By Dr. Elizabeth McNaught, Professor Janet Treasure, and Jess Griffiths (Routledge Publishing, Ltd, New York and London, 2024. Paperback, hardback and Kindle available).
As an internal medicine trained physician now working with hospitalized patients with eating disorders, I found this guide informative and highly relevant to my clinical practice. Evidence-based facts interspersed with lived experiences of patients provide a powerful framework to tackle understanding of eating disorders on an individual basis. I highly recommend this book for providers, carers, students, and patients. The collection of lived experiences within the letters of hope are powerful reminders that recovery is possible for anyone, no matter the stage of their illness.
One section of this book states that body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) can be unhelpful in a range of situations, and notes that many eating disorders professionals are calling for its removal in the assessment of eating disorders. One exception occurs when determining medical instability and making the decision to admit a client for in-patient hospitalization. For example, in one of our recent studies (Int J Eat Disord. 2024. 57:869.), BMI was the strongest risk factors for predicting medical complications, compared to weight disruption and recent rapid weight loss.
This is a wonderfully compact book to guide people on understanding eating disorders. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would love to share the letters of hope with some of my patients as the book becomes more widely available
— Reviewed by Khatri Vishnupriya, MD
