Excess Matters

Tag: anxiety

  • 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food by Susan Albers: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    The book in one sentence: A practical toolkit of 50+ techniques for what to do in the moment between feeling bad and reaching for food.

    What Is 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food About?

    It’s 9pm. The kids are in bed, the dishes are done, and you find yourself standing in front of the open refrigerator for the third time since dinner. You are not hungry. You know you are not hungry. You close the door. You stand there for a beat. Then you open it again.

    Most books on emotional eating explain that moment in detail. They walk you through the psychology, the attachment patterns, the childhood roots of comfort-seeking. They are often moving and frequently accurate. What they rarely give you is something to do instead, right now, in that exact moment.

    Susan Albers built this book to fill that gap. Albers is a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic who has spent her career working with clients who struggle with eating, body image, and food-related anxiety. Her Eating Mindfully series established her as one of the more practical voices in this space. 50 Ways is the most functional book she’s written: 212 pages, five categories of techniques, over 65 specific strategies for what to reach for when food is not the answer.

    The book’s central claim is that emotional eating is a self-soothing deficit problem. Not a character flaw. Not a willpower failure. A skills gap. And a skills gap can be addressed with skills.

    Why Do We Eat for Comfort in the First Place?

    Before Albers hands you the toolkit, she answers the question her readers are always asking: why does food work so well?

    The honest answer is that it does work. At least for a few minutes. Food triggers biochemical shifts (serotonin, dopamine, blood sugar changes), activates decades of emotional memory (warmth, reward, celebration), gives your hands and mouth something to do, and interrupts whatever you were thinking about. Albers doesn’t pretend otherwise.

    “Eating has an amazingly contradictory power. It can relax and calm your nerves, while at the same time, it can drive you crazy.”

    The problem is the duration. The soothing effect disappears roughly when the last bite does. Then the original feeling is still there, and now guilt is there too. So the discomfort compounds, which drives more eating, which creates more guilt. The cycle Albers describes is worth reading in her own words:

    Stress. Need comfort. Need to eat. Feel relief. Feel good. Positive feeling fades. Feel guilt. Need soothing. More stress about guilt and weight gain. Begin cycle again.

    What breaks the cycle is not willpower. The person who can white-knuckle through the urge doesn’t actually have more discipline, according to Albers. She has better self-soothing skills. She has a friend she calls instead, or a bath she draws, or a walk she takes. The alternative to eating is not deprivation. It is comfort from a different source.

    This is the reframe the rest of the book is built on. Albers draws from attachment theory and self psychology to explain that self-soothing is a learned capacity, shaped early by caregivers who modeled it (or didn’t). Someone who grew up being handed food whenever they cried is not weak for reaching for food as an adult. They are running their most well-practiced coping mechanism.

    What Are the Five Categories of Non-Food Soothing?

    The 50 (technically more than 50) techniques are organized into five categories. Each gets its own chapter, with individual strategies running two to four pages each. Albers provides instructions, rationale, and notes on when to use each one.

    1. Mindfulness-Based Techniques

    This section is the longest, and for good reason. Mindfulness is the meta-skill that makes all the others possible. Before you can choose a different response, you need to notice that you are about to respond automatically. The pause mindfulness creates is where every other technique lives.

    Albers presents mindfulness without the spiritual trappings. Her framing is clinical: being aware of what you’re feeling, without judgment, creates the gap between impulse and action. Her practical techniques include:

    • Breathwork: A slow exhale (longer than the inhale) activates the parasympathetic nervous system and counteracts stress arousal. The protocol is simple: inhale for 4, hold for 2, exhale for 6 to 8. Repeat five times.
    • 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding: Name 5 things you see, 4 colors, 3 sensations, 2 sounds, 1 scent. Takes under two minutes. Works anywhere, including in social situations.
    • Minding the Emotional Gap: Before eating, stop and ask two questions. “What am I actually feeling right now?” and “What does this feeling actually need?” The answers (lonely, anxious, overwhelmed, bored) point toward what would genuinely help. That answer is almost never food.

    2. Cognitive Techniques (Change Your Thoughts)

    This section addresses the mental layer of emotional eating: the automatic, distorted thoughts that accelerate the cycle.

    The most useful strategy here is journaling before eating, not as a diary but as a structured interruption. Albers’s prompt: Right now I am feeling ___. What I want to eat is ___ because ___. What I actually need is ___. The act of completing the third blank tends to make the answer obvious. It is rarely “a bowl of cereal.”

    She also addresses all-or-nothing thinking directly, what she calls “zebra thinking.” The pattern is familiar to most emotional eaters: one unplanned eating moment becomes a full binge because I already blew it. Albers’s reframe is not forced positivity. It’s accurate replacement: one moment is not the whole pattern, and treating it as such creates more damage than the original moment did.

