Eating Myself

Candida Crewe wonders whether there's anything 'normal' about any woman's relationship with food and weight. While she now appears enviably slim to everyone but herself, Candida has always worried, sometimes obsessed, about her weight. Eating Myself chronicles her life with food and argues convincingly that while the details obviously differ, the story of her everyday struggle with weight is the story of Everywoman.

Eventually Candida realised she was bored with both herself and her 'normal' but tedious relationship with food. And so, finally, she set about discovering that there's more to life than constantly thinking about what she eats or daren't, even though the sight of a much thinner friend (indeed a fellow forty-one-year-old mother of three) cart-wheeling in just a bikini can still induce a half-hour lie-down and a non-existent lunch.

Eating Myself is an extraordinary and personal book, but one in which many readers will find moving echoes of their own feelings and behaviour, while others will be deeply shocked by why it's no longer unusual to regard food as an enemy.