• When Food Is Love

  • Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy
  • By: Geneen Roth
  • Narrated by: Geneen Roth
  • Length: 1 hr and 34 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (325 ratings)

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When Food Is Love  By  cover art

When Food Is Love

By: Geneen Roth
Narrated by: Geneen Roth
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Publisher's summary

From the internationally acclaimed author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating, and Why Weight? comes a wholly original look at the profound connections between the way we eat and the way we love.

When Food Is Love examines the motivations behind bingeing and obsessive dieting, and explains how such compulsive behavior sabotages intimate relationships. With compassion and penetrating wisdom, Geneen Roth reveals how to break destructive emotional patterns and learn to satisfy all the hungers, physical and emotional - that make us human.

©1992 Geneen Roth (P)2008 Highbridge Audio

What listeners say about When Food Is Love

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

IT HELPED

MANY REPORTED HER VOICE AS BEING AGGRAVIATING I FOUND IT CALMING AND THE MORE I LISTEN TO HER I FELT THE NEED TO TREAT MYSELF BETTER. MY EATING HABITS ALMOST CHANGED ON THEIR OWN AS I FELT BETTER ABOUT ME. I LOST 5 LBS ALMOST EFFORTLESSLY BUT I HAVE KEPT IT OFF THE SAME WAY.

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Timeless

I am so glad that I finally read this book. Three times in one day. it's so worth it. If you binge and you have issues in your life that you cover up with food read this book it can help.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Recommended to those struggling with weight loss

Although the authour, Geneen Roth, has a rather annoying voice (somewhat whining and babyish), the message in her books is excellent. As someone who has struggled with weight issues for a very long time, her take on it is very different from most, but made complete sense to me. I would recommend listening to this and her other books. You get used to her voice after a while and what remains is a way to explore the deeper issues associated with food.

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4 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Ok, but incomplete

I think Geneen Roth did a great job in sharing her story, but I am not convinced that her approach is good for everyone. She roughly suggests that restriction in your diet is somehow staying within the framework of dysfunctional relationships we grew up with. I disagree with this assessment. I am addicted to carbohydrates - they are a drug to me and I treat them as such and abstain. I have tried in the past to do moderation and listen to my body, but I have a better understanding now of physiological triggers which happen that make me feel out of control with food. I think this is a good listen to begin understanding emotional reasons for eating, but to tackle the emotional, I think you need to gain control over the physical. “The Obesity Code” by Jason Fung is a great book to understand the way that certain foods we eat trigger physiological cravings and responses. For a 90 minute listen this is a good place to start understanding the emotional roots of binge/overeating.

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3 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

I listened at 1.5x speed to animate the reader

Roth’s breathy and melancholy words were so painfully, draggingly, s l o w that I could only tolerate her without losing attention sped-up. 

Perhaps that was her intent, to invoke in the listener her own subjective feeling. While it did not make me want to eat (which would have been consistent with some of there thesis), it did bring me to see that in a way I am so emotionally impatient that I can’t even stand her reading or tolerate for a few hours the slowed-down claustrophobia of her subjective world. From there, I recognised that there is much more to me than I am verbally acknowledge and that I often want to zip right through a few things in myself with a parallel 1.5x emotional impatience. She pointed to a good way for me to develop in this regard; she indicated it imperfectly, yet usefully.

Her theses, that revolve around the observation that we imbue food and eating with meaning —as a living, sensorial, physical language— are subtle and deep. She notes that ‘eating is a stage upon which we act our beliefs about ourselves’, that ‘we use food to somatize our deepest fears, dreams and convictions’, because ‘something is wrong, and we use food to express it’. This is fantastically thought-provoking —and could use much development. If we somatize our deepest dreams and convictions with food, give better examples, explain what it means to somatize a dream or conviction and how we do it. A statement like that, floating in the middle of a chapter, does not do justice to the idea and its potential and consequences. 


Roth offered the intriguing and door-opening notion that ‘when we live in environments in which we learn that when we express our humanness we will not be loved, we adapt. We learn how to pretend we are someone other than who we are, but all the while, a strong voice shouts no, and because we don’t hear it, it uses food as its language’. She could’ve more clearly articulated this paradigm-shifting perspective of food as a language used by our un-heard unconscious, a pre-verbal and primordial form of self-communication/consciousness that communicates up to us from within —that we are both rejected by others and reject or do not recognise ourselves, is a fascinating and potentially powerful perspective. …She would do well to develop it.

While her emotional sense is good and subtle and relatably and sensitively neurotic in its symbolism and meaning, her reasoning needs improvement and honing. Her writing is all over the place at times -a genuine view into her, and I could feel empathy for a for a kindred suffering soul- but her ideas could’ve —and I dare say should've— been more clearly identified and articulated, her terms defined, and her writing more analytical and logical; it would make her book more comprehensible and useful. Listening to her was at times like listening to a junior architectural student emote over a bridge they contemplate, unable to articulate the nuts and bolts that a mature professional understands —about how it stands, why, and what functions all its physical and semantic facets serve.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Powerful information!

This book was recommended to be by a friend, and I am so glad I listened. The author points out feelings and ways of thinking which influence my very being. I will listen to this again and take notes next time.
If you struggle with weight, have a listen!

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great book focusing on emotions

More on emotions than food and diets, just what I needed to hear. Emotional eating (for me) is never about the food. This short and sweet book helped me get centered, almost like a meditation. I’ll listen to it again, many times I’m sure.

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Great read...

When food is love the love is outside of us and we have no role or input or expectation of how it works, impacts us or how to respond. we are and can be in control in a healing caring way with both food and with love.

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Love the angle

This was such a refreshing angle on binge eating people need to realize it not because we are fat and lazy...we have issues and they can't be ignored they need to be dealt with

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Truly priceless insight, better with every page.

Possibly the best book I've ever seen on this topic. Written with piercing honesty, it is instructive, healing, and truly valuable. Fifteen years of therapy presented in its essence through one book.

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1 person found this helpful