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

Laura Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2004

A source of hope and valuable information for parents of children with eating disorders

This poignant and informative narrative relates how one mother rescued her daughter from the "experts" and treated the girl's life-threatening anorexia using a controversial approach. Known as the Maudsley Approach, this home-based, family-centered therapy, developed in Great Britain in the 1980s, has been receiving a lot of press here over the past few years. While it has been widely used in Europe for many years and is rapidly gaining acceptance among parents and within the pediatric and child psychiatric communities in the United States, until now, there were no popular books on the subject. Must-reading for parents of children with eating disorders, Eating with Your Anorexic is:

• The first popular book on an increasingly popular approach to curing eating disorders
• A source of practical information and guidance for parents of children with eating disorders
• An eloquent narrative filled with pathos that inspires, empowers, and informs

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

For parents of a child with an eating disorder, the most crucial question is "What do we do now?" In this poignant, informative book, Laura Collins shares how she and her husband discovered the answer for themselves--and most significantly--for their anorexic fourteen-year-old-daughter. It is a chronicle of how they applied a home-based treatment method known as "the Maudsley approach," a nontraditional but highly effective way to treat a disease that is well known but largely misunderstood.

When, in the summer of 2002, Collins's smart, athletic, well-adjusted daughter stopped eating, she did what every parent is advised to do: get specialized help. So began her journey through a health care system that is rife with theories and that almost always "treats" the illness through hospitalization or treatment centers that isolate the child from the family--a family that is presumed harmful and made suspect by a range of unsavory stereotypes, from sexual abuse to excessive control to neglect.

With their daughter's health steadily declining, the Collins family came to reject theories that claimed their daughter had chosen her disease and was responsible for giving it up, as well as those that said it was caused by bad parenting--theories that are now largely being discredited. Ultimately, they adopted the principles of the Maudsley approach.

This innovative method avoids hospitalization by employing family-based treatment that presumes parents can help their child recover. With the support and guidance of experts, the Maudsley approach:

• Equips parents to take charge of refeeding their underweight child
• Recognizes that patients who eat and gain weight are more likely to progress toward ultimate recovery
• Disregards the common assumption that parental or familial pathology is at the root of the disease
• Delivers high success rates: researchers who followed up on their young subjects five years after treatment found that 90 percent had fully recovered--significantly more than those who receive individual therapy

By questioning the health care orthodoxy and learning about their daughter's disease, the Collinses helped her recover. This inspiring book tells you how they succeeded and offers a new approach to dealing with this deadly illness.

"Defeating anorexia nervosa is like climbing a sand hill: you can't rest until you get to the top or you will slide right back down again. Collins's book will inspire you on the climb and . . . increase the likelihood you will reach the top."
--from the Foreword, by James Lock, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Director of the Eating Disorders Program at Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford

This deeply moving, extraordinarily personal, and--most of all--helpful book chronicles one mother's journey alongside her teenage daughter's recovery from anorexia nervosa. A true story of pain, healing, and discovery, Eating with Your Anorexic is also the first book to introduce the Maudsley approach, the treatment method that restored her daughter's life. This nontraditional but highly effective home-based approach:

• Focuses on enabling parents to refeed their underweight child at home, while they receive therapy as outpatients
• Begins with getting eating and weight normalized before focusing on alleged causes and psychological issues
• Rejects the once-popular theory that parental or familial pathology is at the root of the illness, and utilizes parents as a resource for recovery

Unwilling to turn their child over to strangers, and unable to accept the stereotypes that blamed either her or both of them for this deadly illness, the Collins family turned to the innovative, family-based Maudsley approach. Their story offers inspiration, information, and hope for others facing this ordeal.

About the Author

Laura Collins is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in a number of magazines, including iParenting.com, Skirt!, Adoptive Families, Potomac Review and others.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071445587
• ISBN-13: 978-0071445580
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #351,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

As the parent of a child with an eating disorder, I believe parents are often left out of the picture.

Many parents are still told more about what NOT to do than what the most positive and loving actions are.

Discovering the 'Maudsley' approach, which puts full nutrition first and keeps the sufferer at home with loved ones during recovery - this was a life-saving and family-preserving option I could believe in.

