Being in the Soil
Memoirs of a Food Addict
Where is the Book Available?
The book will be released in English in the spring of 2025 - available on Amazon as a printed copy or an eBook.
Additionally, the book is available in audiobook format on Storytel (currently only in Icelandic). The audiobook won the Storytel awards in Iceland for best non-fiction audiobook of 2023.
About the Book
With exceptional sincerity, Icelandic author and soccer player Lára Kristín Pedersen opens up and talks about her shocking battle with food addiction, which she has struggled with for years while playing her sport vigorously in Iceland and abroad.
Lára had tried to seek help in many places, but all channels seemed closed everywhere she looked. She felt like she was alone underground, in the soil, darkness all around, with no way out. The discussion on food addiction didn't seem to exist and the remedies even less so, least not for a young woman in sports who herself had to overcome the shame and realize the root of the problem - addiction.
With Being in the Soil, Lára lends an important and valuable voice to the fight for the recognition of food addiction. Readers get a glimpse into the mind of a food addict as Lára writes in diary form about her search for recovery, the growth that followed, the downfalls that can accompany the disease and how it is possible to blossom despite dealing with an addiction.
About the Author
Lára Kristín Pedersen was born in 1994 and is from the capital area in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Along with focusing on her daily recovery from food addiction, Lára plays soccer professionally for Club Brugge in Belgium while also pursuing a Master's degree in Addiction Studies at King's College London. Lára has also worked as a counsellor at a psychiatric ward, taught Icelandic and social studies at the youth level, driven a Taxi and worked with individuals experiencing severe substance use and homelessness in Iceland.
She is also a certified Food Addiction Counsellor from the INFACT School.
Being in the Soil is her first book.
Reviews
Absolutely amazing book! A truly moving and heartfelt narrative that is all at once shocking, sad, beautiful and heartbreaking. Lára reveals herself in an admirable way, which will undoubtedly help people in the same situation, as well as others who are not familiar with the disease of addiction.
Ingileif Friðriksdóttir
Author & Activist
Being in the Soil is a unique book. The author is so uncomfortably honest that you find yourself confronting yourself throughout the whole reading.
Máni Pétursson
Sports Commentator
Honest, raw, dark, but also beautiful and enlightening. Really well written and describes the shocking struggle of a leading footballer with food addiction, a disease that is not yet recognized by the system.
Hulda G. Geirsdóttir
Radio Interviewer