Giving Wisdom: Books on Eating Disorders

Reading an eating disorder memoir is a potent experience, but there are lots of them out there. Caroline Knapp goes above and beyond the genre, using her own experience as a way to move toward understanding of something bigger. Appetities certainly informs about the dark corners of life with an eating disorder, and it also does some necessary grappling with the larger question of desire for women. Where does it come from? And where does it lead, if an eating disorder, for example, is not an option?

How do we eat? As though we're sleepwalking, most of the time. Rather than taking an approach to food that requires deprivation, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch invite us to a new layer of enjoyment in Intuitive Eating. Far from a license for indulgence, Intuitive Eating represents a path to knowing what you're eating much more accurately by paying attention to your body as you eat. The results can be profound: Many find out that they don't even like some of the foods that they thought they enjoyed! And readers can learn how to get the most enjoyment possible from the foods they do enjoy.

In short, this is a book that teaches you how to trust your body. You'd be surprised how well your body knows how to maintain a healthy weight.

Fathers can have a profound impact on their daughters' self-image and, more specifically, body image. A negative comment can be the trigger that unlocks the development of an eating disorder.

Author Margo Maine, however, does not write to criticize men, but to advocate for them. Maine sees immense value in positive family interactions and goes out of her way to describe how they can occur, reducing the risk of eating disorders.

Cutting and other forms of self-harm often accompany eating disorders. Given the powerful negative messages that exist in the minds of those with eating issues, it's not surprising that cutting, also driven at times by negative messages, would be present as well.

Vanessa Vega's memoir Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light shows us the back-breaking problem faced by many in the shadow of these messages. How does a person live with constant internal attack and a sense of worthlessness while hearing other messages that continually demand perfection? Vega describes her own cutting and eating disorder and also invites us in to her transforming therapy sessions.

The forgotten population in eating disorder discussion is men. Long known as "women's diseases," eating disorders carry a special (and undeserved) stigma when men are the strugglers.

Men and eating disorders, though, are more attached than ever. The avenues by which men end up in disordered eating can be different from those for women, but the eating issues are just as significant.

Don't believe the "happily ever after" endings to many memoirs? Me neither. And neither does author Aimee Liu in this interview-based work written 30 years after her own memoir about recovery from anorexia. Liu's open eyes benefit the reader by taking the bloom off the fairy tale of simplistic recovery.

Why is it good to be realistic about recovery? Because a realistic view allows the gains a person makes in recovery to be relished for what they are (genuine progress) rather than what they aren't — a move to a life of perfection. Those with eating disorders are susceptible to still seeking perfection, but Liu is having none of it in this work. Instead, she offers words that are gentle and firm, and thus both challenging and reassuring.