Loving Someone With An Eating Disorder

"[Author Dana] Harron’s emotional and practical advice for this growing global predicament comes highly recommended." —Library Journal In this compassionate guide, eating disorder expert Dana Harron offers hope to partners of people with eating disorders. You’ll discover ways to communicate with empathy and understanding, strategies for dealing with mealtime challenges, and tips to help you both find your way back to trust, love, and intimacy. If your loved one is one of millions of Americans who suffers from an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia, you may feel alone, without guidance or understanding. As a romantic partner, you need to know how to navigate issues such as parenting, sex and intimacy, and running a household. This book provides that help by addressing your uniquely complex and difficult situation, and provides much-needed support for growth and healing. In Loving Someone With an Eating Disorder, you’ll find valuable information about eating disorders, diagnostic categories, and common misconceptions. You’ll also learn about the importance of self-care and boundaries for yourself, and find writing and perspective-taking exercises to help you gain a greater understanding of your partner’s struggle. You’ll also learn skills to help you address specific problems, such as managing groceries and meals together, sex and intimacy issues, and concerns about parenting. Finally, you’ll find a practical discussion about treatment and recovery from disordered eating—making it clear that both you and your partner need healing—as well as information about seeking further support.

Do you suspect that your loved one has an eating disorder, or have you received the diagnosis already? The reality of eating disorders can feel devastating, but you need not feel despondent. When you are desperate and hopeless, you need honest, practical, everyday insight to help you understand the situation. Above all, you are looking for direction and hope. You want to know if the situation can turn around. Is there recovery and healing? This book will offer you hope. It will also expose the reality of eating disorders and shed light on how they take hold in the mind of the sufferer. You will come to understand your role as a witness and be guided through the feelings of guilt that most people experience. Your love and your constant, non-judgemental presence can be the strength your loved one needs to guide them through recovery. There is a lot of ignorance around eating disorders, and sufferers are often stigmatized, so many families don't know where to turn to and suffer in silence. This book explains the basics of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder in an easy to understand language. This book is not about theory; it has a practical approach. It includes warning signs, physiological, behavioral and psychological symptoms, and also debunks the common myths around eating disorders. It also offers you guidance on how to handle your loved one, and how to cope with a situation you probably don't understand. There are no easy answers for a person who loves someone who has an eating disorder, and this book does not claim to offer any easy solutions. It is a practical guide to beginning to understand a complicated mental illness that can, with the right approach, patience and love get turned around. Your loved one can recover and go into recovery. If your loved one has the right attitude, is offered love and support by family and friends, and keeps to a daily recovery program, recovery can be life-long, and they can lead a happy and healthy life.

A step by step plan that will heal lives and change obsesive relationships with food.

Skills-based Caring equips carers with the skills and knowledge needed to support those suffering from an eating disorder, and to help them to break free from the traps that prevent recovery. Through a coordinated approach, it offers detailed techniques and strategies, which aim to improve professionals' and carers' ability to build continuity of support for their loved ones. Using evidence-based research and personal experience, the authors advise the reader on a number of difficult areas in caring for someone with an eating disorder. This new and updated edition is essential reading for both professionals and families involved in the care and support of anyone with an eating disorder.

Eating disorders are perplexing, frustrating, and seem to make no sense to the families and friends of sufferers. The intent of this book is to explain why your loved one has an eating disorder so that you can understand these baffling disorders and help in the recovery process. Throughout the book you are taken into the world of eating disorders, shown what anorexia and bulimia mean to sufferers, and how they live day to day'obsessed with thoughts of calories, fat, body size, and weight. First, the reader is given an introduction to anorexia and bulimia. Here, the most commons signs and symptoms are discussed along with medical complications. In the second section the focus is on detailing the subjective experiences of those who suffer with eating disorders. This section will help you'as a parent, sibling, spouse, friend, or other loved one'understand what an eating disorder is like from the perspective of the person living with it. The final section deals with directions for treatment and what to expect as your loved one recovers.

Because I Feel Fat: Helping the Ones You Love Deal with an Eating Disorder is a comprehensive guide that gives family, friends, and loved ones a thorough understanding of what eating disorders are and how to help their loved ones recover. Easy to read and understand, Because I Feel Fat breaks down complex disorders into simple terms that gives everyone, from the sufferer and worried loved one, a common ground of understanding. Through painfully honest and heartbreaking first-person stories, gathered from interviews with women suffering from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, the reader learns what it is like to have an eating disorder, in hopes that this insight will answer questions and identify the keys to helping with recovery. "Because I Feel Fat...is a thorough and comprehensive book that will be of great value to both those who have an eating disorder and to their significant others. It fills a much needed gap in the resources that exist today by offering in detail the perspective of people who suffer from eating disorders." Marcia Yamashiro, RD Certified Eating Disorders Specialist

Eating disorders are one of the most physically and emotionally draining experiences an individual can go through in their life. These life functions include friendships, relationships, and romantic connections. Mental illness can push people toward isolation, but building connections with others and seeking help is a key part of recovery. Furthermore, telling others about one's eating disorder requires a degree of vulnerability that one may not feel comfortable exposing themselves to. As a partner or a friend of someone with disordered eating behaviors, you provide a key element of support and insight. This book will offer you hope. It will also expose the reality of eating disorders and shed light on how they take hold in the mind of the sufferer. You will come to understand your role as a witness and be guided through the feelings of guilt that most people experience. Your love and your constant, non-judgemental presence can be the strength your loved one needs to guide them through recovery. It also offers you guidance on how to handle your loved one, and how to cope with a situation you probably don't understand. There are no easy answers for a person who loves someone who has an eating disorder, and this book does not claim to offer any easy solutions. It is a practical guide to beginning to understand a complicated mental illness that can, with the right approach, patience and love get turned around. Your loved one can recover and go into recovery

People who suffer from mental illness rarely do so alone. Their families and loved ones face their own set of unique challenges-problems that deserve their own resources and sources of support. This is the first book written specifically to the loved ones of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It helps readers examine how OCD affects their lives and offers a straightforward system for building a healthier, more constructive relationship with OCD sufferers. The book contains basic information about OCD-its definition, cause, and symptoms-and a brief overview of treatments available for the disorder. After these introductory sections, the book focuses on ways readers can foster a healthy relationship with someone with OCD. It includes tips for increasing family involvement, making accommodation for the disorder in daily life, and creating an action plan for change using family contracts. The book also covers relational topics such as parenting and marriage, self-care, and support networking. Throughout, the book illustrates important points with the real-life stories of families living with OCD.