If you've been a compulsive overeater most of your life you know your health gets increasingly worse and you battle with depression.

Diets and drugs such as Prozac, may give you temporary hope or relief but nothing deeply changes your inner pain or eliminates your compulsive overeating.

You may live a lonely life with food as your prime companion. Yet you may live what many people would consider to be a good life.

You may have an interesting and fulfilling job, a stable marriage and healthy children. You may have friends and a respected positions in your community.

Your life looks good and you do your best to convince yourself and others that you are happy and satisfied. It's exhausting trying to convince yourself that the wonderful aspects of your life balance your pain.

You tell yourself you should accept your compulsive overeating and fat as permanent conditions and make the best of it.

You don't want to admit you have an eating disorder and so eating disorder recovery is unimaginable. You just want to stop eating the way you do.

You hope that if you can accept your compulsive overeating that your depression will go away. But you have moments when your denial fails and you see your health risks increase as you continue to overeat and your weight rises.

When you are on the verge of getting help you admit to yourself that all your worldly achievements do not addres your inner pain. As one compulsive overeater said, "I am so miserable that even when something good is happening  I cannot be happy."

At this point you rally you rally your courage to reach through your anxities, shame and despair to at last look for help.

Perhaps you who are reading this now, are one of those courageous ones, scouring the Internet privately, looking for answers, people, resources, a confidante, hope, a way, that will help you move beyond your painful situation.

If you are, you are looking for something that is beyond your imagination because you have already done everything you can think of to help yourself. You are being brave as you explore what must be new territory. You know that healing methods exist in areas you don't know about yet. That's the beginning of awakening.

You have more than hope. You sense that knowledge, expertise, understanding and caring could be there for you. And if you are still reading, still surfing the net with eating disorder keywords, that sense in you is strong. You are on the verge of getting help.

If you are in or near Los Angeles, perhaps I can offer you the help you are so close to bringing into your life. Please call me, Joanna Poppink: (310) 474-4165.