The Clinical Guide to Fertility, Motherhood, and Eating Disorders

Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive guide to addressing, working with, and healing from emotional struggles related to fertility and eating disorders. Covering the emotional, psychological and physical impact of anorexia nervosa, bulimia and binge eating disorder, this book explores the lived experience of numerous women and men who have lived with eating disorders, fertility, and parenthood. It delves into research on medical complications that can affect fertility, attachment, the experience of shame, adjustment to the postpartum period, and offers clinical tools for therapists to use to support clients from a weight and body neutral perspective. Those who read this book will come away with a renewed sense of hope for recovery and healing from serious mental illnesses, and the notion that the value of having a family may be stronger than the eating disorder itself. The only book of its kind, The Clinical Guide to Fertility, Motherhood and Eating Disorders will be useful to practitioners, therapists, and scholars alike.