“How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?... that became for me more and more, the real measure of value.”

--Friedrich Nietzsche

 …Laura, ashamed of her 280 pounds, keeps her size a secret.  She avoids being seen by working from home.  She lives in front of her computer, compulsively eating and building a virtual double life: she has a professional life that brings her income and a fantasy work where she pretends to be someone else.  She has online relationships with men, sometimes using different personas to carry on several pseudo-relationships at once.  Laura sounds friendly and vibrant on the phone and in her e-mails, but she avoids face to face meetings.  She is worried that she will lose her virtual erotic relationships and long-distance love affairs as Skype video chatting grows in popularity.

“The only devils in this world are those running around inside our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.”
--Gandhi

…..I invite you to suspend your beliefs about your eating and your negative self-definition.  You do this the same way you suspend your beliefs about reality when you watch a film or read a novel.  Let yourself suspend your belief in your current time and surroundings.  Accept, on a temporary basis, the possibility of being in a different time and place.  You are in London in the year 1853, and you’re walking the streets with Sherlock Holmes and Watson on the trail of Moriarty.  Or maybe you are in the far future on the starship Enterprise, hurtling through space at a speed faster than light to save planet Earth from invaders.  You have the ability to suspend your belief. Do this with your own definition of you.

In this open-minded place, look at the way you eat and how you might gradually make adjustments in your psychological and emotional attachments to food.

“Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think, Because Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
--A.  A. Milne, The House on Pooh Corner

…When Barbara negates her identity, her health, her very life and uses eating and purging to support that negation, she is also removing her appreciation of the life force of the food.  Both she and the food become objects to use for emotional manipulations and control.  She was not present enough to explore her defects or symptoms and consider the contemplations.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
--Marcel Proust

…A lovely woman, Roberta, as part of her therapy for bulimia, worked through her difficulties in drawing boundaries with me.  One evening she attended a professional social gathering at UCLA.  A male colleague she knew slightly stood in a small circle of people when she joined them.  During the hellos, he stepped eagerly toward her with his arms outstretched for a full body hug.  She stepped back firmly and stretched out her arm to shake hands and to keep him at his distance.  He stopped, startled, and shook her hand.  She remained engaged with the people in the circle.  She said she felt that the men looked at her with new respect.