I almost burst into tears on the subway on my way to work yesterday morning. There was a woman on the train sitting across from me, looking uncomfortable perched on a corner seat. Her legs were planted wide apart, her feet pushed into black therapeutic-looking sneakers that were unlaced and seemed too tight. She was wearing all black, with thin cotton lounge-type pants on the bottom and a long cardigan on top. Her eyes looked puffy. She didn’t look up once from the newspaper she held in her hand. She was very heavy—morbidly obese.

I always glance around on the train observing people and just taking in people’s faces, trying to guess what they’re thinking, what they’re going through, where they’re headed. But when I looked at her, tears stung my eyes and I had to look away. Why? Because she looked like she was in pain, emotional and maybe even physical. Because I’ve sat next to countless men and women in my binge-eating support groups who cried as they described the way it felt to have the flesh of their legs spill over the edge of a seat; the guilt they felt at taking up “more space than they deserved;” the humiliation of having to ask flight attendants for seat belt extenders; the dirty looks of strangers on the street.

Watching her reminded me of how I felt all those years I was active in my binge eating disorder. My weight yo-yo-ed up and down—at any given time I could be anywhere from 150 pounds to the 225 pounds I weighed at 22. But no matter what I actually weighed or looked like on the outside, I always felt obese on the inside. Do you know what I mean? I felt out of proportion, out of control, different, I felt like I was wearing my disorder on my sleeve, I felt uncomfortable in my clothes.

Those are the awful feelings I imagined this woman on the train was experiencing, and it made me want to cry—for both of us. I know it’s none of my business. For all I know that woman has never binged a day in her life and feels completely fine right where she is! But seeing her reminded me of how I felt inside for so many years, and of the intense pain that millions of young women (guys too) are going through right now. Bingeing sucks and it hurts. And I’m just so sad for everyone who’s suffering through it alone.

Thankfully, not all of us are going through it alone, and recovery is possible. Sorry if the post was a bit of a downer today, guys, but please feel free to share anything it may have brought up for you.

xo…Sunny
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Dr. Bulik’s second chapter is about weight loss and binge eating, a topic Sunny has tried to tackle before. It’s touchy subject, since the last thing any expert wants to do is encourage “fat talk” or the urge to drop pounds. Dr. Bulik admits that the weight issue can be really tricky: Because people who binge don’t always purge or overexercise, some may gain weight—if they do gain, it often leads to a feeling of hopelessness, so you just binge more, keeping the vicious cycle going, she says. (Then, often if you focus on “dieting” or weight loss, it makes you miserable and backfires.)

No matter what your weight, healthy weight stabilization has to be a slow, gradual process, says Dr. Bulik, and “quick-fixes” like extreme diets only fuel the fire and end up making things worse. What does that mean in real life? I remember hopefully reading stories of people getting better, making changes and slowly stopping the binges and then their weight gradually just falling away naturally as things got better. I think this is an ideal situation, but not exactly what happened for me. As I dealt with some of my issues and the overeating calmed down, my weight stabilized. This stage felt sort of like a relief, “Gosh–at least I’m not gaining anymore weight.” But also felt a little daunting, “Now what? I feel so uncomfortable in myself!”

I did a lot of reflection (journaling and reading things) before I felt that I was at a place where I could focus on some strategies for gradual, healthy change and not fall back into destructive black and white thinking or the diet mindset (careful with this!). This preparation part did take a bit of time, but I was patient and honest with myself and I think it really helped me. It wasn’t until I had truly dealt with some of the underlying reasons for my behaviors that I was able to move on to getting my body back to a place where I felt comfortable. I often would have little moments of being really kind to myself and apologizing for some of the past self-destruction, and that I was trying my best to make things better and honor myself and body.

For me, exercise was and has been the most helpful thing. Not only does it make me emotionally and mentally feel great, but as an athlete growing up, it is a familiar activity and allows me to really be in touch with my body. I found that moderate exercise (say, 45 minutes a few days a week) and being conscious about what I put in my body was key. I know I read this everywhere, but never gave it the credit it deserves…the little things are what ended up making the difference.

How have you dealt with weight and body issues in the past and how are you dealing differently now? Have you found exercise to be helpful or did you have trouble not becoming obsessive about it? —Morgan

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Problem is, my friend saying these things has a totally different relationship to food than I do. She is a very intuitive eater and usually doesn’t overeat, so I would be the one who ended up finishing off the goods and feeling ill. (And who doesn’t have the friend that has a bottomless pit for a stomach and a seemingly magical metabolism?)

