Ironically, this physically weak feeling signifies that I’m actually getting stronger. I know from my past that I will ultimately feel strong if I just sit with the feeling and experience it.

I left myself out of humanity by focusing on differences. This isolation only strengthened Ed” (17)

I wrote in my journal about how good I felt when I was not living under Ed’s control. Then, when I really felt like giving up, I read these pages and realized that I was...

Oftentimes, especially during my recovery, I didn’t need to think about everything I was doing wrong; instead, I needed to focus more on what I was doing right—and then do more of the right stuff....

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting....

With Ed, I always pushed away the good and only heard the bad. Today, I let in the good.

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of ‘victim thinking.’ Instead,...

Connect with supportive people who empower you. The more you jump into your life, the further away from Ed you can get. Don’t have a backup plan for living. Live today. […] Trust in God....

When we feel like giving up, like we are beyond help, we must remember that we are never beyond hope. Holding on to hope has always motivated me to keep trying. I have found this...

Intense pain often pushed me to make changes. The pain of the eating disorder pushed me into recovering from eating-disordered behaviors, and then the emotional turmoil I experienced without those behaviors (not knowing how to...

Being thin created intense anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that weight for life, and I couldn’t.

Holding myself to perfectionistic standards, I used to think I had to become lifelong friends with everyone who entered my life. This was exhausting, and I now know it’s not true. I believe the old...

anxiety becomes high energy when taken to the light. For me, it worked like this: I used to live in a constant state of anxiety, worrying about the past and the future. Now I do...

Sometimes I felt lonely because I pushed people away for so long that I honestly didn’t have many close connections left. I was physically isolated and disconnected from the world. Sometimes I felt lonely in...

Real hope combined with real action has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through.

My job is not to worry about what everyone else thinks about me but to discover what I think. If I actually want to know what someone else thinks, my job is then to ask...

Clinicians have told me that our emotional is arrested at the age that an eating disorder takes control of our lives. After we recover, we pick up emotionally where we left off at that age.

To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of...

Food is something I am going to have to face at least three times a day for the rest of my life. And I am not perfect. But one really bad day does not mean...

Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we...

I would not encourage you to go through the sweat, blood, and tears of the recovery process only to reach some kind of mediocre state where you were just ‘managing’ the illness. It is possible...

In the past, my brain could only compute perfection or failure—nothing in between. So words like competent, acceptable, satisfactory, and good enough fell into the failure category. Even above average meant failure if I received...

During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began...