Hope, Help & Healing for Eating Disorders - Book Review

In our society being thin is big business; however, it is also socially acceptable to eat for comfort and not for nourishment, the resultant eating disorders are becoming a huge problem. There is so much pressure to look the part and so much temptation to overindulge. Hope, Help & Healing for Eating Disorders; A Whole-Person Approach to Treatment of Anorexia, Bulimia, and Disordered Eating, by Dr. Gregory L. Jantz, gives an approach that is more than only behavior modification. The book defines disordered eating as, “When eating occurs when what you eat is more about how you feel emotionally than what you need physically. Food is disconnected from physical health and tied to emotional need.” Dr. Jantz reaches out to those who can no longer deny their lives are consumed with food, either as an enemy or as a friend.

Dr. Jantz acknowledges his method is not a quick fix but a life-long process dealing with emotional, intellectual, relational, physical, and spiritual health. Each chapter provides a “Food For Thought” section, including in-depth journaling questions looking at all of the aspects of life. After the questions there is a section dealing what was written and then talking about the spiritual view. This spiritual section can be much more involved because, without God’s help, people are likely to fall back into old patterns. If the process is treated as behavior modification, it will not work.

The book touches on many issues that may help, but not the book alone. Knowing eating disorders, or disordered eating, form from trying to take control of one’s own life, trying to do it your way proves quite the revelation. It cannot be done alone. There must outside intervention. The book gets the reader started down that path; however, meaningful relationships focused on healing must be included.

I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.