    3. Body-Based and Sensory Techniques

    This is where Albers makes her best argument. The body is not just the site of the problem. It is a resource for solving it.

    Progressive muscle relaxation, yoga, self-massage, warm baths, aromatherapy all activate genuine physiological shifts. Peppermint and other non-food scents can interrupt cravings through the olfactory system’s unusually direct connection to the brain’s emotional centers. Self-massage addresses what emotional eating is often actually reaching for: physical warmth and touch. Albers cites Harlow’s attachment research here, where infant primates consistently chose the soft cloth “mother” over the wire one providing food. Touch is a more fundamental comfort than eating. It’s just less convenient and somehow more embarrassing to ask for.

    The sensory comfort menu is one of the book’s most portable ideas. Build a personalized list in advance: at least two items per sense that provide genuine comfort. When the urge to eat arrives, consult the list before opening the pantry. The list exists because, in the moment, your brain will insist there is nothing else available. The list proves otherwise.

    4. Mindful Distraction

    Albers is careful to distinguish mindful distraction from mindless avoidance. The goal is not “don’t think about your feelings.” It is finding activities that fully occupy your hands and attention, are incompatible with eating, and produce their own form of satisfaction.

    Knitting is her canonical example, and it holds up: the repetitive hand movements produce a measurable relaxation response (Herbert Benson’s research, which Albers cites), the craft occupies both hands and focused attention, and finishing something produces a sense of accomplishment that eating never does. Gardening works similarly. So do puzzles, creative projects, and making a bucket list (which redirects attention from what you want from the pantry to what you want from your life).

    The principle: find activities that can genuinely compete with food on the engagement dimension.

    5. Social Connection

    The final category is probably the most underestimated in the emotional eating literature. Albers makes a direct claim here: social disconnection is one of the most common triggers for emotional eating, and social connection is one of the most powerful antidotes.

    A donut cannot fix loneliness. A phone call often can.

    Her most practical suggestion in this section is the soothing buddy: a designated person (nonjudgmental, not competing with you on food or weight) whom you contact before or instead of an emotional eating episode. The agreement is explicit: you reach out before you reach for food, they respond with presence. The structure is adapted from 12-step recovery and it works for the same reason: the connection is the intervention.

    She also covers venting, which she notes can intensify distress without proper structure. Her fix: tell the listener upfront what you need. “I need to vent for five minutes. I don’t need advice.” That framing changes the entire conversation.

    How Do You Actually Use This Book?

    Read it before you need it. Practice the techniques when you’re not in crisis.

    Albers says this more than once:

    “You can’t expect to put them into practice in the middle of a very strong urge to eat unless you’ve done some preliminary practicing. If you wait until you need them, it will be like trying to learn how to swim while you are drowning.”

    This is the most important sentence in the book and also the one most people ignore. They read it during a calm moment, think yes, good idea, and then reach for chips the next time they’re anxious because they never actually practiced anything. The toolkit requires practice to work. A list of 50 options is useless if none of them are fluent.

    Albers’s recommendation: read through all five categories. Pick three or four techniques that match how you specifically experience emotional eating. Practice them before you need them. Build the sensory comfort menu in writing. Designate a soothing buddy. Set up the conditions for success before the next 9pm refrigerator moment arrives.

    Is 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food Worth Reading?

    Read this if you already understand your emotional eating patterns and are specifically looking for behavioral alternatives. If you can describe the cycle clearly but keep ending up in the pantry anyway, this is the book you’re missing. It works well alongside deeper theoretical books (Roth, Ross, Fairburn) as the practical layer those books don’t provide.

    Skip it if you’re looking for a transformational narrative or a deep framework for understanding why you eat emotionally. Albers gives you enough theory to contextualize the tools, but it’s not a theory book. The reader rating reflects exactly this: readers expecting depth or revelation find it thin. Readers who need tools and have the motivation to use them find it genuinely useful.

    One caveat: The book presents emotional eating as more tractable than it sometimes is. Fifty techniques feels empowering. For someone in the grip of chronic binge eating disorder or trauma-based eating, the list can be overwhelming, or the techniques can provide momentary interruption without addressing root causes. Albers acknowledges this (she recommends professional support for severe cases), but it’s worth naming directly. The toolkit is a starting point. For some readers, it’s enough. For others, it’s a supplement to clinical work, not a replacement.

