Summary: If you are a woman who has ever struggled with gaining or losing weight or you’re just someone who’s felt trapped by food then you’ve probably heard of Geneen’s work (<a href="https://twitter.com/GeneenRoth" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@GeneenRoth</a>). She’s written several books on this topic, including the number one New York Times bestseller, Women, Food, and God.<br> Geneen’s work has been endorsed by Oprah, Eckart Tolle, and her book was on the bestseller list for several months and sold more than a million copies. We talk about her newest book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Messy-Magnificent-Life-Field-ebook/dp/B074ZN52K7/&tag=author-hour20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This Messy Magnificent Life</a>, and what it’s like to achieve success as an author, but this conversation is really about freeing ourselves from our own personal prisons.<br> Geneen and I explore some of our deepest and most painful beliefs, the effects of hidden traumas and the social pressures that shape our confidence and our relationships. This episode is your spiritual dose of self-love for this week so get ready to be more in touch with your life.<br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Messy-Magnificent-Life-Field-ebook/dp/B074ZN52K7/&tag=author-hour20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Geneen’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Messy-Magnificent-Life-Field-ebook/dp/B074ZN52K7/&tag=author-hour20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">This Messy Magnificent Life</a> on Amazon.<br> Learn more at <a href="http://geneenroth.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">GeneenRoth.com</a>.<br> <br> <br> <br> Geneen Roth: It was an evening in my late 20s, I was sitting on the floor of the book depot bookstore in Mill Valley. This is before the internet. I was looking for books that gave you the easiest way to kill yourself. There was no book called “How to Kill Yourself in Five Easy Lessons.”<br> I was desperate and suicidal and filled with self-loathing, disgust. I don’t know if I can use any stronger word to describe how I felt about myself and the despair of continuing to live the way I had been living which was in such acrimonious, warring relationship with my body, the size of my thighs, my appetite, the feeling of being utterly out of control with food.<br> I’d tried for the past 17 years at that moment to get it under control. Since I had been 11 and started my first diet. Every single one of those years, every single day of every single week and month and year, I believed that if I could only fix this thing with food then everything else that was wrong in my life would be right.<br> Equal and Opposite<br> Geneen Roth: I tried every diet there was. I did have some favorites, and my most favorite diet was the All Brown Diet. It was of my own making.<br> For three weeks, I ate nothing but diet cream soda, drank coffee. You can’t really call this eating, of course. Coffee, diet cream soda, and cigarettes. That was my diet for three weeks.<br> There was a one hot fudge sundae a day diet. In those days, it was calories, thinking if I just ate the calories in a hot fudge sundae but didn’t eat breakfast and didn’t eat dinner, I’d be fine.<br> I’d been addicted to diet pills, amphetamines, for four years. I had pretty much stopped sleeping. With every single pound lost, I gained twice as much in poundage on my body.<br> I used to say there was an equal and opposite binge. That was the law of the universe.<br> <br> I never went on a diet after which I didn’t binge. Never.<br> <br> Of course, I got better and better at restricting myself. I was anorexic for a while, I limited myself to 150 calories a day for a year and a half. I jogged four miles a day. It was sheer willpower. I weighed 82 pounds, and then after that, I couldn’t stand it one more second. Not one more second.<br> I went on a binge to end all binges. By that I mean,
