Review

Eating and assertiveness

CONQUERING ANOREXIA: the route to recovery
Clare Lindsay
Summersdale, 2000, £9.99

Anorexia claims more lives than any other psychiatric disorder in this country — up to 200,000 young people in the UK currently have the disorder and for one in five it will prove fatal.

Clare Lindsay argues that this need not be the case and that many people would not die if they believed that recovery — and a subsequent anorexia-free life — were possible. Written specifically for people with anorexia (and to a lesser extent bulimia), this book aims to provide evidence that there is life after anorexia.

Anorexia is a devastating illness not only for the person who has it, but also for those who care about them because of the obsessive behaviour it involves, the unrelenting desire to control food intake, the distorted body image, the demise of self-confidence, isolation and the intense unhappiness.

Eating disorders have figured large in my life over the past seven years and I found little written on how to ‘escape from anorexia’. The author also found this to be the case, hence her book.

It is the product of a diary she wrote while in the grip of the illness and in it she discusses why she became anorexic and her experiences of various therapies on her road to recovery.

The diary admissions are frightening because, as anyone with anorexia will tell you, the feelings she recounts are real — feelings which non-sufferers find very hard to comprehend.

Clare Lindsay ‘learnt’ to recover by learning how to behave more effectively, developing 15 assertive life skills necessary for overcoming anorexia. She believes that increasing assertiveness might hold the key to preventing eating disorders occurring in the first place.

A well-structured and accessible book, this is a must for the person who has made the decision to recover from anorexia. It will also be an enormous help for people trying to understand how it feels to struggle with an eating disorder.