Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder {Book Review}

Johanna S. Kandel’s eating disorder story has all the makings of typical memoir or made-for-TV movie. The young, smart daughter of high achieving parents becomes a ballerina and faces the unbearable pressure to be perfect in a world where beauty is currency. She learns that misusing food, alternating between starving and binging, gives her a false sense of control; meanwhile her life is becoming increasingly isolated and chaotic.

But here’s where the story shifts: Kandel doesn’t just find recovery, she becomes founder of a major non-profit and tireless advocate for those struggling with eating disorders. As she briefly outlines in her recent book, Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder (Harlequin, 2010), recovery for Johanna was learning that being a perfect weight wouldn’t make her a perfect person – and that she didn’t even want to be perfect.

Using this and the many other lessons she has learned through her own recovery and that of those she counsels, Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder: Reclaim Yourself, Regain Your Health, Recover for Good is Kandel’s guidebook for anyone struggling with misusing food in dangerous and damaging ways.

Rather than share the gritty details of her the havoc she wrecked on her body, Kandel chose to focus her book on the process of recovery. While there may be a time and place for shock factor used in so many eating disorder books, many in recovery, particularly in the early stages, are not able to use such details for inspiration, but instead fall into a dangerous pattern of comparison. Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder is a book for individuals at any stage of recovery. Kandel recognizes that not everyone reading is ready to jump into a life without the security of a disorder – and she approaches them with a gentle but powerful message of just how wonderful life beyond the disorder can be.

Immensely readable and down to earth, the book offers specific strategies, motivational metaphors, and inspiring profiles of individuals in recovery. With chapters like “Beware of Fake Security Blankets” and “Bridezilla Meets Brideorexia and Other Triggering Occasions,” Kandel gets to the heart of what individuals struggle with and gives them tried-and-true means of staying on top.

In one chapter, Johanna encourages readers to “name your voice,” meaning giving a name to the healthy part of you — the part that sneaks in, even ever so briefly, and tells you that you are good enough. She suggests giving that voice a name and a separate identity so that it can speak to you even when you feel unable to access it. Kandel says, “Walking the road to recovery becomes a lot easier when you have that positive voice walking with you, helping you to put one foot in front of the other.”

At the heart of Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder is a sense of empowerment. Kandel puts the power for recovery into the hands of her readers – nudging them toward it in a voice that is authentic and knowing.

What books have helped you on your journey to recovery?

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