Sometimes I just have to be honest with myself and be clear that to stay sane, sometimes I can’t eat in the same way as my friends. Do I wish it were different? Yes. Can I change that? Not really—it is what it is. The reality of things sometimes is frustrating and disappointing, but ultimately dwelling on it and comparing myself to others is just a distraction from figuring out what works best for me.

Sometimes it’s a matter of needing to eat different stuff (for example, I can’t have a meal of just straight up simple carbs, or else I feel icky and get hungry again really quickly), or that I need to eat at a different time, or in a different environment than my friends. As I have accepted this and become more comfortable with it, the easier it has become to manage. I’ve also found I don’t need to make a big deal about it: “I’m not really feelin’ a calzone right now, but thanks for thinking of me!”

Eating is a naturally social event and its fun and nice to share a meal or snack with people. Sometimes, however, it makes it really easy to confuse what is actually right for you and what other people might be doing.

How do you guys handle these kinds of situations? Do they come up for you? —Morgan

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Hi all. This 20-year-old HealthyGirl.org reader sent me an e-mail asking not only for my help, but for all of yours. She feels really stuck in a cycle of hardcore bingeing right now and can’t seem to find her way out. Give a read and then, in the comments, please tell her how you dealt when you were in a bad place like this. I’ll do the same. xo…Sunny

I’m 20 years old and since last summer have been struggling with eating issues. At first the bingeing was sporadic (and maybe made sense since I had been depriving myself [with a diet]) but then a few months ago it started happening multiple times a day and can go for days at a time—from early in the morning to late at night, I won’t stop eating, trying to get as much “bad” food into myself as possible, no matter how sick I feel.

It’s probably over 20,000 calories per day, no exaggerations. A full day binge might include: 4 muffins and a croissant for breakfast, giant sandwich with french fries an hour later, 3 milkshakes, ice cream, a huge burrito, 3 bags of chips, another sandwich, a pizza, and candy. I actually don’t understand how one person can fit that much food inside her, but I somehow do so on a daily basis.

As expected, it makes me feel awful, mentally and physically. It’s especially bad because I’m currently studying abroad and feel like all this obsessing about food (combined with the secret eating, avoiding plans to eat alone, etc.) are detracting from this exciting time in my life.

The problem is I can’t get myself to commit to stopping the binges. I’ve talked to therapists, read yours and a ton of other helpful resources, have tried keeping a food diary, am very open with my mom, etc. I know in the end I have to be accountable to myself, but don’t know how to get myself there. I know my triggers and I know all the strategies, but once I’ve resolved to eat, I just don’t care about them. Like I know when I’m alone for long periods of time or doing homework in a cafe with yummy treats, I put myself at risk, but I continue to do it anyway, lying to myself that it will be different this time. In fact, during most of my binges, I’ll sit online and literally read about how to stop bingeing—but don’t!

It’s almost like there’s something deep down that doesn’t want me to stop. I’m always in physical pain and want to cry when I look at myself in the mirror (I’ve gained 15+ pounds in 3 weeks since getting here). But instead I just eat more. It’s almost like I don’t have *enough* guilt about what I’m doing.

So, for those of you who are recovering, how were you able to actually commit to yourselves? I feel like I promise to “start over” multiple times a week, and it never lasts, which just makes me more depressed and hopeless. Thank you so much for any help! —Jane*

[*not her real name ]

Marc Jacobs Paris fashion show featuring models with a diversity of body types and ages [via @illusionists]

The model on page 125 of the April issue of Glamour as an example of perfectly healthy, gorgeous body love (sorry I can’t post the pic here—just flip through it at a newsstand to see what I mean!)

Gorgeous plus-size supermodel Crystal Renn sharing her wise thoughts about body love and fashion

Non-double-zero actress Gemma Arterton’s fashion spread in the March issue of Glamour
xo…Sunny
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It’s Day 1 of the HealthyGirl.org Book Club, hooray! As many of you know, our first book club pick is Crave by Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D. We’re going to post on a topic or thought from each chapter once a week. We hope you’ll read along with us, but you don’t have to in order to get something really helpful out of these posts.

The first thing that really struck me in Dr. Bulik’s first chapter was this super simple list of questions that she uses to help people figure out if they have an unhealthy relationship with food.

