Books about Anorexia from Amazon.com

A unique new approach to treating eating disorders

Eight million women in the United States suffer from anorexia nervosa and/or bulimia For these women, the road to recovery is a rocky one. Many succumb to their eating disorders. Life Without Ed offers hope to all those who suffer from these often deadly disorders. For years, author Jennifer Schaefer lived with both anorexia and bulimia. She credits her successful recovery to the technique she learned from her psychologist, Thom Rutledge.

This groundbreaking book illustrates Rutledge's technique. As in the author's case, readers are encouraged to think of an eating disorder as if it were a distinct being with a personality of its own. Further, they are encouraged to treat the disorder as a relationship rather than as a condition. Schaefer named her eating disorder Ed; her recovery involved "breaking up" with Ed

• Shares the points of view of both patient and therapist in this approach to treatment
• Helps people see the disease as a relationship from which they can distance themselves
• Techniques to defeat negative thoughts that plague eating disorder patients

Prescriptive, supportive, and inspirational, Life Without Ed shows readers how they too can overcome their eating disorders.

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Price: $8.57 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook, line, and sinker," Marya Hornbacher writes. "I, as many young women do, honest-to-God believed that once I Just Lost a Few Pounds, suddenly I would be a New You, I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten." Hornbacher describes in shocking detail her lifelong quest to starve herself to death, to force her short, athletic body to fade away. She remembers telling a friend, at age 4, that she was on a diet. Her bizarre tale includes not only the usual puking and starving, but also being confined to mental hospitals and growing fur (a phenomenon called lanugo, which nature imposes to keep a body from freezing to death during periods of famine)..
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Possibly one of the most talked about books of the year, Meg Rosoff's novel for young adults is the winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize 2004. Heralded by some as the next best adult crossover novel since Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, who himself has given the book a thunderously good quote, this author's debut is undoubtedly stylish, readable and fascinating.

Rosoff's story begins in modern day London, slightly in the future, and as its heroine has a 15-year-old Manhattanite called Daisy. She's picked up at the airport by Edmond, her English cousin, a boy in whose life she is destined to become intricately entwined. Daisy stays at her Aunt Penn's country farmhouse for the summer with Edmond and her other cousins. They spend some idyllic weeks together--often alone with Aunt Penn away travelling in Norway. Daisy's cousins seem to have an almost telepathic bond, and Daisy is mesmerized by Edmond and soon falls in love with him.

But their world changes forever when an unnamed aggressor invades England and begins a years-long occupation. Daisy and Edmond are separated when soldiers take over their home, and Daisy and Piper, her younger cousin, must travel to another place to work. Their experiences of occupation are never kind and Daisy's pain, living without Edmond, is tangible.

Rosoff's writing style is both brilliant and frustrating. Her descriptions are wonderful, as is her ability to portray the emotions of her characters. However, her long sentences and total lack of punctuation for dialogue can be exhausting. Her narrative is deeply engaging and yet a bit unbelievable. The end of the book is dramatic, but too sudden. The book has a raw, unfinished feel about it, yet that somehow adds to the experience of reading it. (Age 14 and over) --John McLay.
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A first-time examination of sexual anorexia, an extreme fear of sexual intimacy and obsessive avoidance of sex, by the acknowledged leader in the treatment of compulsive sexual behavior and recovery.

Author Dr. Patrick Carnes begins by defining sexual anorexia and demonstrating how it and its parallel disorder, sexual addiction and compulsivity, often arise from a background of childhood sexual trauma, neglect, and other forms of abuse, Carnes explores the numerous dimensions of sexual health, examining key issues which must be addressed and resolved for recovery to proceed. Utilizing extensive research and elucidating case studies, Carnes develops concrete tasks and plans for restoring nurturing and sensuality, building fulfilling relationships, exploring intimacy, and creating healthy sexuality. Woven throughout the book are stories of recovery which illustrate sexual healing principles, model new behavior, and support motivation for change.Sexual Anorexia enables those suffering from this disorder to recognize that sex need not be a furtive enemy to be fought and defeated but, instead, a deeply sensual, passionate, fulfilling, and spiritual experience that all human beings are innately entitled to.

Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., the best-selling author of Out of the Shadows and Contrary to Love, is an internationally known speaker and writer on sexual dysfunction and recovery. He is currently Clinical Director of Sexual Disorders at The Meadows, a treatment facility that works with clients who deal with a wide range of behavior disorders, addiction, and psychological conditions..
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Critically acclaimed for Girl Culture and Fast Forward, Lauren Greenfield continues her exploration of contemporary female culture with Thin, a groundbreaking book about eating disorders. Greenfield's photographs are paired with extensive interviews and journal entries from twenty girls and women who are suffering from various afflictions. We meet 15-year-old Brittany, who is convinced that being thin is the only way to gain acceptance among her peers; Alisa, a divorced mother of two whose hatred of her body is manifested in her relentless compulsion to purge; Shelly, who has been battling anorexia for six years and has had a feeding tube surgically implanted in her stomach; as well as many others. Alongside these personal stories are essays on the sociology and science of eating disorders by renowned researchers Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Dr. David Herzog, and Dr. Michael Strober. These intimate photographs, frank voices, and thoughtful discussions combine to make Thin not only the first book of its kind but also a portrait of profound understanding..
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HOPE, HELP, AND A REAL EXPLANATION FOR THE DISEASE OF FOOD ADDICTION

If you have struggled with compulsive eating, dieting, and the guilt and conflict they bring, your life will be changed by this important, life-affirming, and astonishingly wise book.

Anne Katherine, a Certified Eating Disorders Therapist and former compulsive eater, explains the chemical reactions in the brain that work in conjunction with lifelong emotional conflicts to make food—particularly sugar and refined carbohydrates—such a comfort that it's almost like a drug.

Once you realize that your binge eating is a physical disease that can be treated, you can use the book's self-tests, exercises, examination of family issues, and complete recovery program for newfound understanding and confidence..
Price: $7.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Why does every one of my friends have an eating disorder, or, at the very least, a screwed-up approach to food and fitness?" writes journalist Courtney E. Martin. The new world culture of eating disorders and food and body issues affects virtually all -- not just a rare few -- of today's young women. They are your sisters, friends, and colleagues -- a generation told that they could "be anything," who instead heard that they had to "be everything." Driven by a relentless quest for perfection, they are on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted from overexercising, binging, purging, and depriving themselves to attain an unhealthy ideal.

An emerging new talent, Courtney E. Martin is the voice of a young generation so obsessed with being thin that their consciousness is always focused inward, to the detriment of their careers and relationships. Health and wellness, joy and love have come to seem ancillary compared to the desire for a perfect body. Even though eating disorders first became generally known about twenty-five years ago, they have burgeoned, worsened, become more difficult to treat and more fatal (50 percent of anorexics who do not respond to treatment die within ten years). Consider these statistics:

• Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders.
• Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders.
• More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would pre fer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat.
• More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid.
• Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.

In Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Martin offers original research from the front lines of the eating disorders battlefield. Drawn from more than a hundred interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, sociocultural experts, and others, her exposé reveals a new generation of "perfect girls" who are obsessive-compulsive, overachieving, and self-sacrificing in multiple -- and often dangerous -- new ways. Young women are "told over and over again," Martin notes, "that we can be anything. But in those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special. You are worth something. But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness."

With its vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters has the power both to shock and to educate. It is a true call to action and cannot be missed..
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Leslie Hiller's world is growing smaller. It used to be large enough to include her worrisome but loving mother, her doting father, her close friend Cavette, and all the other people and places that made up her upper-class, A+ life. But now it has shrunk to the size of a dinner plate full of food--which she scrapes out her bedroom window to avoid eating. Leslie, a perfectionist who loves to be in control, finds she can't control the fear that she will somehow fail to be the perfect daughter, perfect student, and perfect friend. So she decides to master the one thing over which she is certain she has complete domain: food. Even when it becomes apparent to everyone that her severe dieting has become a life-threatening habit, Leslie still can't stop: "I want to be happy. And being happy means being thin."

Author Deborah Hautzig, who recounts her own painful battle with anorexia in a very personal and heartfelt afterword, gives Leslie a frighteningly realistic voice that will ring true to teens everywhere. First published in 1981, Second Star to the Right has risen again to give a new generation of young adults valuable insight into the addictive world of anorexia, and hope for getting out from under the cruel thumb of the disease. (Ages 12 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert.
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Morgan Menzie takes readers through a harrowing but ultimately hopeful and inspiring account of her eating disorder Her amazing story is told through the journals she kept during her daily struggle with this addiction and disease. Her triumphs and tragedies all unfold together in this beautiful story of God's grace.

Features include: daily eating schedule, journal entries, prayers to God, poems, and what she wished she knew at the time. It's the true story of victory over a disease that is killing America's youth.

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