The Serotonin Solution : The Powerful Substance That Can Help You Stop Bingeing, Lose Weight, and Feel Great

Do you head for the refrigerator after a grueling day at work, or pay your bills with a bowl of potato chips by your side? If your answer is yes, you eat your way through stress: you are an "emotional overeater." And if every diet you have ever tried has ended in failure because you lose control of your eating when your emotions fray, here is good news. Contrary to every eating plan you've ever tried or read about, the cure for emotional overeating is not expensive therapy or superhuman will power. It's food.
The secret is the neurotransmitter serotonin, a naturally occurring chemical in the brain that makes us feel good. Stress interferes with our serotonin supply and leaves us without enough of this brain chemical to regulate our moods. But we can boost serotonin simply by eating the right kinds of foods. The reason you feel an uncontrollable urge to eat is because your brain is crying out for relief; it is desperately seeking serotonin! And when you eat the right foods, serotonin runs on full and stress vanishes.
The Serotonin Solution is the first book to confront and control emotion-driven overeating. Based on ten years of revolutionary research and testing at M.I.T., Judith J. Wurtman's Serotonin Power meal and snack plan tells you how to allocate protein, carbohydrate, and fat dosages to literally increase the power of your brain to control your eating. The result? Restored energy, an end to emotional overeating, and permanent weight loss. You will learn to:
* identify your overeating triggers
* follow a daily meal and snack plan that makes you feel so good you'll want
to do it
* avoid foods that exacerbate stress or block the stress-breaker foods from
working
* combine exercise with stress-breaker foods to feel good
and lose weight faster
Along with the basic Serotonin Power Diet Plan for daily stress, Wurtman offers food plans tailored for other types of emotional overeating: a premenstrual mood change plan; a winter/summer food plan; a plan for people who have just quit smoking, finished a diet, or are at home with their preschool kids; and a plan for those who work shifts and are awake when their bodies want to be asleep. Finally, there is a plan to be used in conjunction with the serotonin-based medication developed by Judith Wurtman that is now pending FDA approval.
The Serotonin Solution is the only diet book based on Wurtman's original discovery of the scientific relationship between overeating and serotonin. It can help you banish emotional overeating forever and take control of your appetite for good.

Hudith J. Wurtman, Ph.D., is a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fields of nutrition and behavior, and the bestselling author of The Carbohydrate Craver's Diet and Managing Your Mind and Mood Through Food. Susan Suffes is a senior editor with a major publishing house.


From the Trade Paperback edition.