Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money

Roth offers provocative and radical strategies for transforming how we feel and behave about money.

by Geneen Roth

Roth, who received kudos from Oprah for her messaging on eating disorders and spirituality, is back with a new book that explores how emotional issues with money mirror those with food and dieting.

When Roth and her husband lost their life savings, they joined the millions of Americans dealing with financial turbulence, uncertainty and abrupt reversals in their expectations. The resulting shock was the catalyst for her to explore, in workshops and in her own life, how women’s habits and behaviors around money — as with food — can lead to exactly the situations they most want to avoid.

Roth identified her own unconscious choices — binge shopping, followed by periods of budgetary self-deprivation, “treating” herself in ways that ultimately failed to sustain and using money as a substitute for love — among others.

As she examined the deep sources of these habits, she faced the hard truth about where her “self-protective” financial decisions had led. Roth relates her personal experience with irreverent humor and hard-won wisdom, and offers provocative and radical strategies for transforming how we feel and behave about the resources that should, and ultimately can, sustain and support our lives.

$25.95 hardcover — Viking, published by the Penguin Group, 275 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 30, Number 3, June/July 2011.