Chapter 34 — Further Reading

⚠️ A note before the list, and it is not a formality.

⚠️ Reading about eating disorders is not neutral if you are unwell or vulnerable. Some material in this field — including some clinical and academic material — contains numbers, methods and descriptions that function as instruction.

⚠️ Everything below is selected for being safe to read, and the two categories that are NOT are named in §8 so you can avoid them deliberately. ⚠️ If you are unwell, §34.14 is what you need and this page is not.

1. ⚠️ Start here — the national organizations

⚠️ Your country's national eating disorders charity or association.

⚠️ This is the first and most useful thing on the page, and it is free. The major national bodies publish material written specifically for people who are unwell, for families, for schools, for employers and for clinicians — and it is written to be safe to read, which most of the literature is not.

⚠️ What they typically provide: what the disorders are, how to talk to someone, how to get referred, what treatment involves, what to do while waiting, and support for carers.

⚠️ This book deliberately gives no names or numbers here. ⚠️ Organizations merge, rename and change their helplines; an out-of-date contact detail in a printed book is worse than none. Search for your country's national eating disorders organization.

⚠️ Carer-specific resources are worth naming separately — ⚠️ §34.12's "get support yourself" row is easy to skip and is the reason a lot of families cannot sustain what they are doing.

2. Clinical guidance

⚠️ National clinical guidelines — NICE (UK), the RANZCP guidelines (Australia and New Zealand), the APA practice guideline (US), and national equivalents.

⚠️ Read at least one, and read the section on assessment.

⚠️ Specifically look for the statements about weight and access to treatment. ⚠️ Several guidelines now say explicitly that BMI or weight should not be used as the sole determinant of whether someone receives care — which is §34.4, in the place where it has consequences.

⚠️ MEED (Medical Emergencies in Eating Disorders) guidance and equivalents — ⚠️ on medical risk assessment and refeeding. Written for clinicians; ⚠️ contains thresholds, so treat it as professional material rather than reading.

3. ⚠️ The evidence base for treatment

Family-based treatment (Lock and Le Grange and the trial literature) — ⚠️ the best-supported treatment for adolescents with anorexia nervosa, and the practical refutation of the family-causation model.

Christopher Fairburn's work on CBT-E — ⚠️ including Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders, and his Overcoming Binge Eating for a general readership. ⚠️ The latter is one of the few self-help books in this area with genuine trial support, and is widely used as guided self-help.

⚠️ Reviews of treatment outcome and of what is known about recovery trajectories — ⚠️ read one to see how variable the course is, and how long follow-up needs to be before "recovered" means anything.

⚠️ What you will notice: the evidence base for ADULTS with anorexia nervosa is markedly thinner than for adolescents, and thinner than anyone would like. §34.15 says so and this is where you can check it.

4. The Minnesota study, and why restriction does what it does

Ancel Keys et al., The Biology of Human Starvation (1950) — ⚠️ as in Chapter 33, and it is the evidential foundation of §34.2's first maintaining factor.

⚠️ Read the behavioural findings. They are the reason nutritional restoration precedes the psychological work, and they explain why some of what looks like a person's character is malnutrition.

⚠️ The ethical note from Chapter 33's page applies: the participants were conscientious objectors, consent under those conditions is not comparable to modern standards, and the study could not be run today.

5. ⚠️ Who gets missed — the diagnostic-delay literature

⚠️ This is the reading behind §34.3 and Case Study 2, and it is the most under-read material on the page.

Work on eating disorders in men — ⚠️ including muscularity-oriented presentations, and the demonstration that screening instruments built around a drive for thinness under-detect them.

Work on eating disorders in larger bodies and on atypical anorexia nervosa — ⚠️ including comparisons of medical severity, and studies of clinician response.

Work on eating disorders in minoritized ethnic groups — ⚠️ consistently finding lower rates of being asked, referred and treated, against comparable prevalence.

Work on older adults — ⚠️ including first presentations in later life, and the tendency to attribute restriction to ageing or bereavement.

Autism and eating disorders — ⚠️ including the over-representation in anorexia nervosa and ARFID, and the growing literature on adapting treatment rather than delivering it unmodified. ⚠️ The autistic-authored material in this area is worth seeking out specifically.

ARFID — ⚠️ a comparatively young literature, and the best source of the point that a disorder with no body-image component is invisible to weight-and-shape screening.

6. Athletes and RED-S

The IOC consensus statements on RED-S — ⚠️ the primary source, periodically updated, and the place to see how contested the boundaries and criteria are.

⚠️ Note that the framework has been revised more than once and remains actively debated. §34.15 flags this as held moderately, and this is where you can see why.

Sport-specific work on eating disorders in athletes — ⚠️ including the finding that risk varies substantially by sport, and that environments emphasizing leanness or weight categories carry higher risk.

7. Food insecurity, and orthorexia

⚠️ Research on food insecurity and eating-disorder symptoms — ⚠️ the empirical basis for §34.10, and a body of work that has grown quickly and is still under-cited in mainstream eating-disorder teaching.

⚠️ The orthorexia literature — ⚠️ read it to see an unsettled construct being argued about in real time. ⚠️ The measurement instruments are contested, prevalence estimates vary wildly depending on which is used, and that variation is itself the finding. ⚠️ It is a good case study in how a plausible clinical description does or does not become a diagnosis.

8. ⚠️ Do not read

⚠️ Named as categories, and this section is the reason the content note at the top exists.

⚠️ Pro-eating-disorder communities and content. ⚠️ A documented harm, extremely easy to find, and they do not always announce themselves. ⚠️ Recovery-adjacent spaces can shade into them.

⚠️ Memoirs and documentaries that specify numbers or methods. ⚠️ Some are well-intentioned and well-written, and the specificity is what does the damage. ⚠️ A memoir that gives figures is a memoir that supplies targets, regardless of the author's intent.

⚠️ "What I eat in a day" content, in any form, from anyone.

⚠️ Calorie-tracking and body-composition apps while unwell.

⚠️ And clinical diagnostic manuals used for self-assessment. ⚠️ DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 are professional tools; the thresholds in them exist to allocate treatment and standardize research, and read privately they become a test of whether you qualify (§34.1).

⚠️ If you want to know whether to seek help, §34.13's answer stands: there is no threshold you have to reach.

9. Where this goes in the book

⚠️ One recommendation, if you read nothing else

Find your country's national eating disorders organization and read their page on how to talk to someone you are worried about.

⚠️ It takes ten minutes, it is written by people who do this constantly, and it will equip you better for the conversation in §34.12 than any amount of the academic literature.

⚠️ And the reason it matters: in Case Study 1, eight months passed before anyone said anything, and the reason was that nobody knew what to say.