Recovery Books

Books on Recovery

8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder : Effective Strategies from Therapeutic Practice and Personal Experience (8 Keys to Mental Health)
By Carolyn Costin
This popular self-help book has become a must read in many circles due to its wide acclaim by sufferers as well as significant others and professionals. The authors have received countless e-mails thanking them for this practical guide that offers inspiration and hope. Costin and Grabb, her former patient turned therapist, serve as examples of what being fully recovered is like and how to get there. They provide strategies and assignments to help sufferers work towards recovery while helping those who love them understand, communicate with and support them on this journey. Therapists are using the 8 Keys book in their groups, treatment programs and colleges are assigning it as required reading and the authors have been asked to translate it into Korean, Spanish, Croatian and Japanese. Quotes from sufferers reveal how this book gets inside the eating disorder mindset in order to transform it; “I never felt so understood in my whole life, it was as if you crawled inside my head. I also never had hope before but now I do.”
296 pages, paperback, 2011
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8 Keys to End Emotional Eating
By Howard S. Farkas
174 pages, paperback, 2019
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Beating Ana : How to Outsmart Your Eating Disorder and Take Your Life Back
by Shannon Cutts
Beating Ana gives the reader a look into how Shannon Cutts beat her 15-year battle with anorexia. She takes you through the process of her disorder and her recovery, allowing you to relate to her first-hand experiences. By sharing this recovery process with Shannon, it will aid in your recovery as you learn to move past your eating disorder.
236 pages, paperback, 2009
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Befriending Your Body: A Self-Compassionate Approach to Freeing Yourself from Disordered Eating
by Ann Saffi Biasetti
176 pages, paperback, 2018
[asa book]1611806089[/asa]

Better is not so far away Decide to Recover from Bingeing, Starving, or Cutting
by Melissa Groman
304 pages, paperback, 2014
[asa book]0071840842[/asa]

Body Mindful Yoga: Create a Powerful and Affirming Relationship with Your Body
By Robert Butera & Jennifer Kreatsoulas
240 pages, paperback, 2018
[asa book]0738756733[/asa]

Body Myth : Adult Women and the Pressure to be Perfect
by Margot Maine and Joe Kelly
In the relatively short history of eating disorders treatment, the overwhelming majority of patients have been teenage girls and young women. But now, clinical psychologists like Margo Maine are treating increasing numbers of women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond suffering from disordered eating or the preoccupation with achieving a perfect body. The first book to focus exclusively on adult women suffering from disordered eating and body image despair, this unique, jargon-free guide helps women and their loved ones understand eating disorders and the obsession with perfection, the different eating disorder triggers that adult women experience, and the various treatments available.
279 pages, hardcover, 2005
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Desperately Seeking Self: An Inner Guidebook for People with Eating Problems, 2nd edition
By Viola Fodor
184 pages, hardcover/paper, 2019
[asa book]1684423147[/asa]

Eating in the Light of the Moon : How women can transform their relationships with food through myths, metaphors & storytelling
By Anita Johnston
Eating in the Light of the Moon uses myths and folk tales from around the world to get to the heart of the core issues that underlie struggles with disordered eating.  In a gentle encouraging manner, this book looks at what it means to be a woman in today’s culture and how that affects our relationships with food at very subtle levels.  Infusing her approach with metaphor, allegory, and storytelling, Dr. Anita Johnston allows the reader to view disordered eating in a new light–one that incorporates a woman’s body, mind, and spirit, and can support her in finding a more natural and sustaining relationship with food.  Although lyrical, poetic and spiritual, Johnston’s approach is eminently practical, as she identifies essential skills needed to break free from the struggle, and presents options that may not have been considered before. This is a book for all women with eating difficulties—and for those who love them.
224 pages, paperback, 2000
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ED 101 : The Facts About Eating Disorders… (DVD)
30 min., 2012

The Emotional Eaters Repair Manual: A Practical Mind-Body-Spirit Guide for Putting an End to Overeating and Dieting
By Julie M. Simon
This well-received self-help book, based on the author’s Twelve Week Emotional Eating Recovery Program, offers a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to the resolution of emotional eating. When we eat in the absence of physical hunger cues, eat beyond fullness, or regularly choose unhealthy comfort foods, something is out of balance somewhere.

