What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety

"What's Eating Us is a feat of reporting in the hope of helping people repair their relationship with their bodies and food." —Shondaland

Blending personal narrative and investigative reporting, Emmy Award-winning journalist Cole Kazdin reveals that disordered eating is an epidemic crisis killing millions of women.

Women of all ages struggle with disordered eating, preoccupation with food, and body anxiety. Journalist Cole Kazdin was one such woman, and she set out to discover why her own full recovery from an eating disorder felt so impossible. Interviewing women across the country as well as the world's most renowned researchers, she discovered that most people with eating disorders never receive treatment — the fact that she did made her one of the lucky ones.

Kazdin takes us to the doorstep of the diet industry and research community, exposing the flawed systems that claim to be helping us, and revealing disordered eating for the crisis that it is: a mental illness with the second highest mortality rate (after opioid-related deaths) that no one wants to talk about. Along the way, she identifies new treatments not yet available to the general public, grass roots movements to correct racial disparities in care, and strategies for navigating true health while still living in a dysfunctional world.

What would it feel like to be free? To feel gorgeous in your body, not ruminate about food, feel ease at meals, exercise with no regard for calories-burned? To never making a disparaging comment about your body again, even silently to yourself. Who can help us with this? We can.

What's Eating Us is an urgent battle cry coupled with stories and strategies about what works and how to finally heal — for real.

"Kazdin courageously practices radical honesty in sharing her experience with an eating disorder. Honesty does to eating disorders what water did to the Wicked Witch of the West — it melts them." — Cynthia Bulik, Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders, University of North Carolina

"This book is both a memoir and a study of how disordered eating has become both normalized and encouraged in American culture...Kazdin's conversational tone and writing style make this book accessible to all readers." — Library Journal

"As much a personal story as an examination of body anxiety...Kazdin's painful honesty is leavened with humor and irony." — Kirkus (Starred Review)

Cole Kazdin is a writer, performer and four-time Emmy Award winning television journalist. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan, NPR, and more. Cole is a graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Los Angeles