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?
- Why Do We Eat for Comfort in the First Place?
- What Are the Five Categories of Non-Food Soothing?
- How Do You Actually Use This Book?
- Is 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food Worth Reading?
- Books Like 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without 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
| Book | Author | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Breaking Free from Emotional Eating | Geneen Roth | Understanding why you eat emotionally; the philosophical counterpart to Albers’s toolkit |
| Eating Mindfully | Susan Albers | More depth on mindfulness-based eating; the theoretical companion to this book |
| The Emotional Eating Workbook | Carolyn Ross | Workbook format with structured exercises; covers trauma-based eating more directly |
| Eat Q | Susan Albers | Albers’s later book; focuses on emotional intelligence as the foundation for change |
| The Hunger Habit | Judson Brewer | Neuroscience-based approach to breaking compulsive eating; complements Albers’s technique library with stronger research scaffolding |