I invite all parents and caregivers to learn about home care and treatment and what thay CAN DO to help.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars something to go on, June 20, 2005

By 

Harold Marcuse "professor of German history" (Santa Barbara, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eating with Your Anorexic: How My Child Recovered Through Family-Based Treatment and Yours Can Too (Hardcover)

If you are a parent of a child who suddenly spirals into anorexia, you will be shocked and scared, and immediately seek the "professional help" everyone recommends.
However, professionals know very little about what causes the disease. As far as treatment goes, the only thing research suggests can help is "refeeding." The lead researchers on this in the US are James Lock and Daniel LeGrange (whose book "How to Help your Teenager Beat Eating Disorders" I also recommend, as other reviewers do). They present a more scholarly, balanced review of the range of "causes" and "treatments" than this book does, but they conclude that the "Maudsley" family-centered refeeding method has the best success rate.
Collins' book is a personal memoir advocating a family-centered Maudsley method. I feel fortunate, as a parent of a 12-year-old who spiraled into full anorexia within a 3-week period, to have found a professional who introduced us to this approach right away, sparing us some of the agony Collins went through dealing with blame-based "traditional" approaches that left her daughter thinner and thinner.
I read everything I could find on the web, and understood how little is known about anorexia's causes, but that family-centered refeeding is the most promising treatment. Frantic to understand more about "refeeding" between sessions with our professional, I purchased Lock/LeGrange's "How to" book. The crucial information about HOW to refeed is relatively thin, so I turned to this book for more help with specifics on HOW to break the non-eating cycle. HOW do you get a child who thinks food is harming them to take more and more bites of it? Pages 85-92 are the crux, but they are still vaguer than I wished. The motto-principles on 169-173 are good guidelines. I guess we parents know our children best and must improvise on our instincts. Take this story and advice and try your best. If you are reading this, you are probably as desperate as we in figuring out how to help your starving child. This personal account is well worth the price of the common-sense, hands-on, and emotional support it offers in helping your child back to health.
I read it through in a sitting during and after an early "refeeding" meal, and it helped stabilize my resolve to stick it out. It gave me more detailed advice more quickly than I could get from our professional, and thus paid for its price many times over. And your child's health is priceless anyway. Don't delay--I hope it helps you, too.

PS 2 1/2 months later (I posted the above on June 20): Home refeeding has worked for us, and I am as strong an advocate as you will find. Laura Collins' website includes a bulletin board that was a *tremendous* help to me. Recently a mother responded to a post by someone at their wits' end with the following (Sept. 19, 2005):
'She was at her lowest wt in March of this yr [after 4 years of unsuccessful treatments], and I was utterly insane and giving up, and I declared one day "That's it. No more. I will not eat with her anymore, at home or out. I give up. I will never take her to a restaurant again, I will not watch her eating rituals at home, I will walk away from all of this."
Well, my older D heard me say this, and for Mother's Day she gave me a book entitled "Eating W/Your Anorexic." She didn't know at all what the book was about. It was just that the title fit with my declaring "I will not eat with her anymore!"
Laura's book said everything I believed should be the way to handle her ED, I read it in one sitting, and from that moment on I declared to her and anyone listening what I was going to do, refeed this beautiful child, no matter what.
It's 5 months later, Nxx started college this month, has gained all wt lost, and is thriving. Not only is she a healthy wt, but the monster that was in her soul is so very weak now. She's handling college, a breakup with her bf, and a roomate that's bulemic (!!!) with amazing surprising strength.'

Finally, I also recommend a very concise book that I refered again and again: "Eating Disorders: A Parents' Guide," by Rachel Bryant-Waugh and Bryan Lask. Especially for that fun "stage 2"!

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Would not recommend this book, January 17, 2009

By 

Book Mom - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating with Your Anorexic: How My Child Recovered Through Family-Based Treatment and Yours Can Too (Hardcover)

I would never recommend this book to parents with a child who has been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Ms. Collin's attitude is very smug and she sounds like she has some serious control issues. I bought this book thinking it would have practical suggestions on how to eat with my daughter. Ms. Collins does not give any practical suggestions at all. Our family has tried the Maudsley approach (with the help of Stanford Hospital and their eating disorder clinic) to re-feeding and it did not work with my child. My daughter was too smart to let me add a lot of calories to her food and refused to eat. I finally realized that Maudsley does not usually work with older adolescents.

In Chapter 24, the author writes "I must tell you how incredulous I am, even now, that most anorexics must be hospitalized before the most simple and effective treatment known to science for eating disorders is administered: three square meals a day." What a arrogant sentence. My daughter was hospitalized several times due to medical instability because of her anorexia. It wasn't that we weren't trying at home to re-feed her. Ms. Collins makes it sound like that all you have to do is place the plate in front of the anorexic and she will eat. There may be some bumps along the way, but eventually she will cave and do what "mom" says. If only it was that simple.

This book is more about the "look at me! look what I've done" attitude of Laura Collins. I would not recommend buying this book if you want suggestions on helping your child through family based treatment. The book to read is "Help your Teenager Beat an Eating Disorder" by James Lock.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not very helpful, January 8, 2009

By 

MK - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating with Your Anorexic: How My Child Recovered Through Family-Based Treatment and Yours Can Too (Hardcover)

This book, while the story is admirable, did not provide any significant help for our family that has a young child with an eating disorder. I was looking for an evidence based and thoughtful guideline to help us, which this is most definitely NOT. Instead, it is a rant against society and the medical community. Instead, I would recommend "How to help your teenager beat an eating disorder" which is written by knowledgable medical experts.