Geneen Roth, the author of seven books, including the New York Times best-seller, When Food is Love, has been writing and teaching about hunger, pleasure, deprivation, and healing in all aspects of life.

Roth's work explores the question of what we are truly hungry for when we turn to food, or shopping, or any activity designed to comfort our hearts. Roth believes that the way to transform our relationship with ourselves is to be open, curious, and kind with ourselves - instead of punishing, impatient, and harsh. Roth incorporates meditation, awareness practice, and a set of seven eating guidelines that she calls the foundation of natural eating into her work.

Roth is a monthly columnist for Prevention magazine and her newest book is The Craggy Hole in My Heart and The Cat Who Fixed it: Over the Edge and Back with My Dad, My Cat and Me. Renee Lertzman's interview with Geneen Roth first appeared in The Sun. More information about Geneen Roth can be found at www.geneenroth.com.

Renee Lertzman: You've said that willpower, discipline, and commitment are "irrelevant when it comes to dieting." But isn't self-control what dieting is all about?

Geneen Roth: I used to believe that if I deprived and punished and frightened myself enough, then somehow I would change. But those strategies involving willpower and discipline - so celebrated in our culture - weren't leading me anywhere. In fact, I was killing myself. I began to sense that the way out was through love, openness, and trust, but I didn't feel any of those for myself at the time. Still, once the idea of love and trust occurred to me, I knew that I could never go on a diet again.

RL: You are described as being a pioneer in the anti-dieting­ movement, but your work is more of a psychological - and perhaps even spiritual - approach to food and eating.

GR: First of all, our culture deals with eating and dieting and food as just a women's issue - and a banal one, at that. New diets come out every month. Diet books are always on the bestseller list. But people generally don't think of dieting, weight loss, and food in a particularly deep way. Sometimes dieting is seen as a feminist issue. That can be incredibly helpful, but it's not broad enough. Other authors approach the subject from a serious health perspective, but our relationship with food goes so much deeper than that. It's not just about what you put in your mouth. Food is both concrete and metaphorical - it's something we deal with every day, but it can also be a doorway that leads into the hidden rooms of our lives. My relationship with food is a microcosm of my relationship to being alive, to my beliefs about trust, pleasure, deprivation, and nourishment. But looking at these deeper, underlying issues is considered subversive.