Once episodes of overeating diminish and hidden feelings become apparent, the second phase of your journey begins.

You feel proud and excited as you establish a healthy and reasonable eating pattern. Your good feelings, based on controlling what you eat, reinforce hope that you can create a better life for yourself. In time this more balanced way of eating and living will become familiar.

In this phase of your journey, as newly formed eating habits begin to become routine, you will begin to feel vulnerable and unsure.

This is a critical time. The emotionally flooding thrill of early success will pale as you feel previously hidden emotions. You may feel tempted to return to overeating to soothe yourself.

The temptation to return to overeating signals your next opportunity. Your feeling of exposure and vulnerability springs from being near secrets you have from yourself. Your anxieties suggest that you run away by eating. Your journey to health points forward into the challenge of meeting your fears. This is a time of decision.

Let's take a closer look at inner secrets, those secrets inside that even you don't know.

The dilemma in your recovery process is that eventually, healing and triumph require that you face secrets in yourself.

Despite the benefits in freedom, overeating is difficult to stop. You are using food to stop or prevent yourself from feeling uncomfortable or painful emotions. Your eating patterns are a solution to difficult emotional experience.

You may be eating for protection from loneliness and self doubt.

You may be hiding from your own anger.

You may feel eating protects you from danger.

Often you don't even know this. What you do know is that you feel uncomfortable, nervous, irritable and frightened when you try to stop overeating.

These feelings signal that you have secrets from yourself.

Whether you are underweight, normally weighted or overweight, your eating solution can become a problem. You are tired of the roller coaster ride where you get control of your eating only to return to old patterns. You are weary of feeling like a failure when once again you find yourself alone in front of the television eating junk food. You feel even worse when you are trying to binge on broccoli or sprouts in a futile attempt to reach emotional oblivion without harming yourself. You know this is all wrong, but all your efforts to change seem futile.

Your dilemma is that you can change your eating patterns permanently only if you face and resolve your secrets.

If you follow any reasonable diet regime you will lose or gain weight, depending on your goal.

However, since diets address behavior alone they strip you of your protection from your own secrets. No alternative protection is given. As you eat more appropriately your anxiety can grow until it is unbearable.

With feelings of false power and superiority, or shame, guilt and relief, you return to the food solution.

Addressing the unknown in yourself is the heart of any useful method to stop overeating.

If your overeating is a short term and mild problem, you can address it with this guide and patient friends. If it is a long term or life interfering situation you will need to include additional forms of help.

Be kind to yourself when you feel the urge to overeat. Your desire to overeat often means you feel threatened and are seeking safety, soothing and peace.

The energy in you that propels you toward your eating disorder behaviors is the life energy in you that could blossom into a more authentic and natural you.

You may sense fear or anxiety, but you may not.  Your pull toward food may be strong enough to block out your feelings of apprehension or even terror. Use your urge to overeat as a signal that you need caring and tender attention.

Criticizing and punishing someone for being frightened accomplishes nothing positive. It only makes the frightened person more afraid. On this journey to freedom, the frightened person is you. Be kind. Be compassionate. Seek to understand and befriend.

Remember, every urge to overeat is a moment of opportunity to discover and satisfy your true hidden hunger.

When you want to overeat and don't, you will feel something you don't want to feel. These feelings are your clues to inner mysteries which compel you to overeat.

Knowing and resolving your secrets can free you to explore what you really do want. Maybe you can have it, maybe not. When you know what you really want, if it is realistic you can strive for it. If it is unrealistic you can let it go, mourn and be free.

Either way, the overeating solution is gone. Self kindness is an essential aspect of eating disorder recovery.  How can you be more kind to yourself when you feel the urge to overeat?

The next phase of Triumphant Journey will show you how to discover secrets you have from yourself and how to move beyond their power into a life of more health and freedom.

Your journey to freedom from overeating is not easy. Looking at the rewards you will reap can help sustain you when the going gets tough. As your emotional dependency on food diminishes you will discover these changes in your life.

• You improve relationships.
• You are more sensitive and attentive to yourself and others.
• You enjoy others more and they enjoy you.
• You become physically more attractive.
• For example:
  • Swollen glands shrink.
  • Glazed eyes become clear and alert.
  • Hair develops a healthy sheen.
  • Physical movements become more coordinated and graceful.
• You may be safer.
  • You reduce or end your late night trips to grocery stores or fast food places which may put you in a vulnerable position.
  • You reduce the chances of being in car accidents, from fender benders to major accidents. Such accidents can result when you, the driver, are distracted by food thoughts or by bingeing in the car.
• You have more time for people and activities when you use the energy you previously put into food and eating toward something else.
• You are more creative and productive.
• You are able to think more clearly.
• You have more energy for projects you may have considered unreachable dreams.
• You save money. You spend less on food.
• Emotionally you have more experiences of self confidence, peace and joy.
• You feel more alive.