When someone you love develops an eating disorder, your world changes overnight.
Meals become battlegrounds. Fear replaces certainty. And as a parent, partner, sibling or carer, you find yourself navigating a complex and often misunderstood illness, desperate to help, yet unsure where to turn.
Strong Enough is a powerful collection of eleven real stories from carers supporting loved ones through anorexia and eating disorders. These deeply personal accounts reveal the emotional reality of caring for someone in eating disorder recovery - the exhaustion, the advocacy, the setbacks, and the fierce, enduring love that refuses to give up.
From hospital wards to kitchen tables, these honest stories illuminate what it truly means to support someone with an EATING DISORDER. They give voice to the often unseen experience of caregivers and families, highlighting both the heartbreak and the hope that coexist on the path to recovery.
If you are caring for someone with an eating disorder - whether a daughter, son, partner, sibling or friend - this book offers understanding, validation and solidarity. It reminds carers that you are not bystanders in recovery; you are lifelines.
You are not alone.
You are seen.
You are valued.
You are - and always have been - strong enough.
Compiled by Jane Rowan, Executive Director of Eating Disorders Families Australia, Strong Enough is a tribute to the courage of families and a source of comfort for anyone supporting a loved one through anorexia and eating disorder recovery.
Review :
Strong Enough provides the strength, hope and guidance that families desperately need to nurse their loved ones back to recovery. In these pages, we hear the voices of family members who have valiantly prevailed over not only the nightmare of an eating disorder but also over a health system that urgently needs to change.
Associate Professor Warren Ward
Co-author, with Lexi Crouch, of Renourish: A complete and compassionate guide to recovery from eating disorders
Strong Enough is a quiet companion for parents, siblings and loved ones - honest, vulnerable and deeply reassuring in moments when isolation feels overwhelming.
For anyone supporting a loved one through an eating disorder, this book offers solidarity more than solutions, and sometimes that is exactly what's needed to keep going.
Hugh van Cuylenburg
Mental Health Leader, Founder, The Resilience Project, best-selling author, co-host of The Imperfects Podcast
Strong Enough is a powerful and deeply compassionate contribution to the eating disorders field. By centring the voices of carers, this book brings into sharp focus the realities of supporting a loved one with an eating disorder; experiences that are too often unseen, underestimated, or misunderstood.
The book is also an important reminder that effective eating disorder care does not occur in isolation. The lived experiences shared here underscore the central role of families and carers as essential partners in treatment and recovery. These narratives deepen our understanding of the systemic, relational, and emotional dimensions of eating disorders, and challenge us to reflect on how services, language, and clinical approaches can more effectively support those living with an eating disorder as well as their families and carers.
Jade Gooding
CEO, Australia and New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders (ANZAED)
Strong Enough brings together deeply human accounts from families navigating the reality of supporting someone experiencing an eating disorder, balancing practical guidance with honest stories of grief, fear, and endurance. These stories offer insight into how eating disorders, particularly anorexia and ARFID, can take hold, often quietly and quickly, and profoundly affect the person, their families, and their support networks. Importantly, they also speak to what helps, including how understanding, care, and persistence can interrupt the illness and support recovery.
Collectively, the stories are real, valid, and instructive, reminding us that eating disorders affect people and families in different ways and at different points along a broader spectrum of illness and recovery. What unites them is hope: that recovery is possible, that relationships can heal alongside it, and that no one has to face this alone.
I am deeply grateful to the families who have bravely shared their experiences so openly. In connecting with others' stories, families and support people may recognise aspects of their own journey, gain insight into unfamiliar ones, and find reassurance that strength can be built, support is available, and hope can be held even in the most difficult moments.
Dr Sarah Trobe
National Director
National Eating Disorders Collaboration
