Review of Goodbye Ed, Hello Me by Jenni Schaefer

Jenni Schaefer’s first book, Life Without Ed chronicles her journey through the ups and downs of recovering from an eating disorder. At the book’s end, she declares herself truly free from the control of Ed (a common nickname for eating disorders). Now Jenni has written a follow up book entitled Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life.*

Before I go on to talk about specifics of the book … before I lose readers who think “I don’t have an eating disorder, so I won’t relate to this book” I want to point out something very important. This book is not just for people dealing with eating disorders. It’s for anyone who has spent their life obsessing about food, yo-yo dieting, hating their bodies, and otherwise doing anything related to food, even if it falls short of an eating disorder. This book is here to tell you too, in no uncertain terms, that you CAN find a life outside of your food and body obsessions.

When I interviewed Jenni earlier this year (you can read the interview here) she admitted that even after finishing her first book, Ed still occasionally made an appearance. In retrospect she sees herself then as being “significantly recovered” but not fully recovered. Goodbye Ed, Hello Me was written when she finally put a restraining order on Ed, forbidding him to ever enter into her life again. Goodbye Ed is about what life is and can be like after you are fully recovered (yes, you CAN fully recover!) from an eating disorder. It’s about, as the subtitle suggests, falling in love with life.

In the first chapter,  Happily Divorced, Jenni details some of her final battles with Ed, when she occasionally allowed her ‘ex’ to woo her once again. But with a support team and “tool box” in place, she finally cut him loose once and for all. What follows in the rest of the book is the story of how Jenni reclaimed her life from a vicious illness that nearly killed her.

Because her entire life had been dominated by a force greater than herself (or so she thought until she sought help), Jenni didn’t experience the normal milestones people have during their development. Sure she got her driver’s license. Yes, she graduated from high school and went on to college. But every thing she did was tinted as she viewed the world through the lens of her eating disorder. As a result, she avoided dating, minimized social contact with friends and family, and avoided pursuing dreams for fear of failure. In her own words, “my eating disorder had become my identity.”

After Ed was forever banished, Jenni had to take time to figure out who she was separate from Ed. It was time for her to regain herself, which sometimes was scary, and at other times, exhilarating. Of course, dating landed more on the side of ’scary’ since she never went through the full motions of dating during her adolescence, and in fact one chapter is entitled the Thirty-Two-Year-Old Adolescent. Learning how not to lose herself in a significant other in the same way she lost herself in her eating disorder was part of the dating process for Jenni, and one that was not without great pain when she walked away from an engagement for that very reason.

But it wasn’t just in dating that Jenni had to learn how to find herself. Practically born pursuing perfectionism, it was time for Jenni to work on letting go, allowing for mistakes, living and learning from them, and not losing herself in every task she undertakes. In every step she took that lead her away from Ed, she also had to walk away from the need to be perfect in everything she does.

Goodbye Ed is not just an account of Jenni’s life after Ed. It’s a guide for women (and men) who want to find themselves after kicking Ed to the curb or who just need the hope that its possible to do so, even if they haven’t divorced from Ed just yet. It is filled with tools that can be applied to any stage of recovery, and yet never once does she assert that the reader must do this or must do that in order to have a fulfilling life without Ed. Jenni is wonderful at relaying the tools that made her succesful in her recovery but frequently acknowledges that different approaches are for different people and encourages the reader to adapt their road to recovery accordingly.

Just like Life Without Ed was not just a book for people suffering from an Eating Disorder, Goodbye Ed provides inspiration for anyone wishing to bring out their best inner self, and shine gloriously without the constraints of food-obsession and a poor body image.

* Goodbye Ed, Hello Me was donated to me by The Center for Change, a residential treatment center for eating disorders.