Living FULL
Winning My Battle With Eating Disorders
This is my journey from starving to letting myself become FULL–physically & emotionally. What is living a FULL life exactly? Having anorexia, bulimia, or vacillating between the two, you are emptying yourself or trying to achieve an empty feeling through starvation or purging. Living a FULL life is a life where you aren’t starving anymore—starving for acceptance and love from others and yourself. It’s a life where you are feeding your mind and soul with good thoughts and foods. It’s a life without your eating disorder.
Victim of the eating disorder monster
Imagine waking in a hospital bed to find your frail, pale arm punctured by an IV transferring fluids and nutrients into your weak, stiff body. What happened? You’re an adult, age twenty-six, and you just had a seizure precipitated by your chronic secretive decades-long struggle with unacknowledged eating disorders (ED). You have no friends and no normal young-adult experiences. Living FULL is author Danielle Sherman-Lazar’s story.
Hidden out of shame
Eating disorders in young adults are hardly talked about although they are extremely pervasive. Eating disorders are kept hidden out of shame. A groundbreaking 2012 study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found that about 13 percent of women over age 50 exhibit ED symptoms. To put that in perspective: Breast cancer afflicts about 12 percent of women. Everyone knows about breast cancer and how dangerous it is; yet eating disorders are kept hidden out of shame.
Journey to recovery
Filled with pop culture references that will appeal to millennials, humor, and delivered with raw honesty about the escalating and increasingly dangerous behaviors of a person acting out the mental illness of ED, Living FULL chronicles author Danielle Sherman-Lazar’s step-by-step descent into the nightmare that is full-blown ED. Recovery comes using the Maudsley Approach, a treatment that is rarely tried on adults. In a grueling battle, sometimes reminiscent of Helen Keller’s fight with Anne Sullivan, the Maudsley Approach is a regimen of supervised controlled eating or refeeding by out-patient helpers that eventually can result in recovery.
Living FULL exposes the rarely talked about behind-the-scene triggers and treatments, shame and guilt, and even coexisting addictions that go undetected in adult women today. Living FULL is written by a woman who has passed through the crucible of ED to recovery. Danielle Sherman-Lazar shares the most intimate and shameful details of her mental illness. She is now a mother with a fierce commitment to raise healthy daughters who may well carry the ED gene.
Benefits of reading Living FULL: Winning My Battle With Eating Disorders:
Learn how to confront your ED demon
Find relief from someone who has won her ED battle
Discover a new and beautiful life
“My favorite books are those telling a real life story. This book does just that! A real life story of the author’s battle with herself and her eating disorder… told in a way I felt her sitting right next to me. Like I could step inside her words. Eye opening. Heartfelt. Beautiful.”
- Mikaela Albertson, Writer – Ordinary on Purpose
“Danielle has poured her soul into her book, taking the reader on her battle with eating disorders. She unravels each experience with how the illness taught her to starve herself and purge. Most importantly, she writes how she overcame anorexia and bulimia. This book is not just for other people experiencing or recovering from ED’s, this book is pertinent for all to read, including health care professionals.”
- Yvette Mystakas, Writer – She Is Sacred
