Eating with Your Anorexic: How My Child Recovered Through Family-Based Treatment and Yours Can Too

Thank you Laura Collins, for sharing your experience, your trials, and finally your approach and its success. Along with this book, which helped me realize that I had to take charge and NOW, I recommend "Help your teenager beat an eating disorder" and "the parent's guide to eating disorders".

My granddaughter is recovering from Anorexia. I heard about this book and, since it sounded like what my children were doing with their daughter, went to the nearby bookstore to pick it up. When I took the book to the counter, the young lady at the register looked at it and then read the fly leaf and part of the intro (a slow day at the book store). Then she told me that she wished there had been books like this when she was sick with Anorexia. She told me her parents would be arrested today for what they did when she was a teenager; they gave her marijuana to stimulate her appetite and get her to eat. It worked, she said. Well, there's nothing in "Eating With Your Anorexic" about marijuana, but there is a lot about eating. The story the author relates is exactly what my children encountered; therapist after therapist telling them not to make their starving child eat. This seemed crazy to me then and it seemed crazy to Mrs. Collins also. Rather than watch their girl starve, the author and her husband began using a therapeutic approach called the Maudsley Method in which the parents work as part of the cure and support their child in re-feeding. Here's the best part though---she got better. I cannot imagine what the previous negative reviewer was thinking. She claims that Mrs. Collins believes that simply making the sufferer eat would cure anorexia. She never says that. What she says, in chapter after chapter of lovely prose, is: that she and her husband refused to believe that they caused their daughter's disease; they didn't believe that an adolescent sufferer could "choose" to get better and that they refused to watch the child they love starve. I've seen Mrs. Collin's methods work first hand with my own grandchild. This book is an inspiration for any parent who believes they can help their child recover in a safe, secure, supportive home environment.

In her vivid memoir, Collins empowers parents to re-feed their starving child. Anorexia nervosa is the last serious mental illness widely blamed on parenting. But, like autism and schizophrenia, experts now realize that anorexia is a neurological disorder. Triggered by low body weight, neuroendocrine changes in appetite regulators make eating difficult, and other brain changes lead to denial of starvation and restless activity. These odd changes probably helped Pleistocene foragers to migrate when food was depleted. Now these archaic adaptations result in illness and death. The only cure is weight gain, but many parents, thinking that they are somehow to blame, back off just when their child needs them most. Collins' gentle, loving resolve shows how families can help their anorexic recover.

I am lucky enough to have found the kind of treatment Laura Collins describes for my daughter (at the Clinic mentioned in her book). The writer's struggles and sorrows are so familiar, reassuring and inspiring. Some of the hardest things for recovering patient and family are people's unintentional but hurtful and demeaning comments. The patient did not cause the disease and you are not the reason she has the disease. Most people still cannot understand or believe that statement. "Eating with Your Anorexic" is a book I will reread, especiall the last pages, 'Parent to Parent: What I would say to you over coffee'.

Finally, Laura Collins dispels the myth of the perfectionistic, weight-obsessed, "anorexagenic" mother and suggests that parents can be the cure for rather than the cause of eating disorders. Readers will find the story of this author's daughter and her journey through anorexia insightful and encouraging.