Danielle Sherman-Lazar

Living FULL―Winning My Battle With Eating Disorders

Finding Recovery or My FULL: This is my journey from starving to letting myself become FULL–physically & emotionally. What is living a FULL life exactly? Having anorexia, bulimia, or vacillating between the two, you are emptying yourself or trying to achieve an empty feeling through starvation or purging. Living a FULL life is a life where you aren’t starving anymore―starving for acceptance and love from others and yourself. It’s a life where you are feeding your mind and soul with good thoughts and foods. It’s a life without your eating disorder. 

Victim of the eating disorder monster: Imagine waking in a hospital bed to find your frail, pale arm punctured by an IV transferring fluids and nutrients into your weak, stiff body. What happened? You’re an adult, age twenty-six, and you just had a seizure precipitated by your chronic secretive decades-long struggle with unacknowledged eating disorders (ED). You have no friends and no normal young-adult experiences. Living FULL is author Danielle Sherman-Lazar’s story. 

Hidden out of shame: Eating disorders in young adults are hardly talked about although they are extremely pervasive. Eating disorders are kept hidden out of shame. A groundbreaking 2012 study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders found that about 13 percent of women over age 50 exhibit ED symptoms. To put that in perspective: Breast cancer afflicts about 12 percent of women. Everyone knows about breast cancer and how dangerous it is; yet eating disorders are kept hidden out of shame. 

Journey to recovery: Filled with pop culture references that will appeal to millennials, humor, and delivered with raw honesty about the escalating and increasingly dangerous behaviors of a person acting out the mental illness of ED, Living FULL chronicles author Danielle Sherman-Lazar’s step-by-step descent into the nightmare that is full-blown ED. Recovery comes using the Maudsley Approach, a treatment that is rarely tried on adults. In a grueling battle, sometimes reminiscent of Helen Keller’s fight with Anne Sullivan, the Maudsley Approach is a regimen of supervised controlled eating or refeeding by out-patient helpers that eventually can result in recovery. 

Living FULL exposes the rarely talked about behind-the-scene triggers and treatments, shame and guilt, and even coexisting addictions that go undetected in adult women today. Living FULL is written by a woman who has passed through the crucible of ED to recovery. Danielle Sherman-Lazar shares the most intimate and shameful details of her mental illness. She is now a mother with a fierce commitment to raise healthy daughters who may well carry the ED gene. 

Benefits of reading Living FULL: Winning My Battle With Eating Disorders:
 Learn how to confront your ED demonFind relief from someone who has won her ED battleDiscover a new and beautiful life