by Christian Boyles

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
by Roxane Gay
BF697.5.B63 G39 2017

About the book

From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. 

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

Is it checked out? Don’t worry about it. Here are some other titles on the subject.

Eating Disorders Sourcebook : Basic Consumer Health Information About Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge Eating Disorder, and Other Eating Disorders | RC552.E18 E287 2016

Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, exercise addictions . . . these disorders can be devastating, but they are in no way unbeatable. Therapist Carolyn Costin, herself recovered from anorexia, brings three decades of experience and the newest research in the field together, providing readers with the latest treatments, from medication and behavioral therapy to alternative remedies.

Whether you are living with an eating disorder or you are a loved one or professional helping someone who is, The Eating Disorder Sourcebook will help you:

• Recognize and identify eating disorders
• Discover and work with the underlying causes of an eating disorder
• Make the right choices when comparing treatment options
• Understand what is expected in individual, group, and family therapy
• Know when outpatient treatment is not enough and what else can be done

Re-Thinking Eating Disorders: Language, Emotion, and the Brain (ebook)

In Re-Thinking Eating Disorders: Language, Emotion, and the Brain, Barbara Pearlman integrates ideas from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and cutting-edge neuroscience to produce a model of neural emotional processing which may underpin the development of an eating disorder.

Based on clinical observations over 30 years, this book explores how state change from symbolic to concrete thinking may be a key event that precedes an eating disorder episode. The book introduces this theory, and offers clinicians working with these challenging clients an entirely new model for treatment: internal language enhancement therapy (ILET). This easily teachable therapy is explored throughout the book with case studies and detailed descriptions of therapeutic techniques.

Re-Thinking Eating Disorders will appeal to students and practitioners working with this clinical group who are seeking an up-to-date and integrative approach to therapy.

Beauty Mark (DVD) | RC552.A5 B43 2009

Diane Israel, a Boulder-based psychotherapist and former champion triathlete, talks candidly about her long and agonizing personal struggle with eating disorders and obsessive exercising, fearlessly confronting her own painful past as she attempt to come to terms with American culture’s unhealthy fixation on self-destructive ideals of beauty and competitiveness. The film lends context to Israel’s personal odyssey with fascinating insights from athletes, bodybuilders, fashion models, and inner-city teens, as well as prominent cultural critics and authors.