Geneen Roth on helping food addicts and problem eaters Oprah Winfrey, who has publicly battled with her weight, experienced her "aha" moment, which prompted her to give up dieting for ever, after reading a passage in Women, Food and God. It resonated with her so much that she read it aloud on her show: "You've got to be willing to believe that you were put on this earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same 30lb 300 times for 80 years... Once you begin treating yourself with the kindness that you believe only thin or perfect people deserve, you can't help but discover that love didn't abandon you, after all." Cue rapturous applause for Oprah and for Roth, who was appearing on the show and went on to sell more than four million copies of the book. She even got a job as adviser on Oprah's website. But the idea that we are plump simply because we must be nursing psychological damage raises heckles for some of us. Even though this writer's own dieting career has left her with a wardrobe of clothes in every different size, the theory smacks of self-help psychobabble. Can't we be overweight just because we happen to like eating ice cream? "Of course you can," Roth says with a laugh. And we have to be careful how we define what being overweight is, because if we're defining it in reference to models and movie stars, then everyone's overweight. But the question is, how do you feel in your own body? If someone feels comfortable, at ease with their body, no problem. But if you feel bad about yourself... if someone weighs 22st, and they're schlepping themselves up hills and they can't move properly - even though they will tell me outright that they are eating only for physical hunger - it's safe to say there's probably a reason for that compulsive eating. Here are some of Roth's questions to anyone who has ever dieted or knows they overeat: do you spend most of your day frantically rushing from one thing to another without noticing how much food you consume? Do you eat in your car, in front of a computer, television, refrigerator? Do you eat when you come home from work because you are lonely or bored? Do you stop and pay attention to what you eat? Do you feel bad about yourself? Roth's theory is that if you don't notice what you are eating you'll keep eating more and more. Thirty years ago, when she began writing, this was a revolutionary idea. The fact that she's still writing about it, and selling more and more books, says a great deal. If you're missing the eating experience of what's on your plate, you are more likely to go back for more because you didn't taste it the first time. People eat a quarter as much when they're paying attention," she adds. Chances are, you're also using food to mask sadness, loneliness, boredom, stress, feelings of inadequacy. "The main thing that people feel is "who I am is not enough." Food becomes the panacea to make that feeling go away," she explains. All right, so sometimes I do eat at my desk, and I'll admit to occasionally inhaling food straight from the fridge. But only because there's nothing on television. Roth's philosophy begins to make uncomfortable sense. Besides writing books, Roth hosts weekend retreats for women twice a year in a rural setting on the West Coast. These, which she has run for 30 years, are now as famous as Roth herself and attract more than 200 women of all ages, who each pay $900 (£570) to attend. Lately, she has seen a lot of mothers and daughters. Once there, they are restrained from eating what they want and led through a series of exercises to help them examine their core beliefs and self-image. In short, they are made aware of how they eat. "When you become aware, you can't be compulsive at the same time," says Roth. In her books, Roth describes asking women to put food on their plates, and instructing them to wait until everybody has their food. Only when she gives the go-ahead are they allowed to eat. The quantity of food is restricted. Some people have been known to get angry. Food is the drug of choice for many women, and when anyone stands in the way between an addict and their fix, it's never going to be fun. Facing up to the reasons that make us eat mindlessly is not easy. Roth has no great cure-all, either. But she says that experiencing sadness is better than eating to mask it. I ask what would happen if people allowed themselves actually to feel their loneliness or their sadness, instead of eating to numb them. People sometimes feel they're supposed to be happy all the time, and if they're not, then something's wrong. There's a lot of suffering that walks into the retreats," she adds. But there's a lot of opening and joy that walks out. She will not talk about how much weight people have lost as a result of her retreats or books. That's not what her philosophy is all about (though her book When Food is Love does tell of one woman who dropped from 26st to 18st). But she has many success stories - sackfuls of mail arrive each week from women telling her how she has changed their lives. "When somebody comes to me with tears in their eyes and says, "I wouldn't be on this earth if it wasn't for you," it means a great deal to me. It makes me happy that my personal story can be an instrument of help. Roth, who grew up in a middle-class family in New York, was always a chubby child. Her mother, who'd herself been an unhappily overweight child, put her on diets. By the time Roth was 15, she was addicted to amphetamine diet pills. Years of crazy diets and bingeing followed, and by her late twenties she was suffering from anorexia. "Eventually I was down to 80 lb, but I still didn't like myself," she explains. People think that, when they lose the weight, everything changes. They think their lives will be perfect, if they could just lose the weight. But nothing changes when you lose weight, except you have a thinner body. Much of Roth's sorrow lay in an unhappy family life. My mother was an alcoholic for a while, my dad was never home. They divorced. As a child, you internalise a lot. I think I felt that it was all my fault. I thought if I could lose weight I would make everything all right. But there's a catch 22 with that because, when you lose weight and everything still isn't right, that's scary. What do you do then? Roth regained the weight - doubling her size in only two months. It was at that point that I felt I had been on either a diet or a binge for 17 years. I didn't know what it was to be a normal eater. I didn't know it was possible to eat ice cream without feeling guilt and shame. I felt so horrible about myself. I felt repulsive. There was so much self-loathing that expressed itself through my relationship with food, whether I was fat or thin. Her epiphany came after she made a plan to kill herself. She was a medical student and, while at a bookshop researching useful drug combinations for suicide, she came across Susie Orbach's book Fat is a Feminist Issue. "It was the first time that anybody had written a book about how an issue with weight might be an expression of something deeper than willpower," says Roth. That book gave me a glimpse into the possibility that there could be a rhyme and reason to my eating. I stopped dieting the next day. And as soon as I stopped dieting, I felt better because the bingeing stopped, too, and so that cycle of deprivation, binge and self-hatred stopped immediately. It felt like someone had released me from prison. More research followed, and she ended up abandoning her medical degree. As she became more at ease with herself, the weight shifted. She began leading weekly groups with friends, and friends of friends, talking about their relationship with food, with a view to writing a book. Writing had been something she'd always wanted to do. "I knew immediately I was on to something," she says. Almost all the women I met were flailing around feeling bad about themselves, like me. The women from that group became contributors to her first book, Feeding the Hungry Heart. Its success led to all the others. Roth is at pains to point out that she's not a therapist. Her books (including her most recent, Lost and Found, which explores how money and shopping act to mask pain) are all written from her perspective. It's one reason why she writes only for women. I often get men asking why I don't write for them, but my books are written from my direct experience and I haven't worked with men. Happily married, Roth divides her time between travelling to promote her books, hosting her retreats and writing. It's a life she never thought possible 30 years ago. "I just feel so fortunate to be someone who gets to do what she loves and also gets paid for it," she says. Geneen Roth's tips Eat when you are hungry Eat sitting down in a calm environment Eat without distractions Eat until you are satisfied Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others Eat with enjoyment, gusto and pleasure Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Anything, by Geneen Roth, is published by Simon & Schuster, £7.99