In The Emotional Eater’s Repair Manual, Julie Simon offers a compassion-filled, step-by-step guide for practicing and mastering five self-care skills, five body-balancing principles and five soul-care practices. Simon states that “the primary cause of emotional eating is your disconnection from yourself.” She gently guides the reader in reconnecting to herself, paying attention to her mind, body and spirit signals and responding appropriately to meet her needs without turning to food for soothing, comfort, pleasure, distraction or excitement.
360 pages, paperback, 2012
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Ending the Diet Mindset: Reclaim a Healthy and Balanced Relationship with Rood and Body Image
By Becca Clegg
177 pages, paperback, 2018
[asa book]1631832190[/asa]

Expressing Disorder: Journey to Recovery, A Documentary (DVD)
David Alvarado/Structure Films
2013

French Toast for Breakfast, New Revised 2nd Edition
by Mary Anne Cohen
Check out our exclusive interview with Mary Anne Cohen by clicking here
Emotional eating is about being hungry from the heart, not from the stomach. In French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating, Mary Anne Cohen illustrates how we can use food to distract, detour, or deny our inner problems. She describes how the language of food and fat is a symbolic communication in which we recruit our bodies to express what we cannot utter in words. Ms. Cohen, Director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders, believes that every person’s eating disorder is as unique as a fingerprint. She offers a wide range of healing approaches designed to be custom tailored to the individual needs of the reader. French Toast offers a path for recovery by decoding and unlocking emotional eating triggers such as loneliness, anger, shame, depression, rejection, sexuality, and grief. Her chapter “Overcoming the Fear of Success” helps identify personal roadblocks to resolving and sustaining recovery. She examines the no-diet/no deprivation approach, the addiction model, and the role of medication, and offers insightful looks at relapse and the power of psychotherapy to resolve emotional eating. French Toast for Breakfast is richly illustrated with examples and verbatim transcripts of actual group and individual therapy sessions selected from Ms. Cohen’s years as a psychotherapist. They take readers directly into the treatment room and make them part of the healing process. Readers will declare peace with emotional eating by learning to sink their teeth into life, not into their obsession with food!
246 pages, paperback, 2016
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Getting Better Bite by Bite, Second Edition: A Survival Kit for Sufferers of Bulimia Nervosa and Binge Eating Disorders
By Ulrike Schmidt, Janet Treasure & June Alexander
182 pages, hardcover/paperback, 2015
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Group : Voices Within the Journey of Eating Disorder Recovery
By Annette Aberdale-Kendra
229 pages, paperback, 2012
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Healing Your Hungry Heart : Recovering from your Eating Disorder
By Joanna Poppink, MFT
This step-by-step self-help book lays out essential guidelines for creating and supporting your ongoing recovery. It is written in conversational style, covering diverse topics, many of which are seldom mentioned in other ED books, such as spiritual depth, sexuality, the great terror, and triggers as teachers.
245 pages, paperback, 2011
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Health at Every Size : The Surprising Truth About Your Weight
By Linda Bacon
Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight, by Linda Bacon, PhD, emphasizes that we can all make nourishing health choices, regardless of what we weigh. The book focuses on diet, nutrition and self-care, encouraging men and women to tune in to their body’s cues of hunger and response to exercise and forget about a certain number or society’s ideals. It also challenges conventionally accepted ideas that you need to be thin in order to be healthy, or that sustainable weight loss is achievable through dieting. You can read more about the size acceptance movement and strategies for reclaiming your body in Linda’s next book Body Respect, due out this fall. 400 pages, paperback, 2010
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Lasagna for Lunch : Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating
By Mary Anne Cohen
