From 1999 to Present: the History of the "Eating the Moment" Project

I first started working on this project in 1999. At that time I was doing my Pre-Doctoral Internship at the Pittsburgh Veterans Administration hospital system. In the course of my Behavioral Medicine and Primary Care rotations I began to train in delivering cognitive-behavioral weight management and co-led my first group for weight management. I finished the manuscript by 2000 and entitled it "No-Diet Diet."

The following year I moved to Wyoming and began my Post-Doctoral Training at the University of Wyoming Counseling Center with parallel rotations at the Cheyenne Family Practice and at the U of W Health Center. Weight management was "popping" up again and again as a behavioral medicine clinical modality. I finished the second draft of the book, this time changing the title to "Mindful-not-Mouthful."

After my Post-Doc in Wyoming, I returned to Pittsburgh and accepted a job as a Clinical Director of a drug and alcohol program at the Allegheny Country Jail. This was 2001 and I began crystallizing an eclectic clinical approach for dealing with compulsive spectrum disorders that I later described in a monograph "The Recovery Equation." My approach to working with impulse-control disorders (inclusive of substance use and other compulsive presentations) began to take a more humanistic and existential form that combined the principles of Logotherapy and Harm Reduction. These two camps, coupled with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, seemed to be a successful clinical recipe for empowering clients and equipping clients with craving control know-how.

At around the same time, probably early in 2000, I started to organize my haphazard understanding of Buddhism, Daoism, Jainism and the teachings of Gurdjieff, into a project that I called "Egg Drop Soup for the Mind." This was a fun writing project that I later came to view as an act of literary hooliganism. In trying to consolidate my understanding of Buddhism in particular, I started imitating - in writing - the Buddhist genre of koans, and began a meditation practice.

By 2003, my clinical approach became an amalgam of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Exposure-Based Relapse Prevention Treatment, Logotherapy, Harm Reduction and Buddhist Psychology and more. I continued to polish "Mindful-not-Mouthful" for 3 more years.

In 2003 I started to transition into a generalist private practice. With behavioral medicine and health psychology experience as part of my clinical repertoire, I continued to offer weight management/diet compliance/overeating-focused interventions to the clients that presented with bulimic or binge-eating disorder presentations. Also, I began offering psychological assessment to candidates for gastric bypass surgery some of whom elected to continue to work with me post-surgery.

By 2006 I was on my 5th draft of "Mindful-not-Mouthful." At around this time, my wife, tired of this seemingly never-ending literary commitment, suggested I go ahead and submit the project for publication. I put together a book proposal and pitched it to what I considered to be one of the best publishing houses for psychologists on the market. A few months later Melissa Kirk, a New Harbinger acquisition editor, called me up with a "green-light." The rest is history.

The book that began in 1999 as "No-Diet Diet" and mutated through a series of drafts under the working title of "Mindful-not-Mouthful" is now, hopefully, in your hands as "Eating the Moment."

What's next? 

I have just finished the final draft of "Reinventing the Meal."  It's been a fascinating project to write up.  It is scheduled for publication in 2012.