Shades of Hope

Book excerpt: The founder of Shades of Hope Treatment Center offers real-life solutions and a step-by-step program that teaches you how to stop the never-ending cycle of diets, binges, negative behaviors, and broken promises that come with food addiction. Includes a Foreword by Ashley Judd There are millions of people who bounce from one diet to another with no understanding of the link between emotional eating (compulsive overeating) and not being able to keep off the weight. Author Tennie McCarty was herself an overeater, food addict, and bulimic. Tennie believes that food addiction is a physical and mental problem with a spiritual solution. Tennie confronted her addictions to unhealthy relationships, food, work, and was finally able to find the one thing we all ultimately crave—serenity. In her work with clients, Tennie helps them uncover why they yo-yo diet, why they compromise their health with a diseased relationship to food, why their uncontrollable need for control has left them feeling broken, and what it is about their past or present that leads them to seek comfort in the oscillating consumption and restriction of food. As Ashley Judd, a former patient says, “Because if there was hope for Tennie McCarty, there was hope for me.”