Customer Reviews

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

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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"!

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.

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.

My therapist, the Shan Guisinger mention in the book, gave this book to me to read, which I did in one sitting. I was with my mother at the time, who gave a loud exclamation in the middle of the busy cafe we were in. She recognized the author's name from the controversy that went on in the somethingfishy.com's message boards. I read aloud to her the part which the author mentions this occurance, and the both of us decided that she glossed over the incident and didn't tell the whole truth.

The book (minus the glossed over bits) didn't much captivate me. She gave little to no explanation to how they actually got their daughter to consume the vast amounts of food. Any anorexic I have ever met (myself included) would not have been party to this treatment.

If a parent does wish to go ahead and try this Maudsley method, I would reccomend that he/she not let her son/daughter read this book before a stable recovery point. The mention of hiding butter in every type of food (including milk) will be enough to send him/her running as fast as their emaciated legs can carry them.

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.

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.

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.

I just finished this book last week. Laura clearly has a talent at writing. I found the book to be engaging and real. By the end of the book, I felt like Laura really understood me and all of our experiences as we have treated our son. I also felt like she accurately challenged many of the current problems in treating anorexia with mostly her mother's instinct. I personally think she was right on the mark. I'd like to have her courage and influence in speaking out and changing inaccurate perceptions (see some of the reviews below) of what anorexia is and what it isn't.

One of the worst days of my life was the day my daughter was diagnosed with anorexia. And I'm convinced that all that saved her life, and my sanity, was stumbling across a copy of this book in our local library. I read the whole thing standing in front of the shelf, crying, and then went home with a new plan. Today, two years later, my daughter is healthy and happy and in full recovery (at least now). The information Laura Collins provides in this book is priceless--and it's not disseminated by the medical profession. For parents who are overwhelmed, grieving, and scared, this book is a lifeline and a lifesaver.