<p><em style="color: rgba(36, 36, 36, 1)">The Optimistic Food Addict</em><span style="color: rgba(36, 36, 36, 1)"> explores the author's courageous journey through a lifetime of battling binge eating disorder. Beginning with early trauma, the author describes in frank detail the childhood challenges she faced, including sexual assault, physical and psychological abuse, and poverty, and how they contributed to the origins of binge eating disorder and body dysmorphia. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgba(36, 36, 36, 1)">As her journey continues, the author carefully examines how binge eating disorder became a firmly rooted coping mechanism for continuing trauma. After getting pregnant at 17, she dropped out of high school only to have the baby's father murder their daughter was just a few months old. Then, after battling nearly a decade of infertility, the author gets pregnant again. Unfortunately, her son was born at 27 weeks' gestation and died a week later. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgba(36, 36, 36, 1)">Through all of this trauma, food remained her comfort and her punishment, simultaneously saving her from more severe forms of self-harm and keeping her from the one thing she needed the most: herself. As her battle with binge eating disorder intensified, her body began to show signs of the abuse: heart palpitations, severe depression and anxiety, hair loss, skin diseases, and more. She finally found hope in recovery. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgba(36, 36, 36, 1)">By the end of the book, we find the author well into her healing journey but aware that she has a lifetime of work ahead of her. Inspirational, honest, and motivating, the author's quest to find peace with food and herself is a testament to human resiliency. This is a story of triumph that will ignite a spark for any reader wanting to fight for their own best life. </span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>
