About Geneen Roth

Geneen Roth's pioneering books were among the first to link compulsive eating and perpetual dieting with deeply personal and spiritual issues that go far beyond food, weight and body image. Rather than pushing away the "crazy" things we do, Geneen's work proceeds with the conviction that our actions and beliefs make exquisite sense, and that the way to transform our relationship with food, our body, and so much more in our life is to be open, curious and kind with ourselves -- instead of punishing, impatient and harsh.

Geneen’s work has now expanded to explore the territory beneath the culture we’ve built. After years of teaching workshops on weight, food, and money, Roth realized that there was a connection between these issues that held her students captive in their anxiety, lack and discontent. Seeing herself as much a student as a guide, Roth uses revelations from her own life—both the horrific and comic—to examine this connection. Out of her own past struggles with feeling as if she would never fit into her own skin, much less in the world around her, Roth tackles how we can move beyond our pasts and build a life that reflects our singularity.

Geneen Roth is the author of ten books, including the just-released This Messy Magnificent Life and New York Times bestsellers When Food Is Love, Lost and Found, and Women Food and God, as well as The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It. Over the past thirty years, she has worked with  thousands of people in her groundbreaking workshops and retreats and has appeared on numerous national shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, the Today show, Good Morning America, and The View. She lives in California with charms of hummingbirds; her husband Matt; and Izzy the fabulous, eating-disordered dog.

 

WHAT PEOPLE SAY

"Many people are talking about wholeness today, but what makes Geneen Roth different is her microscopic honesty. She doesn't hold back. Her work is about the objective truth, and you can feel it nourishing your body." -- Christiane Northrup, MD

"Geneen's work will blow you away. It is beautiful and funny and deep, and most of all, she speaks the truth." -- Anne Lamott

 

About This Messy Magnificent Life

 

“Geneen Roth’s early work pulled my sister out of the abyss of eating disorders. My gratitude and admiration for Geneen has deepened still with her newest book. In This Messy Magnificent Life, we experience her signature divine wisdom and hilarious humanity—but Geneen also gives us something new and important. Here, Geneen shows us how our individual body and food obsessions are directly linked to our collective oppression as women—and how getting free from our personal prisons is crucial to seeking liberation at every level. This is a beautiful, funny, deeply relevant book—a vital work for this moment.”

—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior and founder and president of Together Rising

 

“I’ve long admired Geneen Roth’s approach to food and its place in our lives.  In This Messy Magnificent Life she goes beyond food and shows the complex interconnection between our minds and the bodies we have the power to heal.  Her insights and simple practices will help readers rediscover the power to live their most vibrant lives.”
—Mark Hyman, MD, author of the New York Times bestseller Eat Fat, Get Thin

 

“Geneen Roth's secret sauce—the ingredients of which are warmth, wisdom, honesty and powerful self-scrutiny—are all blended to perfection in this lovely book, which will be a welcome companion to her legions of readers, and bring her many lucky new ones. There's a reason she's such a treasure.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage and Devotion: A Memoir

 

“This Messy Magnificent Life delivers a brilliant, funny, and frank offering at the stroke of midnight (just when we need it).  By page ten you're convinced she's your smartest and funniest best friend.  This Messy Magnificent Life is—dare I say it? Yep. Messy. It's magnificent, hilarious and 100% the generous, complicated gift that is Geneen Roth's imagination, experience and soul, on a platter. 2018 will be made easier to navigate with This Messy Magnificent Life by my side.”
— Kathy Najimy, Actor, Activist, Director

 

“Roth, who has become more resilient with age, will captivate readers with her energetic yet calming wisdom.”
—Publishers Weekly

 

“Roth provides a gentle, guiding hand for those in search of comforting words to help them build self-esteem and assert control over all aspects of life. Depression, loneliness, and general feelings of emptiness are common among women with body image issues, and the author addresses them with compassion, blending her teaching with touches of humor, thoughtful reflections on her own journey, and motivating quotes from other authors… Empowering words for women… to regain control of their lives.”
—Kirkus Reviews

 

About Women Food and God

 
"Women Food and God is daring, dazzling, funny, comforting, wise and profoundly spiritual. It maps the journey from the darkness of obsession to the pure sense of being in prose so insightful and astonishing it left me breathless. Geneen Roth is an international treasure, and her new book is a gift to us all."    — Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. author of Five Wishes and Conscious Loving