In her second book, Lasagna for Lunch: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating, Mary Anne Cohen explores why for many people, trusting food may be safer than trusting people. Food never leaves you, never rejects you, never criticizes you, never dies. It is the only relationship where we get to say when, where, and how much! Food is also the cheapest, most available, and most socially sanctioned mood-altering drug we can get. Ms. Cohen, Director of The New York Center for Eating Disorders for over forty years, gently guides readers to reclaim the vitality of their inner selves, taking back what has been hidden by a consuming relationship with food. Isolation with pastry, she says, needs to be replaced with intimacy with people. The author shows how emotional eating freezes feelings and pain and keeps people stuck. Specific healing strategies are described to help the thawing process. Lasagna for Lunch delves into issues of frozen grief and mourning, sexual abuse, substance abuse, men and eating disorders, healing negative body image, night-time binge eating syndrome, and pregnancy, as well as eating disorders in older women. Replete with in-depth case illustrations culled from her forty years of experience treating compulsive overeating, bulimia, and anorexia, Lasagna for Lunch offers a frank, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the healing experience of psychotherapy for emotional eating. The book reads like part novel, part detective story, with the author’s accumulated wisdom presented clearly and with humor. Lasagna for Lunch is a unique, information-packed mini-encyclopedia on eating disorders that will help emotional eaters and therapists alike.
348 pages, paperback, 2013
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Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder: Reclaim Yourself, Regain Your Health, Recover for Good
By Johanna S. Kandel
Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder, by Johanna S. Kandel is an inspiring collection of the recovery tools and techniques that can be used along the path to recovery.  Johanna speaks about real issues, raw emotions, fear, and motivation that are all a part of the struggle to be free from an eating disorder.  This book is truly a guide back to health, to find one’s self along that journey, and it provides the wisdom to strengthen the healthy, positive voice that lies within anyone going through this struggle.
240 pages, paperback, 2010
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Love, Anger, Power, and Food! A Guidebook for Women
By Shoshana Kobrin
Food is only too often a woman’s enemy – and her best friend. This unique guidebook addresses the underlying reasons for difficulties with food and weight. It offers practical tools for untangling frustration, transforming outmoded eating patterns and discovering satisfaction in the relationship with food, body – and life itself.
116 pages, paperback, 2013
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Maintaining Recovery from Eating Disorders: Avoiding Relapse and Recovering Life
By Naomi Feigenbaum
Expert advice from professionals in the field provide a wide range of skills designed to cope with eating disorders. Real life stories illustrate the experience of recovery from these. This title is an indispensable guide to practical methods for overcoming the emotional hurdles associated with recovery.
240 pages, paperback, 2012
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Making Peace with Your Plate : Eating Disorder Recovery
By Robyn Cruze & Espra Andrus
Whether you suffer from an eating disorder, care about someone who does, or seek to professionally help those with this deadly illness, this is a powerful and passionate resource providing identification and education. This book smashes the lies of the illness and equips the reader with concrete tools to help overcome an eating disorder. Robyn, fully recovered from an eating disorder after eighteen years with the illness, and Espra, a veteran eating disorder therapist, take the readers through an inspirational process to show that becoming fully recovered is possible! Learn to take back your power, rebuild a trusting relationship with food/body and reclaim your life forever.
224 pages, paperback, 2013
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Making Weight : Men’s Conflicts with Food, Weight, Shape & Appearance
By Arnold Andersen, Leigh Cohn & Thomas Holbrook
256 pages, paperback, 2000
[asa book]0936077352[/asa]