How many of her Qs do you say yes to?
1. Do you feel compelled to eat when an urge to binge is coming on?
2. Have you always had “issues” with food?
3. Do you have negative weight associations, i.e., “fat” is “bad” and “thin” is “good”?
4. Do you frequently lie about the amount of food you eat?
5. Do you often wait until you’re alone to eat?
6. Once you start eating do you have difficulty stopping?
7. Do you build your day around eating?
8. Do you hide secret stashes of food around the house/in the car?
9. Do you have feelings of shame, guilt, remorse or inadequacy after overeating?
10. Do you have a list of “bad foods” that you secretly crave?
11. Do you often “black out” or “zone out” during overeating, to the point where you barely remember, let alone taste, what you ate?
At one time in my life I would’ve answered yes to nearly every single one of these questions. Now? It’s just two: Number 2, of course, and also number 6. (Sometimes it’s still tough for me to push my plate away, especially when I’m eating carbs.)

How many of these Qs from Dr. Bulik do you answer “yes” to? How many would you have said “yes” to a couple years ago? What does this say to you about your relationship with food?

xo…Sunny

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Ever seen the "Fix it!" skits on SNL? Sometimes we feel that way about ourselves, no?

Recently, I have been involved in helping a friend seek out ways to make some important and necessary changes in her life (this includes seeing a trained therapist, not solely talking to me about things).

Throughout the process, I have been thinking about the human instinct to want to just fix things and immediately make them all better. I’ve found that sometimes when working on making positive changes in yourself, there can be this nagging feeling of urgency, like “Okay, let’s fix this, and make it all go away.”

Fixing things seems like the ultimate solution (i.e., my life would be so much better if this were fixed), but sometimes the instinct to want to “fix” it can add to the problem. The inevitable feeling of not having control over something I want to fix creates anxiety that can make me want to emotionally overeat.

I have come to see that with strong emotions and exploring your inner workings, sometimes things have to get a little bit messy before they get better. It’s sort of like ripping off a dirty band-aid and cleaning up a cut so that it can heal properly—it’s not the easiest thing, but in the long run will be so much healthier. Sometimes the “fix me!” feelings can inform you more deeply about things you should pay attention to. So you can use these feelings to learn about yourself and what is really going on.

Where's the tape? Let me fix this thing up right now!

Next time you feel discouraged because you just want your bingeing or emotional eating or body obsession to all to be fixed right now, maybe remember that recovery takes patience and time, and think about how that urgent desire is shaping your efforts to get better.

Have you ever wished you could be “fixed” instantly? Did that feeling of urgency make things harder for you? —Morgan

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I was feeling really lazy about going to the gym even though I knew it would make me feel better and I told myself to just do the best I could do in this moment. I finally went and got on a treadmill and I was actually feeling pretty good at the beginning. I was confidently striding a long and a Giselle look-alike got on the machine right next to me.
She was probably six inches taller than me, consequently thinner and just all of the things I am conditioned into thinking defines beauty. I got this heavy, insecure feeling and all I could think about was what our behinds must look like next to each other, bouncing along.

My head space really drastically went from feeling strong and normal to panicky and bad about myself. What is going on? Ohhh…I’m comparing myself to this stranger for no good reason and it’s sucking positivity out of me.

Luckily, I caught myself and my negative-thoughts loop and immediately gave myself a little pep talk. What prompted me to compare myself to this person? Why do I care at all? Why am I so worried about what other people are looking at? (p.s. Everyone is always so into how they are coming across, they generally aren’t even paying attention). I realized in order to get myself out of this space, I needed to focus more on myself and what I was doing.

I realized that I felt proud I actually made it to the gym and that I was fulfilling my own personal exercise goals. After I had my turn around, I felt this lightness come back into my step and pseudo-super-model next to me kind of faded out of my periphery. (She also got off way before me, but who’s counting anyways, right? =)

Looking back, I think that when I was at my worst with my food and body stuff, some of it was due to a perpetual bad habit of comparing myself to other people…Other people’s bodies, eating habits, jean size, social lives, accomplishments, you name it. After learning to focus more on my own thing, I think it had a direct correlation to me being able to listen to my body and really figuring out what I need and what is best for me. It takes some practice to recognize moments of comparing and then ways to talk yourself out of doing it, but ultimately I think it is a helpful thing to work on! There’s little use for comparing on the road to recovery because we are all so different!

Do you compare yourself to other women in day-to-day life? Or at work? Or at the gym? —Morgan

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“For every diet there is an equal and opposite binge.” —Geneen Roth

Most emotional eaters or binge eaters get to a point where their old faithful quick-fix—dieting—stops working. That’s a time of incredible fear. If dieting doesn’t work anymore, aren’t I just going to get hugely fat, majorly depressed and eventually just die, miserable and alone?!

