Free Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen Page A

all of my co-workers; and each of the kids I worked with touched my heart and my life. I'd found a small place in the world—with my new husband, our new home, and my new job—and although it wasn't a perfect life, it was a good life.
    And yet I kept binge eating. Why couldn't I stop?
    THE COPING QUESTION
    When I concluded that making major life changes or finding personal fulfillment still wasn't the answer to curing my bulimia, I briefly considered going back to therapy. Maybe my therapists had been right all along, I thought. Maybe I really did need to get to the root psychological causes of my eating disorder; maybe some complex inner need was yet unfulfilled. After all, there were things about my life in Arizona that left me wanting more. I missed my family and friends, and although I talked to my mom on the phone every day, and talked to my dad and sister at least once a week, I still wanted to see them. I didn't have much of a social network outside of work, and anxiety and depression hit me from time to time. So maybe I wasn't as content as I seemed on the surface, and maybe there were some hidden emotional issues causing me to binge? Although my intuition and my experience on Topamax suggested otherwise, I began to slip back into what I'll call the "therapy mind-set"—the belief that I was diseased and somehow needed to binge eat to cope with life.
    Most of the time, it sure felt like I needed to binge eat. But no matter how right a binge felt in the moment or shortly afterward, before long I felt that eating had done nothing to satisfy me—as if it were all some kind of dirty trick that I'd been dumb enough to fall for again—and I felt fat, disgusting, and shameful. Then, as always, I felt equally compelled to undo the damage, so I exercised frantically, which always helped a little. Exercise made me feel that I'd showed whoever or whatever pulled that dirty trick on me that I wouldn't let myself become fat without a fight. However, I worried that eventually I wouldn't be able to do this anymore; that I would eventually start to binge without doing anything to compensate. After all, my body was getting tired, and the strenuous exercising was becoming more difficult for me over time.
    I intrinsically knew that binge eating really didn't help me cope with anything in my life; instead, it only made my problems worse. I knew that whatever temporary benefits binge eating gave me—like tranquil sleep, pleasure, excitement, or numbness—weren't worth the cost. I knew that binge eating only made my relationships suffer and wasted valuable time, and I truly wanted to stop; but I couldn't. It only seemed logical, then, to conclude that I binged for very complex psychological reasons. Otherwise, I thought, it would be easy to stop.
    So, about six months after Greg and I moved into our new house, I began again to search for a complex answer to the question of why I binged. I asked myself: What is the deeper reason for all of this? What is binge eating helping me cope with?
    It wouldn't take me long to finally find the true answers to those questions—the answers that would propel me quickly into lasting recovery. Nevertheless, the answers were very surprising to me because they weren't complex at all. The answers were very simple, and they solved the mystery of my bulimia once and for all.

9 : A New Book and New Hope
    I t was a warm day in May 2005, the beginning of an extremely hot summer in Arizona. I had binged horribly the night before and was driving to the gym, planning to do six hours of cardio and some weights. I was exhausted and felt sick at the thought of working out; so instead of going directly to the gym, I stopped to procrastinate at a bookstore.
    I made my way to the psychology/self-help section—a section I'd visited many times before looking for a solution to my eating problems. Over the course of my bulimia, I'd read about twenty books that I thought might offer help or a cure. I'd read self-help