My Body, My Enemy: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa - Softcover

Beeken, Claire

3.85

176 ratings by Goodreads

9780722533840: My Body, My Enemy: My 13 year battle with anorexia nervosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0722533845 ISBN 13: 9780722533840

Publisher: Thorsons, 1997

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Most people know someone who is anorexic. Cosmopolitan recently ran a feature ‘Have you heard the latest school girl craze. Starving yourself within one inch of your life is now the acceptable face of teenage angst.’

It is a controversial subject that attracts constant media attention – as an illness it mystifys as much as terrifies.
This is Claire Beeken’s story of her battle with anorexia. She was first hospitalized at the age of 10 with an eating disorder and spent the next 13 years locked in a cycle of starvation, binge-eating and laxative abuse. This is an incredibly honest, moving – and at times darkly funny – account of her illness. Claire takes us on her personal roller coaster ride – from the early years (‘I wanted to make myself smaller so there would be less of me to hate’) through her teenage years (school, friends, family and boyfriends, child abuse, attempted suicide, plummeting weight, obsessive exercising, long periods spent in the psychiatric wing of her local hospital etc.) and finally how she gained the upperhand and put herself on the road to recovery.
This book will strike a chord in every reader; it stimulates rather than depresses and offers incredible insight into a life lived with anorexia.

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From the Back Cover:

'"...and I am sent helter-skelter into the land of fun-house mirrors where thin is fat and food is greed and calorie books rule okay!"'

'My Body, My Enemy' is the powerful account of one girl's journey through the hell of anorexia nervosa – and back.

Desperate to make herself smaller so 'there will be of me to hate', Claire was first hospitalised with an eating disorder at the age of ten. In the years that follow he locks herself into a cycle of starvation, binge-eating and laxative abuse – plunging into the depths of despair and surfacing thirteen years later to tell the tale.

Brutally frank, wry and deeply affecting, 'My Body, My Enemy' gives voice to the terrifyingly high incidence of eating disorders amongst young people. Through it we understand a life lived with anorexia – and experience the pain of family and friends as they watch the person they love try to starve herself to death.

Claire finally won her battle and in 1994 set up the charity 'Caraline' which offers counselling and support to anorexics, bulimics and compulsive over-eaters. She has since been awarded the Whitbread Young Volunteer of the Year Award for her work.

Synopsis:

Anorexia nervosa is a controversial subject that attracts constant media attention. As an illness it mystifys as much as terrifies. In this book Claire Beeken tells the story of her battle with anorexia. She was first hospitalized at the age of 10 with an eating disorder and spent the next 13 years in a cycle of starvation, binge-eating and laxative abuse. She describes her early years through her teenage years to how she finally gained the upperhand and put herself on the road to recovery.

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