A Really Cool Response

This morning I had a surprise in my email. Barbara Kent Lawrence, the author of The Hungry i: A Workbook for Partners of Men With Eating Disorder, emailed me a response to a post I left on her website: http://www.barbaralawrence.com/index.html  I had left a post thanking her for writing this workbook and what it has done for me so far in my journey.  Barbara asked me to post this comment on my blog:

Beth - thank you for mentioning my book, "The Hungry i: a workbook for partners of men with eating disorders."  It means a great deal to me that it is useful to you and your husband.  I wrote my first book, "Bitter Ice: a memoir of love, food and obsession," as a way of understanding my now former husband's struggles with eating disorders and ways my own vulnerabilities made me an enabler.  It was very painful for me to write that book because it forced me to try to understand my own behavior.  I'm sorry our struggle ended in divorce, and I respect your effort to keep your family intact.  Writing The Hungry i" helped me understand the illness itself by putting on my 'research' hat.  Perhaps most startling was realizing that eating disordered behavior gives people an endorphin high, so it becomes addictive.

I wish I had some magic dust to throw over all the men and their families who suffer from the destructive illness of eating disorders, but of course, I don't.  I do, however, believe that we must raise awareness that men and boys are vulnerable to eating disorders.  One statistic - since 1998 when "Bitter Ice" was published, and 2010 when "The Hungry i" was published, the ratio of men to women who are eating disordered in the US rose from one in 20 to one in four. Surely,  we can do more to help these men and boys.

I feel so blessed to have gotten a response back from Barbara Kent Lawrence. Gives me hope especially on days like these when I don't have much hope that we will make it through this.