Eating Issues > Personal Stories - Eating Disorders

After her 2001 suicide attempt, broadcast live on a Webcam, Pershall realized the need to heal her mind and body. She found a revolutionary cure, met a tattoo artist, and discovered the healing power of body modification.

Born Mandy Rodgers just outside of Geelong, Portia de Rossi is one of Hollywood's most intriguing and talked about stars. Finding early success in the Australian film Sirens, Portia went on to star in the hit television series Ally McBeal, as well as the cult hit Arrested Development, launching her Hollywood career - and even... read more

When it became clear that Amanda Webster's eleven-year-old son Riche was not just a little too skinny but dangerously ill, people were often surprised. Do boys get anorexia? they would ask. And then, How did he get it? That was the question Amanda asked herself, too. She had trained as a doctor; she knew that every disease ha... read more

'Helping our daughters love their bodies - even when we don't love our own.' There is a question that plagues mothers everywhere: If I'm critical of my body how can I teach my daughter to feel good about hers? In this heartfelt and helpful book Dara Chadwick offers a pathway to a solution. The mother of a talented thirt... read more

Bright, popular, pretty and successful, Grace Bowman had the world at her feet. So what drove her to starve herself nearly to death at the age of 18? And what, more importantly, made her stop? A grippingly honest account of life with anorexia nervosa, "A Shape of My Own" is Grace's hearbreaking, shocking and, finally, inspira... read more

From an award-winning author comes a darkly riveting, compulsively readable and, at times, heartbreaking memoir by a brilliant writer who is obsessed with food - and with being fat. Fat Girl shares a powerfully honest account of obesity that, until now, no one else has been brave enough to tell, an account that will appea... read more

Candida Crewe's relationship with food is anxiety-ridden. In fact, is there anything 'normal' about any woman's relationship with their weight? Most women, even those who have never had any kind of eating disorder, hover on the edge. They are keenly aware of what they eat, and think they would be happier if they were a bit th... read more

At the age of four Marya Hornbacher looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At nine, she was bulimic. At 12, she was anorexic. By the time she was 18, she'd been hospitalized five times, once in a mental asylum. Her doctors and her parents had given up on her; they were watching her die. But Marya decided to live. Four ye... read more

What makes Claude-Pierre's treatment of anorexia and bulimia revolutionary? Perhaps it's that the astonishingly high success rate of even the most chronic cases at Claude-Pierre's Montreux Clinic (only sufferers near death who have not been helped by doctors and hospitals are admitted) defies the common misconception that eat... read more

The hapless and hilarious tale of a life lived under the constant and ruthless reign of a chocolate biscuit! Lumped into 'the too fat for potatoes group' by her mother, carefree eating isn't something Arabella Weir had much experience of growing up. Written with startling frankness, Arabella unravels her own eating history ... read more

Aimee Liu, who wrote Solitaire, the first-ever memoir of anorexia, in 1979, returns to the subject nearly three decades later and shares her story and those of the many women in her age group of life beyond this life-altering ailment. She has extensively researched the origins and effects of both anorexia and bulimia, and... read more

"Alice in the Looking Glass" is a moving memoir written by a mother and her anorexic daughter, Alice. At ten, Alice was an easy-going, free spirited child with a tremendous sense of humour, adored by everyone who knew her. At eleven, she started to develop her 'rigmaroles' - little rituals which grew into severe Obsessive Com... read more

Millions of families are affected by eating disorders, which usually strike young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty. But current medical practice ties these families' hands when it comes to helping their children recover. Conventional medical wisdom dictates separating the patient from the family and insists that ... read more

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Portraying a young woman's struggle with anorexia, the author draws on her own experiences of an eating disorder to give a powerful and candid story of hope and survival.

"You've eaten too much, you fat pig." When Jessica was thirteen years old, she met the Monkey. The Monkey lived inside her: a driving, fiery voice telling her that thinness was the only way. The only way to be safe, to be good, to be acceptable and above all, to escape from the cold, looming threat of approaching adulthoo... read more