Lydia was 19 years old and enjoying university with a loving family and great friends when she became anorexic. The doctors told her that she would die.

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? A compulsive read, essential for anyone hoping to understand more about eating disorders and overcoming addiction.

Written for activists and educators, this cultural critique of female body image discusses the topic as it relates to sports, fashion, advertising, and propaganda, and offers practical strategies for those willing to fight unhealthy or unrealistic female images in society. Original. Tour.

Lydia was 19 years old and enjoying college with a loving family, great friends and a serious boyfriend when she became anorexic. The doctors told her that she would die.

Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia. Told entirely from Elena's perspective over a five-year period and cowritten with her mother, award-winning author Clare B. Dunkle, Elena's memoir is a fascinating and intimate look at a deadly disease, and a must read for anyone who knows someone suffering from an eating disorder.

Jenni is an average teenage girl about to graduate from high school who keeps a blog about her struggles to get a boyfriend and arguments with her best friend, Carly. But Jenni's blog is a bit different. She's a pro-ana/pro-mia blogger documenting her struggles with her eating disorder, keeping track of her weight, calorie intake and what her parents made her eat. When her best friend Carly discovers her blog, things start to blow up, only getting worse as Jenni meets Dani, who also suffers from an eating disorder. Jenni's story is tragic and sarcastic rolled into blog format and told through her posts and text messages.

Many people around the world have experienced signs that our angels are listening and helping us in our daily lives.

Imagine struggling with anorexia for seven years and finding yourself in the hospital weighing 56 pounds at 20 years old. Your parents are planning your funeral, and you are given little chance to live. Fast-forward one year. You are now 221 pounds and obese. Safety in Numbers: From 56 to 221 Pounds, My Battle with Eating Disorders is Brittany Burgunder's raw and captivating memoir of her 10-year battle with three forms of severe eating disorders -- anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. Taken from her extensive journals, she shares her uncensored and disturbing story of fear, sadness, chaos, disbelief, and darkness. In the end, though, her first-person account gives a message of hope and triumph. Safety in Numbers is a brutally honest and unique account highlighting a profound struggle at both ends of the weight spectrum with eating disorders. Brittany's battle shows that a happy and healthy life is possible no matter how hopeless the situation may seem. It provides a firsthand look into an unthinkable journey that will mesmerize, move, and inspire readers. Ultimately, it is a story of survival and strength -- no matter what the struggle.

An editor at This American Life reveals the searing story of the secret binge-eating that dominated her adolescence and shapes her still. “Her tale of compulsion and healing is candid and powerful.”—People NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE For almost thirty years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret. When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents’ abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But in the fallout from her parents’ breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from “peculiarity to pathology.” Susan entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success—she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse—she’d binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again—and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to “quit food.” Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of narrative and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.

This is the story of the incredible journey of Melissa, her family, and her community, and the challenges each faced. Melissa’s condition, Trisomy 18, is one that carries a poor prognosis and her story is one of unconditional love, hope, despair, and joy, as she struggled to hold onto her fragile life. For Melissa’s family, life was extremely challenging for her short nine years. Her story gives the reader an insight into their lives and how each of them coped in their own way. Josie, Melissa’s mother, in writing Melissa’s story, opens her heart and innermost feelings and thoughts, enabling the reader to gain an understanding of how, despite the many challenges Melissa faced, each achievement was a milestone to be proud of. -Shirley Wass- Parent to Parent New Zealand