“This is a hugely important work, a life-changer, one that will free untold women from the tyranny of fear and hopelessness around their bodied. Beautifully written, a joy to read, rich in both revelation and great humor.” — Anne Lamott, author of Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

"Geneen Roth has written an extraordinary book - at once beautiful, moving, funny and searing. Most important, she gives us a practical way to use our bodies - along with some of the most difficult parts of our emotional lives - as gracious and transformative portals to our soul." --Rick Foster, co-author of Happiness & Wealth and How We Choose to Be Happy

"Geneen Roth does it again! Women Food and God is absolutely mesmerizing. And loaded with insights which can change your life."   — Chistiane Northrup, MD, ob/gyn physician and author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause

 

About Lost and Found

"Dazzling insights and eloquent wisdom from one of the truly sophisticated minds of our time."    — David Krueger, MD,  author of The Secret Language of Money

“Lost and Found offers a wake-up call on a topic that causes so much psychological and spiritual pain and stress. Geneen Roth shows us how awareness of our money behavior can liberate our wisdom, happiness, and well-being. Read it and you'll also understand how to make wiser money decisions.” — Spencer Sherman, MBA, CFP, author of The Case for Money Madness

"A compelling, gorgeously written, searing, funny, and utterly inspiring book. You won't be able to put Lost and Found down and when you've finished it, your relationship with money will never be the same. " -- Lynn Twist, author of The Soul of Money

 

From Geneen's Students

 

"Thank you for another amazing ride. Great retreat. For the first time, I got to fully appreciate the depth of how I have changed and I took it all in. I cried many tears of joy. Nothing else in my life has impacted me like this work.  That bliss carried over into this week. This morning, as the sun was just rising at this time, I walked outside and looked into my garden. I noticed my miniature roses. So many buds just ready to bloom. All of them rising to meet the sun. That's me, that's us. What simple, majestic bliss."  -- Kay, May 2016 Retreat

 

"I'm still floating in awareness, presence, and kindness to myself. Things blossom in this space. I'm​ blossoming. I've been experiencing sadness, melancholy over a romantic disappointment, but writing about it, sitting with it, being curious about my default stories, shows me I want in my life feels real, here, meaningful, and none of it's terrible or impossible to be with. It's interesting, sweet, silly, tender! Nothing short of gorgeous. It's grace. Thank you for showing the way." -- Jennifer, November 2017 Retreat

 

"What a great retreat! Thank you for putting into words your own process and making it available to all us. You've helped us to open so many new possibilities beyond the obsession with food.  It changed my life!  Especially my  relationship  with my self and my body. I don't remember giving myself so much attention ever.  I'm addicted to it now.  All I want to do it's to be with myself!"  - Silvana, November 2017 Retreat

 

"Every retreat has been, for me, an opportunity to experience small miracles.  This most recent week at Asilomar was no exception.  But this time, the miracle was not small.  It was profound and life-changing and I am still amazed at the change in me.

"It happened, as so often is the case, while you were working with someone else during an eating meditation. Like me, she is a Restrictor, and when you explored with her that underlying her agony over whether or not to eat the oatmeal, was a feeling that she was a failure. You explained in a most straight-forward way, that whether she ate the oatmeal or not, she would still experience those feelings of failure. The feelings were the issue, not the food.

"BOOM!!!  It hit me like a shot. And in that moment, everything changed. The food and the restriction and the torture ended for me. Food contains no charge for me.  t seems, even now, almost impossible.  But it is the truth.  Thank you.  I am not sure I can adequately express how this has changed me.  I'm surely not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination.  But with the work at the Retreats and all of the support afterwards, I now believe all beautiful things are possible for me." -- Pam, May 2016

 

"I have had three tastes of freedom now. One when I first read Women Food Food and God and I was forever changed. My second, on retreat when I understood, that taking the time, every day, several times a day, to feed my sweet body what it needs, what it wants, is how I stay in relationship with who I am and with what I most want:  to be IN my life.

So now I am cautiously embracing my third and longest lasting taste of freedom. I am seeing once again that it is possible to have ease and even joy with food. To feel close to myself, protected and loving. I feel calm, strong, open, compassionate, slowed down, grounded, in control and at the same time surrendered. I am understanding more what it means to live as is. And the biggest bonus is that I lose weight. Right away my body is lighter. Effortlessly, this part follows. It simply follows. It is the miracle I always feared wasn't possible -- feeling confident, calm and sure about my beautiful body." -- Nina,

See more comments about Geneen from her many students and readers.