There is life beyond your eating disorder—and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Johanna S. Kandel, founder and executive director of The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, struggled with her eating disorder for ten years before finally getting help. Now fully recovered, Kandel knows firsthand how difficult the healing process can be. Through her work with The Alliance—leading support groups, speaking nationwide and collaborating with professionals in the field—she's developed a set of practical tools to address the everyday challenges of recovery. Kandel, founder and director of The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, brings her own successful recovery from anorexia and bulimia to this readable text whose message is that full recovery is possible. Noting that no recovery is “perfect,” the author, who stresses that she is not a health professional, seeks to free others from identifying with the disorder and risking becoming it. Kandel seeks to empower readers by sharing her own past—how her youthful perfectionism and aspirations to become a ballerina fueled her need to control and numb her emotions, which stoked her disorder—as well as the stories of others. She also offers practical advice, using boxed and large-type inserts to emphasize main points: “My eating disorder gave me carte blanche not to have to do things that scared me: I didn’t have to feel . . . Basically, it protected me . . . from life.” With a list of resources, Kandel’s experience and accessible self-help approach should help many find and remain on the path to wellness. --Whitney Scott Johanna S. Kandel, Founder and Executive Director of The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, graduated Magna Cum Laude from The University of Central Florida. After a ten-year battle with various eating disorders, she founded The Alliance in October, 2000. Kandel has mentored many women during their treatment, helped spread information on eating disorders and advocated for eating disorder legislation on a state and national level. I'm not a psychiatrist; I'm not a psychologist or a therapist or a nutritionist or a doctor of any kind. But I have been an anorexic, an exercise bulimic and a binge eater, and if either you or someone you love is struggling with an eating disorder, I can honestly say that I know what you're going through— maybe not the day-to-day details, but certainly the physical and emotional landscape of your struggle. Perhaps one of the most important and startling things I learned both during my ten-year battle with an eating disorder and during my recovery is just how much ignorance, misinformation, fear and stigma are still attached to eating disorders even in the midst of the so-called information age. The entire time I was struggling and during my recovery process, I never knew anyone who had successfully recovered from an eating disorder. Truthfully, I didn't know if recovery was even possible. All I knew was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, so I decided to seek help. As I began my own journey to recovery, I vowed to myself that if I were given a second chance at life, I would do everything in my power to dispel some of that darkness and bring eating disorders awareness and information into the light. I strongly believe that no one should have to struggle with or recover from an eating disorder alone. Eighteen years ago, when I first began to develop my eating disorder, I had no idea how many people had the same terrible disease. I honestly believed I was one of the very few. But here are the facts: according to the Eating Disorders Coalition, today, in the United States alone, approximately 10 million women and 1 million men are struggling with anorexia or bulimia, and 25 million people are battling binge eating disorder. Eating disorders do not discriminate; they affect men and women, young and old, and people of all economic levels. You need to know that anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate—estimated to be up to 20 percent—of any psychiatric illness. And only one in ten people with an eating disorder receives any kind of treatment. Those figures make me sad and are, quite simply, unacceptable. As I began to recover and find my strength, I kept the promise I had made to myself all those years ago, and in late 2000 I founded the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness in my hometown of West Palm Beach, Florida. The Alliance is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to prevent eating disorders and promote positive body image by advancing education and increasing awareness. To this end we do community outreach through talks at schools, we provide educational programs about eating disorders to therapists and other health-care professionals, we lead support groups for people in recovery and we do whatever we can to convince government officials that eating disorders ought to be a health-care priority. For specific information about the Alliance, see page 215. I believe we ar