    Books Like 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food

    BookAuthorBest For
    Breaking Free from Emotional EatingGeneen RothUnderstanding why you eat emotionally; the philosophical counterpart to Albers’s toolkit
    Eating MindfullySusan AlbersMore depth on mindfulness-based eating; the theoretical companion to this book
    The Emotional Eating WorkbookCarolyn RossWorkbook format with structured exercises; covers trauma-based eating more directly
    Eat QSusan AlbersAlbers’s later book; focuses on emotional intelligence as the foundation for change
    The Hunger HabitJudson BrewerNeuroscience-based approach to breaking compulsive eating; complements Albers’s technique library with stronger research scaffolding

  • Spark by John Ratey: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    Book in one sentence: A Harvard psychiatrist makes the case in molecular detail that exercise is primarily a brain intervention, not a body one, and that it treats depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction as effectively as any drug.

    What Is Spark About?

    Here is what you’ve been told exercise is for: burning calories, toning your arms, lowering your cholesterol, getting your heart rate up. John Ratey spent a career at Harvard Medical School watching those reasons fail to motivate people, and he wrote Spark to offer a different one. Exercise is primarily a brain intervention. The body benefits are real, and they are secondary.

    Ratey is a clinical psychiatrist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He spent years synthesizing hundreds of neuroscience studies showing that aerobic exercise directly changes brain structure: growing new neurons, strengthening synapses, flooding the brain with chemicals that rival pharmaceutical antidepressants, and rebuilding the regions most damaged by stress and depression. When you go for a run, you are doing something measurable and structural to the organ that governs your moods, your memory, your impulse control, and your resilience.

    The book opens in Naperville, Illinois, where gym teachers built an intense, heart-rate-based PE program and scheduled it before academic classes. Their students went from average to near the top of international academic rankings (first in the world in science in 1999). The PE teachers didn’t know the molecular reason it worked. Ratey does, and Spark is his explanation.

    Published in 2008, the science has only gotten stronger since.

    What Is BDNF and Why Does It Matter for Your Brain?

    At the center of almost everything Ratey covers is a protein called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which he calls “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” BDNF does for neurons what fertilizer does for plants: it makes them grow, branch out, and form denser connections. It is also the physical substrate of memory. When you learn something and it sticks, BDNF is what made the synaptic connection durable enough to last.

    Aerobic exercise is the most reliable activator of BDNF. A run triggers its release within minutes, then activates the genes that produce more of it over hours and days. Three companion growth factors arrive alongside it (IGF-1, VEGF, and FGF-2), which grow new blood vessels in the brain and support the survival of newly born neurons.

    The hippocampus is where most of this happens. This seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain governs memory, learning, and emotional regulation. It is also the structure most vulnerable to chronic stress (elevated cortisol literally shrinks it), most affected by depression, and most responsive to exercise. Walking three times per week for six months measurably increases hippocampal volume, reversing roughly two years of age-related brain shrinkage. That is not a metaphor or a motivational claim. It is a finding from Arthur Kramer’s lab at the University of Illinois.

    For years, neuroscience held that adult brains do not grow new neurons. That turned out to be wrong. Fred Gage at the Salk Institute showed that adult brains do generate new hippocampal neurons from stem cells throughout life, and that running mice grow dramatically more of them than sedentary mice. Exercise was building new brain structure.

    The catch: new neurons need stimulation to survive. They are born as blank slates, unusually plastic and primed to form new connections, but they require input to wire into. This is why Ratey frames exercise and mental engagement as a pairing. Exercise provides the raw material; learning or social interaction gives it something to build into. His practical instruction: exercise first, then do the hard cognitive or emotional work within the hour that follows.

    How Does Exercise Treat Depression and Anxiety?

    In 1999, Duke University published a clinical trial comparing aerobic exercise to sertraline (Zoloft) in treating moderate depression. The exercise group matched the medication group in symptom reduction. At the ten-month follow-up, exercisers had lower relapse rates than the medication-alone group. If exercise came in pill form, Ratey notes, it would have been hailed as the blockbuster drug of the century. Instead, the study ran on page fourteen of the Health and Fitness section.

    A follow-up study identified a therapeutic dose: roughly eight calories burned per pound of body weight per week through aerobic exercise. For a 150-pound person, that is about 1,200 calories per week, achievable with six 30-minute sessions. The low-intensity arm (three calories per pound) produced only marginally better results than placebo. Intensity matters. Casual walking is not enough.

    The mechanism matches antidepressants almost exactly. Exercise elevates serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine (the same three neurotransmitters that SSRIs and SNRIs target) and does so without pharmaceutical side effects. It also reduces chronically elevated cortisol, which physically damages the hippocampus, and promotes the hippocampal rebuilding that chronic depression tears down.

