 Today I wanted to share with you a new edition of a great book, Hope with Eating Disorders, by Lynn Crilly. Now this is the second edition of a book that was originally published in 2012 and the first edition was great. The second edition is absolutely fantastic. So Hope with Eating Disorders is kind of what it says on the tin. It's a book that brings hope. It's designed for parents, carers, other adults who are supporting someone with an eating disorder. And important to note that this doesn't only look at supporting a young person with an eating disorder. This would be helpful if you're supporting anyone of any age and any gender suffering with any kind of eating disorder. That's one of the things that this edition of the book has really done is opened out looking at things like overexercise, looking at eating disorders in males as well as females, and also looking at eating disorders kind of across the ages and looking at the whole range of eating disorders as we now understand them. Because the diagnostic criteria were updated a few years ago and we are constantly learning more about how to support things like binge eating disorder, for example, which wasn't formally recognised until relatively recently. It's hard to imagine that really now, isn't it? So this is written by a wonderful lady called Lynn Crilly. Now Lynn has twin daughters, one of whom suffered with an eating disorder and like many people who find themselves in the situation of parent or carer for someone with an eating disorder, Lynn was looking for input for support for help. And back at the time, there was not as much as there is now. And Lynn's life work really has turned into understanding and supporting people in a similar situation to herself. She now has both professional as well as personal experience of working with eating disorders and a whole range of different mental health issues. And one of the things that makes this book so helpful is that she really beautifully combines both her personal and often difficult experience of loving someone with an eating disorder with also very kind of, there's a lot of very knowledge rich material within the book to really help improve your understanding. Now, it's not a dry book. So sometimes you will read a book about eating disorders or another mental health issue and there's lots and lots of information in there. But you don't really get a feel for what that looks like day to day or you can't understand how you would apply that in your normal life. This isn't like that. There's lots of information in here for sure. And if there's a particular issue you want specific information on, it will be in here. But the whole thing is brought to life with Lynn's personal experience and the experience of the many people that can she consulted with whilst putting the book together, which does also include quite a lot of input from her daughter as well. You feel this is a really kind of collaborative project and her daughters, in fact, both daughters are completely on board with and support the work, which again is really nice because you get the input there from the person who has suffered and struggled with these issues and you can hear things from their point of view, which can really help. Eating disorders are incredibly complex issues and it can be so hard to understand the motivations behind the different behaviours that we see and it can be really hard as someone who is supporting not to attach all sorts of thoughts and feelings of our own to those behaviours. And actually hearing firsthand from the person who's suffering can help us to realise that sometimes what we're seeing isn't quite as it appears or that sometimes the people that we love the most are the ones that we can be quite difficult with, for example. It's quite a personal one for me because having had many, many years suffering with eating disorders I can kind of also see it from both points of view and when I think sometimes about the behaviours that my eating disorders have driven me to and how I've treated the people that I really love around me it's hard not to feel some sort of shame or anguish about that but again that's something this book does really well. It kind of tries to look at this calmly objectively and just to aid understanding rather than loading guilt or shame or any of those other really difficult feelings. In terms of the contents, so you can see it's quite a big book but you wouldn't necessarily kind of sit down and read it in one go although sometimes when you're desperate for information having this, you know, having something like this as a bit of a Bible would be really helpful. But in terms of the content so we've got kind of what's an eating disorder looking at the different ranges of eating disorders then the chapters look at sort of wellbeing when we've got co-morbidity with other issues and then really helpful the later chapters I found to be particularly helpful so thinking about your relationships how this works at home then thinking about the workplace and school and also about exercise and sport which is something that people have lots and lots of questions about how can we use exercise as a healthy tool rather than as a part of the eating disorder. So basically long and short would I recommend it? I absolutely would if you are supporting someone who is struggling with an eating disorder and you want to understand more and you want to feel less alone then this is a fantastic book. It's absolutely full of information and ideas and it's really really practical too. Like with anything what you need to do is to use this as a starting point for your conversations for your thinking and use it to empower you in the support that you give to someone that you care about rather than necessarily seeing it as a one-size-fits-all solution because eating disorders are more complex than that but yes I absolutely think it's worth investing in and actually if you already have the original first edition I do think there's significant additional material in this second edition so it would be worth investing in in buying the updated edition if this is a particular area of interest or concern. So yes I hope that was helpful do let me know if there are other books you would like to hear me tell you about.