Written by: Isabelle Hendrich, Faith Editor
DAYTON, TN – Grace McCready is a Bryan alum who graduated in May of 2021. She majored in both Business Administration: Management and Communication, Media & Culture.
McCready is originally from Maryland. She and her family moved to Tennessee in November of 2020.
On March 25, 2022, McCready is going to be the guest speaker at Chapel at Bryan College. She will be discussing her book, Real Recovery: What Eating Disorder Recovery Actually Looks Like. Her book is available for pre-order now at amazon.com/real-recovery. McCready’s book will officially be published and released on February 22, 2022. This date was purposefully chosen because it is during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (NEDA), which is the last week in February.
On writing her book, McCready says, “I wanted to write something that was realistic for young women who are dealing with an eating disorder and especially recovery, something that gives realistic expectations so they understand what recovery is going to look like. There is a bit of the physical side of recovery…in my book, but a lot of it is mental and emotional and spiritual recovery-focused.”
During her healing, McCready wanted a resource that could give her realistic standards of recovery from a Christian perspective. McCready’s book contains ten chapters, each including a false expectation about eating disorder recovery, a Real Recovery expectation, then a passage from the Bible that correlates with the chapter’s topic.
Around the age of 15, McCready began to struggle with anorexia. It wasn’t until she was 18 that McCready began her physical recovery, which took 6 months.
“Since I was 18 really I have been dealing with the emotional, and the mental, and the spiritual side of recovery, so that could be something I deal with for the rest of my life,” McCready said.
On what caused her anorexia, McCready said, “There wasn’t a direct event that caused my anorexia. It’s possible that the lack of control I felt about going away to college led me to try to control how my body looked. But my anorexia developed really gradually and subtly.”
While McCready briefly discusses how she physically recovered, she mainly focuses on how she did and still is recovering mentally in her book since her mental recovery is taking longer than her physical.
McCready became a Christian when she was four years old, which played a huge part in her recovery and writing Real Recovery: What Eating Disorder Recovery Actually Looks Like. While McCready said the book Life Without Ed by Jenni Schaefer and Thom Rutledge was helpful for her to read during her recovery, there were several major flaws, which McCready attributes to it being written by non-Christians. McCready did like that the book incorporated humor, which is why she includes some lightness in her book as well.
One of the main reasons McCready wrote Real Recovery: What Eating Disorder Recovery Actually Looks Like was to give people a recourse that focused on the mental recovery of eating disorders from a Christian perspective, especially one that highlights the seriousness of the issue but also the lightness that can be found in it as well.
For more information on McCready and her book, go to her blog titled Tizzie’s Tidbits of Truth.
Isabelle Hendrich is a communication major and history minor at Bryan College. Besides running, Hendrich likes to read and do crafts. She is a triplet whose siblings, Benjamin and Savannah, are also attending Bryan College.