Midlife Eating Disorders : Your Journey to Recovery
By Cynthia M. Bulik
352 pages, paperback, 2013
[asa book]080271269X[/asa]

Nourish: How to Heal your Relationship with Food, Body, and Self
By Heidi Schauster
228 pages, paperback, 2018
[asa book]0999512005[/asa]

No Weigh! A Teen’s Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom
By Signe Darpinian, Wendy Sterling & Shelley Aggarwal
192 pages, paperback, 2019
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Prevention and Recovery from Eating Disorders in Type 1 Diabetes Injecting Hope
By Ann Goebel-Fabbri
152 pages, hardcover/paperback, 2017
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Recover your Perspective: A Guide to Understanding Your Eating Disorder and Creating Recovery Using CBT, DBT and ACT
By Janean Anderson
306 pages, paperback, 2018
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Recovering : Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa (DVD)
42 min. 2011

Recovery Is Stories of Healing
By Liana Rosenman and Kristina Saffran
140 pages, paperback/kindle 2015

The Recovery Mama Guide to your Eating Disorder Recovery in Pregnancy and Postpartum
By Linda Shanti McCabe
208 pages, paperback, 2019
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Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders
By Aimee Liu
240 pages, 2011
[asa book]1590308778[/asa]

Self-Esteem Tools for Recovery
By Lindsey Hall & Leigh Cohn
128 pages, paperback, 1990
[asa book]0936077085[/asa]

Someday Melissa – Includes Guided Discussions for Recovery (DVD)
42 min., 2011

Speaking Out About ED (DVD)
42 min., 2011

Starting Monday : Seven Keys to a Permanent, Positive Relationship with Food
By Karen Koenig
If your life is spent going from super self-care to “I don’t care,” especially around food, this book will help you make sense of your yo-yoing patterns and turn them around.  When you do all the right things for yourself, then stop doing them, and start again, it’s hard not to feel frustrated and even just a little bit crazy.  This book will explain how your on-again-off-again behaviors are rooted in underlying (generally unconscious) mental conflicts.  It will help you resolve mixed feelings about intimacy and sexuality, self-comfort, self-worth, maintaining health, what is enough, identity, and creating change so that you can more easily attain and maintain your eating, fitness, and self-care goals.
280 pages, paperback, 2013
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Stories I Tell My Patients: 101 Myths, Metaphors, Fables & Tall Tales for Eating Disorders Recovery
By Arnold Anderson with Leigh Cohn
256 pages, paperback, 2016
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Surviving Disordered Eating: One Bite at a Time
By Barbi Webber & Carrie Thiel
132 pages, paperback, 2015
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Telling Ed No! and other practical tools to conquer your eating disorder and find freedom
By Cheryl Kerrigan
189 pages, paperback, 2010
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Thriving after Trauma: Stories of Living and Healing
By Shari Botwin
272 pages, hardcover, 2019
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Understanding Teen Eating Disorders: Warning Signs, Treatment Options, and Stories of Courage
By Cris E. Haltom, Cathie Simpson, and Mary Tantillo
To read our exclusive interview with the authors, please click here.
To listen to our exclusive podcast interview with the authors, please click here.
204 pages, hardcover/paperback, 2018
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Using Writing as a Therapy for Eating Disorders The diary healer
By June Alexander
To listen to our podcast interview with June, please click here
To read an excerpt from this book, please click here.
278 pages, paperback, 2016
[asa book]1138788376[/asa]

You Are Why You Eat : Change Your Food Attitude, Change Your Life
By Dr. Ramani Durvasula
Weight loss is a dangerous business in America – more about appearance than health, more about deprivation than self-care, more about listening to others than listening to yourself.  We know that dieting may be one of the single most consistent predictors of developing eating disorders and dysfunctional eating patterns. You Are WHY You Eat is a revolutionary approach to weight loss. This book is a myth buster and takes on some oldies but goodies – the idea that exercise is the key to weight loss, the danger of diets, and most importantly it highlights the only tool any of us have – the importance of listening to ourselves.  There are no shortcuts and this is a life change book, not just a weight change book.
288 pages, paperback, 2004
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You Can’t Just Eat a Cheeseburger : How to Thrive Through Eating Disorder Recovery
By Justine Duppong
Do you have questions about eating disorder recovery that you haven’t been able to find answers to anywhere else? Questions like, “How do I talk to the person I’m dating about my eating habits?”, “How do I eat ‘normally’ at restaurants or parties?”, “What’s going to happen to my body when I stop trying to control my eating and exercise?”, or “What do I do if I don’t always want to change?” You Can’t Just Eat a Cheeseburger: How to thrive through eating disorder recovery is your answer to all of those questions. In it, author Justine Duppong shares not only her own road map to recovery, but also the insight of internationally recognized field experts, and advice from nearly 100 people in recovery from the United States and beyond. Each page contains easy-to-read pieces of real world advice, all wrapped up in Duppong’s own dramatic story of recovery. If you’ve ever felt alone or confused along your own journey, You Can’t Just Eat a Cheeseburger is here to help.
192 pages, paperback, 2013
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