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 eventual high-profile marriage to Hollywood mega-star Ellen DeGeneres.
But behind her success, Portia was plagued by self doubt, depression, anorexia and bulimia. Starving herself and terrified of being 'oute... 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 thirteen-year-old Chadwick watched with sadness as her daughter started showing signs of the body insecurities that she had hoped to shield her from. And when Dara found herself overweight and unhappy she struggled ... 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, inspirational memoir. An extraordinary story, it is also a common one - is there a woman in the western world who has a normal relationship with food? It is a compulsive read, essential for anyone hoping to understand... 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 appeal to the millions of girls and women (and not a few men) who have a love/hate relationship with food and their bodies, and anyone who has knowingly (or unconsciously) used food to try to fill the hole in their ... 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 thinner, or quite a lot thinner. Eating Myself is a wise, witty and often disturbing memoir, charting one woman's uneasy struggle to face her demons.

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 years on, now 22, here is her tale, powerfully told in a mix of memoir, cultural criticism and psychological examination. Here is the fury of a clever woman made stupid by her culture, who threw away her teenage ... 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 eating disorders are incurable. Claude-Pierre has made a personal commitment to dispel this damaging myth. Having cured her own two daughters of anorexia, you might say hers was a vested interest. The Secret Langu... 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 in this humorous appraisal of our attitudes towards eating disorders and obesity. Not easy for someone who still can't be alone unsupervised in a room with a packet of chocolate biscuits. Charting Arabella's n... 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 dispels many commonly held myths about these diseases with the persuasive conclusion that anorexia is a result of personality. Key revelations include: the temperament required for eating disorders, the long-t... 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 Compulsive Disorder and then, at fourteen, turned into anorexia. In the first part of the book, Jo Kingsley writes with raw intensity about Alice's illness and what she hopes is her recovery. Jo describes her jour... 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 'it's not about the food', even as a family watches a child waste away before their eyes. In Brave Girl Eating Harriet Brown describes how her family, with the support of an open-minded paediatrician and a ther... 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.