I felt a little bit like that in my mid-20s when I gained all the weight back from the last diet I ever went on. But far from leading me into a dark, unhappy future, giving up on dieting lead me to where I am today: Happy, healthy and recovered from binge eating disorder. Letting go of the diet mentality (“Everything will be better when I’m thin, and if I just have enough will power, I will get there”) allowed me to stop focusing on the symptom (my weight) and start focusing on the real problem: The fact that I used food to cope with life.

That’s the happy message I want to send to HealthyGirl.org reader Stacey, 18, who sent me this note a while back:
“I recently lost 40 pounds in this pattern: One month liquid fast then three months of strict low-fat, low-carb and low-calore (no joke) eating. I was happy, everyone said I looked good, I said ‘I will never be fat again.’ Then one day I decide to have a piece of chicken, and after that I wanted rice, and cookies, and then on my birthday I had a chocolate cake, and some cheesy artichoke, then I started visiting the dorm vending machines at night. I kept doing that until I completely ended my diet, and now I am about 30 pounds heavier and still eating. I have tried going back on a diet, a healthy one. It’s not working. I tried eating in moderation. Didn’t work. I am mostly mad at myself. I cry a lot now, but I still eat.“

How can you be angry with yourself for something that’s not your fault? Yeah, that’s right, failing at dieting is NOT YOUR FAULT. When you restrict your eating, it’s a natural and normal physiological reaction for you to crave more food. It’s like a rubberband—pull it back too far and it’s bound to bounce back (hard). Emotional eating expert Geneen Roth put it best: “Every diet has an equal and opposite binge.”

There was a classic study done decades ago in which researchers had a group of normal, healthy men cut their eating back far enough that they lost 25% of their body weight over two years. What happened? These once totally normal guys became obsessed with food. And when the dieting study ended, they started to binge eating. Their eating habits and thoughts about food remained screwed up for a long time.

Why should it be any different for us? The way to get to a healthy weight is by dealing with the issues that cause us to overeat in the first place: Anxiety, pain, fear, low self-esteem and the need to avoid uncomfortable feelings.

Ladies of HealthyGirl.org: Have you stopped dieting? Why? And what’s happened since?

xo…Sunny

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I’ve filled up five whole moleskin journals over the course of a year (that’s a lot of pages) with my thoughts, worries, goals, rants, whining, etc.

I’ve been to a meditation retreat for beginners to learn more about meditation as a technique for all sort of things, but more specifically, how to manage my anxiety and its influence on my eating habits. I was nervous before going, but often communities that practice, share and teach meditation (I found mindfulness meditation to be my favorite) tend to be really welcoming and friendly. At first it was very new to me, but since it is based on yourself and where you are at, you can take it at your own pace and make if your own practice…that’s why they call it a mediation practice. It was really helpful for teaching me the fundamentals of mediation and I am now able to translate it to my real, everyday life.

I’ve participated in a support group that met once a week. It was a demographic of women from the community nearby where I went to school that ranged in age. All of them were older than I was, but even so, it was a really valuable experience for me. Again, I was apprehensive about going the first time, but it felt so great to just be able to be open and talk about all this stuff with people who got it!

I’ve gotten out my art box and let myself make weird drawings and collages about some of the strong emotions I was feeling instead of eating and stuffing the feelings away. I like doing creative things as an outlet–making visual things with my hands. I remind myself that these are for no one else, just me and it can get quite fun, a little wacky and a good release. Really, just finding some kind of outlet that helps you can be really beneficial.

I’ve written letters to myself from my body and I have written letters back. This sounds a little kooky (I know), but it was kind of crazy how interesting it turned out to be. I kind of had to just let go of the fact that it was a little strange and once I did that I was surprised at what I ended up writing in each instance. Things along the lines of, “I’m really sorry I have been treating you this way. I know I can say terrible, terrible things to you, and I am working on that.”

I’ve sat on the floor of Barnes and Noble reading self-help books. There’s a lot of really great books out there. A lot of them we are going to be reading in our HealthyGirl.org book club!

I’ve taken public transportation over an hour away to attend my very favorite yoga class when I was feeling really icky about my body. Sometimes something that makes you feel really good after wards is worth the extra effort.

These are just examples of some of the things I did that looking back were really helpful to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will be exactly what you need (since we are all different), but perhaps some variation on the above will help, and you will never know until you try it. Sometimes taking the leap and trying something new can be really helpful.

Do you have any surprising ways that have helped you feel more at peace with this stuff? –Morgan

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