    “I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain.” (John Ratey)

    For anxiety, exercise works through four distinct channels at once:

    • Distraction: the anxious mind gets a different focus, and the post-exercise effect outlasts other distractions
    • Muscle tension reduction: exercise acts like a beta-blocker, releasing physical tension and interrupting the body-to-brain feedback loop
    • Neurochemical rebuilding: serotonin calms the amygdala; GABA (the brain’s natural calming agent, the same target as Valium) rises; BDNF consolidates non-fearful memories
    • Fear relearning: exercise produces the same physical sensations as anxiety (elevated heart rate, faster breathing, warmth), and by associating those sensations with something controllable, the brain gradually relearns that they are not dangerous

    British doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression. In the United States, as of this writing, it remains vastly underutilized.

    What Does This Mean If You Struggle with Food?

    The case for exercise during weight loss is not about caloric expenditure. This is the part of Spark most relevant to ExcessMatters readers, and most people never hear it framed this way.

    Compulsive overeating and food cravings involve the same reward circuitry as drug and alcohol addiction. The dopamine circuits that govern desire and satisfaction get dysregulated by highly palatable food, flooding the brain with spikes that ordinary life cannot match. Over time, this depletes D2 dopamine receptors (the brain’s receiving end for dopamine signals), leaving the person in a state of chronic reward deficiency. Nothing feels satisfying. Food temporarily fills the gap.

    Exercise addresses this at three levels.

    Immediately. Exercise releases dopamine, providing a natural reward signal that competes directly with cravings. Even a short walk around the block can interrupt a craving cycle by redirecting dopamine and providing a moment of self-efficacy.

    Over weeks. Regular exercise rebuilds depleted D2 dopamine receptors, gradually restoring the brain’s capacity to feel satisfaction from ordinary experience. The pull of compulsive eating weakens as the rest of the world gets richer.

    Structurally. Exercise counteracts the anxiety and depression that most often trigger emotional eating. Ratey’s framing: exercise is not just a substitute behavior for food. It is working on the same underlying neurobiology.

    The Odyssey House drug rehabilitation program in New York built running into their treatment protocol. Their director described what happens when someone quits an addiction: “The drug, for the addict, becomes everything. Take it away and suddenly there is an ’empty vessel’ at the core of the body and mind.” Exercise starts filling that vessel. Residents who ran regularly stayed in treatment twice as long. The “empty vessel” description maps directly onto emotional eating recovery.

    There is also the prefrontal cortex angle. Chronic stress, depression, and emotional dysregulation all impair prefrontal cortex function (the part of the brain that governs impulse control, long-term thinking, and the ability to pause before acting). Exercise directly strengthens prefrontal cortex activity.

    Serotonin, elevated reliably by aerobic exercise, is described in the book as important for “mood, impulse control, and self-esteem.” Those three things cover the emotional terrain of most overeating episodes almost entirely.

    Then there is the stress-eating connection. When cortisol is chronically elevated, the body craves glucose, and simple carbohydrates and fat become irresistible. Exercise breaks the cortisol loop at its source. The comfort food craving loses its urgency when the cortisol driving it gets metabolized instead of accumulated.

    None of this means exercise is magic. It does not directly address the behavioral patterns, the beliefs about food, or the emotional history that often underlies compulsive eating. It gives the brain the neurochemical foundation that makes all of that other work more possible.

    Is Spark Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have ever treated exercise as punishment for eating, used movement to “earn” food, or dismissed exercise as purely a calorie-burning strategy. This book rewires the entire framing. Also essential reading for anyone managing depression, anxiety, or ADHD who has been offered medication as the only option (not because Ratey argues against medication, but because he argues for a fuller toolkit).

    Skip it if you want a step-by-step protocol without the science. Ratey is a gifted communicator, but this is a science book. The final chapter provides a concrete exercise prescription, but the preceding 250 pages are mechanistic explanation. That explanation is the book’s entire point, though not everyone is in the mood to read neuroscience.

    One caveat: Some of the neurogenesis claims (specifically, how robustly adult human brains grow new hippocampal neurons) became more contested after the book’s 2008 publication. The mechanism is real; the magnitude in humans is less settled than Ratey implies. The core argument (that exercise has profound, measurable effects on brain function across every domain he covers) has not been weakened. If anything, the evidence base has deepened.

    Books Like Spark

    BookAuthorBest For
    The Joy of MovementKelly McGonigalWhy movement feels good and how to build an identity around it
    Strong CurvesBret ContrerasPractical strength training program for women
    The Willpower InstinctKelly McGonigalThe neuroscience of impulse control and self-regulation
    The Hungry BrainStephan GuyenetHow the brain drives overeating and what to do about it
    Lean and StrongAllan HillisExercise and nutrition together for body composition