Healing is a multidimensional process that twists and turns, and the women often reevaluated and altered their philosophies and approaches. For many of them, a first step was deciding against the severe diets that had led to weight fluctuation. Laura's first approach to her compulsive eating was initiated by her mother, who enforced a strict diet that did nothing to stop her bingeing and caused her enormous frustration:

I ballooned in high school. Through Weight Watchers I went up and down, up and down. Between 175 and 179 and then between 150 and 179. That is where I bounced like a tennis ball. [In college] I said fuck it. Then I got into some fat serenity, which is also really bad for me. Saying, oh God, I don't care. When I really cared very much. It really hurt me very much. I ended up sleeping with the whole Buffalo police force trying to prove to myself that I didn't care. Four abortions later I decided, oh no, this is not good. I am obviously not really loving myself very much.

In Overeaters Anonymous she stopped eating compulsively and quickly lost sixty pounds. But, after six months of following what she later considered an excessively rigid food plan, she began to binge again. This scared her into seeking out a long-term inpatient treatment program. After a few years in recovery, how much she weighs is for the first time less relevant than eating in a way she considers sane. At 245 pounds, she considers herself healthier than she has ever been. Her focus is now on eating well and carefully, rather than on how much she weighs.

Many of the women characterized their healing processes as two steps forward and one step back. Often they took daring steps toward acknowledging trauma and learning new methods of coping with pain yet returned to old coping methods when loneliness, fear, or painful memories became overwhelming or when crises intervened. Ruthie told me that

when you get to a new point in healing, going back is familiar. Even when you know it is bad, it is familiar. That is a really lonely place in your growth. You get to a place in healing, in spiritual growth, where you recognize these patterns. . . . You don't want to go back but that is what is familiar. Back to bad behaviors whether it be with eating, friendships, or your relationship to your parents.

For many of the women, healing was a slow process because of the many layers of trauma they needed to sort through. Rosalee is a vivid case in point. Changing her eating patterns has been intertwined with seeking help for having grown up with an alcoholic father, incest, battery by her former husband, and her own possible alcoholism. As she begins this formidable task, she has learned that she has to pace herself. The first time she spoke at an Al-Anon meeting about growing up with an alcoholic father, she began to cry so hard that she couldn't stop. She was so embarrassed that she quit abruptly, telling herself she was actually fine. Later she went back, and with help from Al-Anon, therapy, and Overeaters Anonymous, began to retrieve memories she had repressed since childhood —of a cousin who was smothered to death by parents who were "disciplining" him, of her feelings about her daughter, who had "not been conceived in love," of sexual abuse. Stopping bingeing gave her a window to many buried memories, yet this clarity left her terrified; after a month she began to binge again, although not as much as before:

During times like this, I feel like I am just skating on thin ice. Like I am about to go under. I start grasping. I was talking to my pastors. I was angry with God. I am going to church. I am being as good a person as I know how to be and still my life is falling apart and I feel like shit. Physically I am falling apart. ... I have been through so much stuff and there is so much stuff down there it scares the hell out of me. It really does. I am at the point now where I have days when I honestly don't know if I can continue. I get emotional about this because of all the things I have tried to salvage, out of what I consider a kind of crummy life. It is much worse than I ever thought. It is much worse than I thought I could have ever dealt with. I needed to bury it because I simply wouldn't have been able to function.

Dawn's substitution of one drug for another contributed to a bumpy healing process. She found some relief from bingeing when she began to attend OA meetings, but when she came out as a lesbian she tabled her involvement in the program. Then her partner became abusive and attempted to kill her, which petrified her and brought her back to meetings again —this time to both Alcoholics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. She became involved with another woman who was an addict and they began to freebase cocaine for hours and sometimes days at a time. After using all of her savings, she realized that while the company she was keeping certainly was encouraging her addiction, it was not the cause. When she stopped bingeing and purging she lost weight, which gave her confidence to get sexually involved. As the infatuation wore off, however, she would begin to use whatever drug was closest at hand. With each step she understood more fully the signs of denial and distraction that had stood in her way.

Martha linked coming out as a lesbian with her initial willingness to stop bingeing. Her emerging lesbian identity gave her energy she had never felt as someone who had spent her life watching television for twelve hours a day. She began to exercise, visit people, and go to parties for the first time in her life. In a summer's time she lost sixty pounds. She also began to smoke marijuana, which she now believes became a compulsion the way that bingeing had. Ironically, because she was getting high with people when she smoked rather than bingeing by herself, smoking pot was a step toward rather than away from healing; she was beginning to break the isolation at the root of her disconnection. By her late twenties she realized she was addicted to pot and had been told by her therapist that she could not come to therapy stoned. Martha sought a twelve-step drug treatment program and stopped smoking pot, then began to binge again and gained fifty pounds. In retrospect, she doesn't think she ever fully confronted her eating problems during the years her bingeing subsided since she had substituted one drug for another. By the time she stopped smoking pot and realized she needed help for her compulsive eating, more resources were available to her than when she was younger. She had been introduced to the philosophy of twelve-step programs, which made attending Overeaters Anonymous familiar. She had been in therapy for a few years and knew that her weight gain wasn't simply a matter of needing more self-control. Her years of involvement in the lesbian community had significantly lessened the internalized homophobia that had been at the root of the shame and isolation she felt as a child. After pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, Martha had trouble losing the 95 pounds she had gained during the pregnancy. All of these factors led her to continue therapy and seek Overeaters Anonymous.

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