within these seven key areas: 1) create lasting change, 2) making conscious choices, 3) feel deserving, 4) how to comfort themselves, 5) know what's enough, 6) manage intimacy, and 7) developing a healthy identity.

Starting Monday first helps readers unearth their mixed feelings in these seven areas, then teaches them how to change their beliefs and behaviors to resolve them. Using humor, plain talk, examples from her clinical experience, reflection exercises, case studies, and homework, Koenig lets troubled eaters know that their yo-yo patterns of eating and self care are due to conflicts. She shies away from easy answers and, instead, provides hope and concrete actions to developing a permanent, positive relationship with food.

Karen R. Koenig, LCSW, M.Ed., is a psychotherapist, international eating coach, national educator, and popular author of four books on eating and weight. She is an expert on the psychology of eating—the how and why, not the what of it—is best known for her non-diet, eating “normal” approach to making peace with food, and has worked in the field of eating disorders for 30 years.

Her first two books set the stage for her "normal" eating series, The Rules of "Normal" Eating (Gürze Books, 2005) and The Food and Feelings Workbook, and she is also the author of What Every Therapist Needs to Know about Treating Eating and Weight Issues (Norton Professional Books, 2008) and Nice Girls Finish Fat (Simon and Schuster, 2009). Her books have been translated into 10 foreign languages.

Ms. Koenig practices in Sarasota, FL, moderates an online Food and Feelings message board, and authors two blogs.