Healing Your Relationship with Food is Rarely Just About Food
For many women, emotional eating, disordered eating, and body image concerns are deeply connected to experiences of trauma, and the feeling of not being good enough. While therapy offers a space to explore these layers, books can also support the process of healing and recovery.
This collection brings together books that speak not only to eating disorder recovery, but to the deeper work of healing your relationship with your body, your emotions, and your sense of self.
Starting Recovery
Break Free from ED: A Workbook – Centre for Clinical Interventions (CCI)
A structured workbook that explains eating disorders and guides you step by step through practical strategies to support recovery from emotional eating, binge eating and disordered eating.
8 Keys to Recovery from an Eating Disorder – Carolyn Costin & Gwen Schubert Grabb
A practical and compassionate guide that blends professional insight with lived experience. It offers clear, achievable steps to support recovery at your own pace.
Nourish – Heidi Schauster
Blends clinical insight with compassion to support healing your relationship with food, body, and self.
The Appetite Awareness Workbook – Linda W. Craighead
Provides practical tools to reconnect with internal cues like hunger and fullness, reducing reliance on external rules.
Sick Enough: A Guide to the Medical Complications of Eating Disorders – Jennifer L. Gaudiani
Clearly explains the medical realities of eating disorders, helping you understand when and why support is needed.
Building a Gentler Relationship with Food
Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes – Michelle May
Supports a more mindful and balanced relationship with food while managing diabetes, without relying on rigid rules.
Gentle Nutrition: A Non-Diet Approach to Healthy Eating – Rachael Hartley
Offers a calm, non-diet approach to nutrition that supports health without shame, restriction, or rigidity.
Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works (4th ed.) – Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch
A foundational book that helps you rebuild trust with your body, reconnect with hunger and fullness, and move away from dieting.
The Compassionate Mind Approach to Beating Overeating – Ken Goss
Uses compassion-focused therapy to help reduce shame and support a kinder, more understanding relationship with eating.
Moving Away from Diet Culture
Anti-Diet – Christy Harrison
A powerful unpacking of diet culture and its harms, alongside a grounded introduction to intuitive eating and weight-inclusive care.
Fat is a Feminist Issue – by Susie Orbach
A foundational feminist text that explores how women’s relationships with food and body are shaped by culture, power, and the pressures placed on women’s bodies.
If Not Dieting, Then What? – Rick Kausman
A practical alternative to dieting that focuses on sustainable habits, self-awareness, and long-term wellbeing.
No Weigh!: A Teen’s Guide to Positive Body Image, Food, and Emotional Wisdom – Signe Darpinian, Shelley Aggarwal & Wendy Sterling
A teen-friendly guide that supports positive body image, emotional awareness, and a balanced approach to food.
The Wellness Trap – Christy Harrison
Unpacks how wellness culture can become another form of pressure, offering a more freeing and realistic approach to health.
Body Image and Self-Acceptance
Befriending Your Body: A Self-Compassionate Approach to Freeing Yourself from Disordered Eating – Ann Saffi Biasetti
A deeply self-compassionate approach to healing your relationship with your body, especially for those who feel disconnected or critical toward themselves.
Body Kindness: Transform Your Health from the Inside Out and Never Say Diet Again – Rebecca Scritchfield
Encourages a shift away from self-judgement toward caring for your body with respect, flexibility, and kindness.
Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight – Lindo Bacon & Lucy Aphramor
Challenges common beliefs about weight and health, offering a more inclusive, evidence-informed perspective on wellbeing.
Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body – Connie Sobczak
Encourages body acceptance through awareness, curiosity, and self-trust rather than control or criticism.
The Body Is Not an Apology – Sonya Renee Taylor
A powerful call toward radical self-love and body acceptance in the face of cultural and systemic pressures.
Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls – Jes Baker
An honest and accessible exploration of body acceptance, self-worth, and challenging weight stigma.
Creative and Reflective Healing
Using Writing as a Therapy for Eating Disorders: The Diary Healer – June Alexander
Uses writing as a tool for reflection and healing, particularly in eating disorder recovery.
Finding Your Voice Through Creativity: The Art and Journaling Workbook for Disordered Eating – Mindy Jacobson-Levy
Encourages expression and emotional processing through creative practices.
Understanding Yourself More Deeply
Care of the Soul – Thomas Moore
A reflective exploration of emotional life, helping you reconnect with meaning and inner care.
Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body and Soul – Marion Woodman
A thoughtful exploration of the relationship between body, soul, and self.
I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from What Will People Think? to I Am Enough – Brené Brown
Explores shame, perfectionism, and the fear of not being enough, supporting greater self-acceptance.
Pursuing Perfection: Eating Disorders, Body Myths, and Women at Midlife and Beyond – Margo Maine & Joe Kelly
Explores how perfectionism and cultural pressures contribute to eating struggles across the lifespan.
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting – Alice Miller
Examines how early relational experiences shape emotional and physical patterns later in life.
The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships – Harriet Lerner
Offers insight into relational patterns and how anger can be understood and used constructively.
The Happiness Trap – Russ Harris
Introduces practical tools to help you respond differently to difficult thoughts and emotions.
The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook – Kristin Neff & Christopher Germer
Provides structured practices to develop self-compassion and reduce self-criticism.
Mother–Daughter Relationship
I’m Glad My Mom Died – Jennette McCurdy
A candid memoir exploring the impact of a complex and controlling mother-daughter relationship.
Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance – Kelly McDaniel
Explores unmet attachment needs and their lasting emotional impact.
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect – Jonice Webb
Helps identify and understand the effects of childhood emotional neglect and how to begin addressing them.
Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers – Karyl McBride
Supports daughters of narcissistic mothers in understanding their experiences and rebuilding self-worth.
Trauma, the Body, and Nervous System
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving – Pete Walker
A clear and compassionate guide to understanding and recovering from childhood trauma.
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World – Sharon Heller
Explains sensory sensitivity and its role in overwhelm and stress.
The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment – Babette Rothschild
Explores how trauma is held in the body and how to work with it safely and effectively.
Alternative and Complementary Approaches
Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body – Marcella Friel
Introduces EFT tapping as a tool to reduce emotional distress and support a more easeful relationship with food and body.
The Secret Language of Your Body: The Essential Guide to Health and Wellness – Inna Segal
Explores the connection between emotional and physical experiences through a mind-body lens.
Veganism and Eating Disorder Recovery – Jenn Friedman
Addresses how to approach recovery while maintaining ethical or plant-based values.
Yoga and Eating Disorders – Carolyn Costin
Explores how embodied practices like yoga can support reconnection with the body.
There is No Single Way to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Soul
Some of these books offer guidance and structure. Others open up deeper questions about identity, trauma, and what it means to come home to your body and soul. Together, they remind us that recovery from emotional eating, the underlying trauma and low-self-worth, is not just about changing behaviours, but about understanding what sits beneath them.
If you’re drawn to my reflective and depth-oriented approach, I’ve also shared an earlier collection of 10 soulful books for eating disorder recovery and other food, weight and body image concerns, which explores the journey back to self in a different way.
