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

Description: "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.

Review Quotes: BOOK REVIEW:
Synopsis: "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. Author Laren R. Koenig helps her 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.

Critique: Informative, motivational, exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "Starting Monday: Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food" is especially recommended for anyone wanting to improve their mental and physical health through a more nutritional and balanced approach to meal time decisions. Very highly recommended and instructional reading, as well as an invaluable addition to community library Self-Help and Health/Medicine collections, "Starting Monday: Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food" is also available in a Kindle edition ($9.99).

- Small Press Bookwatch; The Midwest Book Review July 2014

BOOK REVIEW: Starting Monday: Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food by Karen Koenig LCSW, M.Ed. (Gurze Books, 2013, 288 pages) People repeatedly - but often fruitlessly - promise themselves they will finally get their eating struggles under control. When? Starting Monday! The title of Karen Koenig's book refers to this familiar resolution, and she explores why emotional eaters, filled with determination to improve their hurtful behaviors, wind up failing time after time. In this, her seventh book, Ms. Koenig offers a key approach for long lasting change: people must confront that internal part of themselves which is invested in not getting better! This is a book for those people who yearn for weight loss and body satisfaction but may have difficulty appreciating the conflicts within themselves that sabotage and defeat their best efforts. Why would someone want to derail their best efforts to be happy? Koenig shows readers how to identify "the ouch of self-recognition" and to discover what blocks normal eating. She describes seven keys to unlock your self-defeat and create lasting change: 1. apply curiosity, self reflection, and compassion to why you have been stuck. 2. make conscious choices through the mindful focus of living in the present moment. 3. feel deserving by exploring your family history which may have left you feeling unworthy or deprived. 4. comfort yourself by reaching out to others and develop strategies to cope with stress. 5. know what's enough and pinpoint where you feel unsatisfied not only with food but money, possessions, work, and relationships. 6. manage intimacy by becoming aware of your fears of closeness and your desires. 7. develop a healthy identity by claiming your most authentic self regardless of weight. What are your beliefs, your needs, your truths? In a lively, engaging style, Ms. Koenig illuminates these psychological solutions to help you get unstuck so you can live a fruitful and compassionate life every day of the week - not just Starting Monday!

Book review submitted by Mary Anne