Nutrition is a very important part of the healing process and the part that had somehow escaped me through all the years of the Grapefruit Diet, the Fruit and Rice Diet, the 1,000 Calorie Diet and all the other diets that I had gone on, thrown up on, lost 10, 20 or 30 pounds on, gone off of and gone back on because I had gained back the weight I had lost. It was also key information that all my doctors, counselors and therapists had neglected to bring up in Eating Disorder Therapy 101 - which I always failed.

Food used to be one of the scariest things in the world to me. I used to spend hours and hours eating food, not eating food, thinking about food, about what I should eat, what I shouldn't eat, how I should cook it, how I would eat it, where I was going to get it from, what grocery store or restaurant, throwing it up, not throwing it up, if I should throw it up, if throwing it up was as bad for me as I had read in the health magazines and if I would ever stop throwing it up.

Even with all of my thoughts of food, somehow the fact that I was a compulsive overeater totally escaped me; I was a Bulimic, NOT a Compulsive Overeater. I had called OA because I knew that they had a Bulimic/Anorexic meeting segment to help with the vomiting, not to help with the eating. I never realized that I would benefit from the normal OA meeting. I remember the moment it hit me that I was an overeater; it's as clear as if it were yesterday.

I was sitting in the basement of a church reliving a scene from Fight Club when one of the members said that they were powerless to food… It resonated for a moment… Powerless to food…Powerless to food…

Then…BAM! It hit me…So was I! I WAS POWERLESS TO FOOD! At that moment I knew that I was a compulsive overeater first and a bulimic second, and it scared me to death. For the last 15 years I had been a bulimic, I was comfortable with that, but a compulsive overeater…? How could I be that? At that moment everything inside started to hurt. And everything started to make sense.

I slowly began to start to accept that my issue had to do with food first. I was able to begin to try to understand what food was giving me that I was unable to give myself. Before I was trying to figure out why I was throwing up, not why I was eating. What I needed were the answers to both questions…not just one. They existed together, not separate.

At this point I began to see for the first time that I was an emotional eater. I ate to suppress my feelings, I ate to repress my feelings, I ate when I was scared, anxious, rejected, insecure, sad, depressed or just plain bored. I ate if I was happy, nervous, excited or overwhelmed. Sometimes, when I was being "good" I didn't eat during these occasions, but the thought of eating was till there. I associated food with every emotion possible and used food to keep from truly feeling those emotions that were too extreme.

I explained it to a friend of mine once like this: If life is 12 inches long and most people experience all 12 inches on occasion, but mostly live in the middle, I would only allow myself to experience the middle eight inches. I would cut off the two inches on the top and the two inches on the bottom, the extremes were too painful for me to experience. I was safe in the middle and neither extreme was ever experienced. I had to eventually learn how to experience ALL my emotions, including the ones I had been avoiding...especially the ones I had been avoiding.