The Hug That Healed Me

It still shocks me when I am shopping for clothes and the saleswoman asks me, "What size are you, a size 6?"

I reply with insistence, "No, absolutely not! If I'm lucky, a size 10!"

She argues with me. "You, a petite thing like you? You must be a size 6 or 8!" I find myself in the perverse role of convincing someone that I'm really bigger than I look.

It wasn't always this way. For 20 years I battled an eating disorder so fiercely, it consumed my life. My closet did contain a few size 8's, for those rare moments in time when my body actually squeezed into them. That lasted about a month or two. Most of the time, I hovered in the size 12-16's, on one endless diet after another.

I started dieting when I was age 11. I stopped when I was age 32.

During that interim period of time, like so many women and men, I tried every diet ever invented, purchased countless numbers of health club memberships used for six months or less, paid thousands of dollars to therapists and weight loss organizations, attended Overeaters Anonymous and convinced myself that I would be a recovering binge eater for the rest of my life, and mostly, I despaired. Since a woman has to eat, and I couldn't seem to eat like a normal, healthy adult, I had received my life sentence--binge eater and overweight woman for life.

I was wrong.

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