Eating Disorder Book Recommendations
ANAD’s eating disorder book recommendations are curated to educate, motivate and inspire anyone affected by an eating disorder. Many of these books are written by our board, staff, and clinical consultants. If you would like to see your eating disorder book included on this page, please contact us at .
- 8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder
- Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat
- The Longest Match
- The Diet Survivor’s Handbook
- Body Kindness
- Good Enough
- Beauty Sick
- Positively Caroline
- Loving Someone with an Eating Disorder
- By Their Side
- The Daily Dare for Eating Disorders
- Hope for Recovery
- Starvation
8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder
by Carolyn Costin (ANAD Clinical Consultant) and Gwen Schubert Grabb
A unique and personal look into treatment of eating disorders, written by a therapist and her former patient, now a therapist herself.
This is no ordinary book on how to overcome an eating disorder. The authors bravely share their unique stories of suffering from and eventually overcoming their own severe eating disorders. Interweaving personal narrative with the perspective of their own therapist-client relationship, their insights bring an unparalleled depth of awareness into just what it takes to successfully beat this challenging and seemingly intractable clinical issue.
For anyone who has suffered, their family and friends, and other helping professionals, this book should be by your side. With great compassion and clinical expertise, Costin and Grabb walk readers through the ins and outs of the recovery process, describing what therapy entails, clarifying the common associated emotions such as fear, guilt, and shame, and, most of all, providing motivation to seek help if you have been discouraged, resistant, or afraid. The authors bring self-disclosure to a level not yet seen in an eating disorder book and offer hope to readers that full recovery is possible.
Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat
by Stephanie Covington Armstrong (ANAD Board Member)
The Longest Match
by Betsy Brenner (ANAD Mentor)
‘Eating disorders.’ Most of us instantly picture a teenaged or college aged girl when we see those words. After all, doesn’t age immunize women from the body image, weight concerns and eating disorders that plague the younger years? Truth is that, over 15% women at midlife and beyond suffer from eating disorders, surpassing the number affected by breast cancer! These are serious, life threatening and heartbreaking illnesses at any age. This story needs to be told and Betsy Brenner does just that.
The Diet Survivor’s Handbook
by Judith Matz, LCSW and Ellen Frankel, LCSW
The best non-diet book for those looking to embrace a positive and satisfying relationship with food.
If you’re looking for diets that work, STOP RIGHT THERE. Dieting is hazardous to your health. Diets don’t work and they won’t work, and yo-yo dieting will make you fatter.
You can step off the destructive diet bandwagon and reclaim your self-esteem, positive body image and a happy, healthy life. These 60 inspiring lessons will give you the tools you need to change your relationship with food, your body and yourself.
This book can show you how to:
- Never diet again and allow your weight to stabilize
- Stop feeling guilty about eating the foods you love
- Free up all that mental energy to be more productive and have more fun in life
- Get in touch with physical hunger and learn to love your body
- Stop stress eating, compulsive eating and emotional eating and instead practice mindful eating
Give up the vicious cycle and stop overeating.
Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel are therapists specializing in eating problems and weight issues. Each holds a Master’s degree in Social Work and has over 20 years of clinical experience in the field of eating disorders. They are the authors of Beyond a Shadow of a Diet.
Body Kindness
by Rebecca Scritchfield
Create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame.
Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did?
This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body.
Body Kindness is based on four principles.
WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more
HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head
WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values
WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life
With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can’t control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. It’s the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.
Good Enough
by Jen Petro-Roy
A young girl with an eating disorder must find the strength to recover in this moving middle-grade novel from Jen Petro-Roy.
Before she had an eating disorder, twelve-year-old Riley was many things: an aspiring artist, a runner, a sister, and a friend.
But now, from inside the inpatient treatment center where she’s receiving treatment for anorexia, it’s easy to forget all of that. Especially since under the influence of her eating disorder, Riley alienated her friends, abandoned her art, turned running into something harmful, and destroyed her family’s trust.
If Riley wants her life back, she has to recover. Part of her wants to get better. As she goes to therapy, makes friends in the hospital, and starts to draw again, things begin to look up.
But when her roommate starts to break the rules, triggering Riley’s old behaviors and blackmailing her into silence, Riley realizes that recovery will be even harder than she thought. She starts to think that even if she does “recover,” there’s no way she’ll stay recovered once she leaves the hospital and is faced with her dieting mom, the school bully, and her gymnastics-star sister.
Written by an eating disorder survivor and activist, Good Enough is a realistic depiction of inpatient eating disorder treatment, and a moving story about a girl who has to fight herself to survive.
Beauty Sick
by Renee Engeln PhD
An award-winning Northwestern University psychology professor reveals how the cultural obsession with women’s appearance is an epidemic that harms women’s ability to get ahead and to live happy, meaningful lives, in this powerful, eye-opening work in the vein of Naomi Wolf, Peggy Orenstein, and Sheryl Sandberg.
