title: Inner Hunger: A Young Woman's Struggle Through Anorexia and Bulimia
author:  Marianne Apostolides 
description: In this candid recovery memoir, the Canadian author details her decade-long eating disorder, which began when she was 14. Right after bingeing on a package of Oreo cookies at summer camp, she resolved to lose weight in order to improve her appearance and become more popular with peers. Compulsive dieting and exercise turned Apostolides into an angry teen who battled daily with her worried mother over her refusal to eat enough to maintain her body weight. The author is careful not to blame her family directly for the escalating self-destructive behavior that soon changed from anorexia into episodes of bingeing and purging bulimia, but she does maintain that the seeds for her condition were sown in a childhood with a distant father, a self-sacrificing mother and a successful brother whom she idolized. Those suffering from similar conditions will benefit from Apostolides's account of her psychotherapy, which provided the emotional insight to overcome her obsession with food. However, the author's self-absorption, perhaps necessary to her recovery, occasionally wears thin. <br />Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: No time for introductions, scenes, characters. No time for taking it slow. No
  time for being kind or gentle with words; there is only time to be rash and
  brisk.
  I am a girl who got tired of the world.
  I am a girl who got scared of the people.
  I am a girl who, like many others, went looking for answers.
  I am a girl who, like many others, found none and became desperate.
  I am a girl who became half - or, more accurately, two thirds - of the person
  I used to be.
  I am a girl who started smoking, then starving, then cutting, then drinking
  to -
  To what?
  I still don’t know.
  All along, it made perfect sense in my head.You feel bad? You drink.You
  feel anxious? You smoke.You feel hated by others? You cut.You hate
  yourself, as well? You starve. It helps.
  I feel anxious, using the word ‘starve’. I never starved, at least not in the
  way people think anorexics do. I didn’t live on a diet of lettuce and Diet
  Coke and ‘an apple a day’, and I never weighed less than six stone, I never
  dreamed of being 