What would it feel like to feel gorgeous in your body, not ruminate about food, feel at ease at meals, exercise with no regard for calories-burned? To never make a disparaging comment about your body again, even silently to yourself.
What's Eating Us - Women Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety, the new book from Emmy award-winning journalist Cole Kazdin, blends personal narrative and investigative reporting to reveal that disordered eating is an epidemic crisis killing millions of women.
Women of all ages struggle with disordered eating, preoccupation with food, and body anxiety. Journalist Cole Kazdin was one such woman, and she set out to discover why her own full recovery from an eating disorder felt so impossible. Interviewing women across the country as well as the world’s most renowned researchers, she discovered that most people with eating disorders never receive treatment––the fact that she did made her one of the lucky ones.Kazdin takes us to the doorstep of the diet industry and research community, exposing the flawed systems that claim to be helping us, and revealing disordered eating for the crisis that it is: a mental illness with the second highest mortality rate (after opioid-related deaths) that no one wants to talk about. Along the way, she identifies new treatments not yet available to the general public, grass roots movements to correct racial disparities in care, and strategies for navigating true health while still living in a dysfunctional world.Cole Kazdin is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist and author of What's Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety (St. Martin's Press 2023). Selected as a Next Big Idea Book Club Must-Read, the book blends personal narrative and investigative reporting to reveal disordered eating as an epidemic crisis killing millions of women. Cole has written for TIME, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, The Daily Beast, MEL Magazine, and more, and was a regular contributor to VICE. She has produced television for Good Morning America, Nightline and World News Tonight. Cole has told stories live on The Moth's Mainstage across the country, The Moth Radio Hour on NPR,, and has performed storytelling all over Southern California where she is a proud, three-time Moth GrandSLAM champion. Her solo performances have garnered national praise and been optioned for film. A contributing author to the bestselling book, The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, she coaches and teaches writers all over the world, as well as leading workshops and classes for corporations and universities and currently teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
George M. Slavich, PhD, will join Cole Kazdin in conversation. Dr. Slavich is a leading authority in the conceptualization, assessment, and management of life stress; in psychological and biological mechanisms linking stress with mental and physical health; and in systems and policies for reducing population-level health disparities and achieving greater health equity by addressing stress-related factors at the individual and collective level. He is presently a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, where he directs the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research. In addition to these research roles, he serves as Director of the California Stress, Trauma, and Resilience Network, Director of the UCLA Bruin Stress Resilience Network, Director of the Branco Weiss Fellowship International Collaborative Grants Program, Director of the Global Belonging Collaborative, Co-chair of the APS National Task Force on Stress Measurement in Primary Care, and Associate Director of the National Institute on Aging Stress Measurement Network. Dr. Slavich is also Director of the Evaluation and Evidence Department for the UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network, which is California’s state-wide initiative to develop, promote, and sustain evidence-based methods for addressing the negative impacts of adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress physiology on health and wellbeing. Dr. Slavich’s work has been covered by many media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Scientific American, TIME Magazine, HBO, and NPR, among others.