Today’s young women face a bewildering set of contradictions when it comes to beauty. They don’t want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women but hungrily consume the very outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture’s absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a “skinny arm.” They understand that what they see isn’t real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Yet these same young women are fierce fighters for the issues they care about. They are ready to fight back against their beauty-sick culture and create a different world for themselves, but they need a way forward.
In Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. Combining scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages, she makes clear that to truly fulfill their potential, we must break free from cultural forces that feed destructive desires, attitudes, and words—from fat-shaming to denigrating commentary about other women. She provides inspiration and workable solutions to help girls and women overcome negative attitudes and embrace their whole selves, to transform their lives, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change their world.
Positively Caroline
by Caroline Adams Miller
Positively Caroline: How I Beat Bulimia for Good and Found Real Happiness is one of the first books of its kind to tackle the subject of how eating disorder survivors can and do create lives of joy and health that persist past the early years of recovery. Some media reports have led people to believe that there is an “addictive personality” that careens from addiction to addiction without ever experiencing lasting wellness, but Caroline’s story is a demonstration that many people can, and do, put food into its proper perspective and then go on to handle other life challenges without sliding backwards into food abuse or turning to other addictive substances or behaviors.
Positively Caroline is the sequel to the bestselling My Name is Caroline (Doubleday 1988), which was the first major autobiography to cover recovery from bulimia, and which continues to sell well today. The book was an Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and was reviewed in countless newspapers and magazines all over the world, and featured on television and radio programs. Tens of thousands of people say that the book helped them to have hope for themselves or someone close to them, and that it gave them the courage to speak up and get the help they needed.
Loving Someone with an Eating Disorder
by Dana Harron, PsyD
In this compassionate guide, eating disorder expert Dana Harron offers hope to partners of people with eating disorders. You’ll discover ways to communicate with empathy and understanding, strategies for dealing with mealtime challenges, and tips to help you both find your way back to trust, love, and intimacy.
If your loved one is one of millions of Americans who suffers from an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, you may feel alone, without guidance or understanding. As a romantic partner, you need to know how to navigate issues such as parenting, sex and intimacy, and running a household. This book provides that help by addressing your uniquely complex and difficult situation, and provides much-needed support for growth and healing.
By Their Side
by Lara Lyn Bell
In the depths of illness, it can be difficult to believe recovery is possible. Overcoming an eating disorder is one of the hardest battles any of us can fight—not only for the afflicted person but also for the friends, family members, and loved ones suffering beside them, wondering how they can help. By Their Side understands. The parents, siblings, friends, doctors, psychologists, and survivors who lend their voices to this book have all witnessed the destructive power of an eating disorder firsthand. By sharing their powerful testimony, expert advice, tips, and technical knowledge, they hope to empower you to understand what your loved one is going through and how you can provide the best possible support. As you read, you may also follow along in the companion book, Working by Their Side, a workbook for guided journaling, recording observations, and compiling resources for your loved one and yourself. No matter how dark the future seems, there is hope for healing. Let By Their Side help you find the way. Learn more at bytheirsidebook.com.
The Daily Dare for Eating Disorders
by Linda Kaye
A book to help those struggling with an eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia, or even other addictive illnesses. designed to provide practical help and tips for overcoming the battle. Through interactive activities and a daily dare, Linda challenges the reader to carry out a hands-on activity to help fight the voice of “Ed.” It is the perfect recovery companion, providing inspiration, compassionate, and meaningful messages to inspire and promote hope for a journey that can, at times, feel hopeless.
Hope for Recovery
by Catherine Brown and Christina Tinker
The statistics regarding eating disorders are staggering. 30 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from eating disorders and every 62 minutes, a person dies as a direct result of an eating disorder. In fact, there is a higher mortality rate from eating disorders than from any other mental illness.
Co-editors Catherine Brown, a writer, and Christina Tinker, corporate storyteller and courage cultivator, are among the 60% of people who have recovered from eating disorders. To help others who struggle, they have co-edited and contributed to a compilation of essays by women and men who have recovered from eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder.
The book’s diverse essays emphasize each writer’s journey to recovery, providing hope for individuals suffering with an eating disorder and their loved ones. In addition to these highly personal, vulnerable essays, the book includes informative sections with insights from mental health professionals on topics such as how families can help loved ones affected by eating disorders and males with eating disorders.
Starvation
by Molly Fennig
16-year-old Wes McCoy is not the favorite child. He does not have a wrestling scholarship to Stanford nor does he live up to the family legacy as an athlete, unlike his brother, Jason. But when Jason dies in a car accident on the way to the state high school wrestling championship, Wes turns to food to give him the control over his life he didn’t have before, and the kind of success he never tasted.
Told through alternating past and present chapters revolving around Jason’s death, Wes must come to terms with more than Jason’s death. There’s Caila, a defiant girl who introduces him to the painful pleasure of starving. And there’s Collin, Wes’s best friend who speaks in Shakespearean insults and with whom his relationship is irreparably damaged. But most of all, Wes must take back control from his eating disorder as he learns more about himself and the mystery surrounding Jason’s accident, before he loses his life and those closest to him.
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