On the surface, everything seems great…

Maybe you have a perfectly healthy looking body – or at least a body most people would want to have – but no matter how good you look, you never feel good about yourself and struggle with your waistline like a damn about to break and look at common foods as something that, if you ate them, would make you blow up like a balloon…struggling to eat as healthy as possible in public, but giving in to binging like a weak-willed loser when you’re alone.

You feel like a total fraud because around your family, friends and in public you seem so “put together”, some would consider you spiritual, upbeat, even happy…yet underneath you feel trapped behind the shame, lies and deceit because of all of the sneaking around you do to hide – what no one would understand-  the madness going on inside your mind.

You instantly regret feeling overly full after eating too much and choose between “getting rid of it” now or purging with a few days of cleansing, juicing or restricting to counteract eating too much.

You get into a fight with your husband, ex, boyfriend – or even your mom – and it sends you off the deep end and straight into a binge session with stress-and-feeling-avoiding sugary foods that, by the time you come back to your sesnses, you’re more pissed, frustrated and disappointed in yourself than from the fight itself.  This never-ending-emotional-roller-coaster-binge-purge-cycle happens frequently because these peak emotional moments always seem to send you, like an addict, into binges leaving you deeper in despair than you would if you could just figure out how to handle the stress or anger that comes up in the first place – you’d probably be able to get this monster off your back.

Maybe you’re able to go a week or two binge/purge free…then you’re out one night or away for the weekend and you strictly tell yourself you won’t eat that fried food or have dessert after dinner and then you end up eating it and beating yourself up all the way home…that leads to a purge and wake up yelling at yourself all the next day…”Why??!! Why can’t I just stop? I was doing good!”  

Or maybe…on the outside life looks normal. You have a family at home with kids you love…perhaps you have a very successful career, job or business you run…you have lots of friends and admirers who would kill to have what you have…you have a normal – perhaps wonderful – life in so many ways. So, why can’t you just figure this damn binging thing out and get on with your life!?! You’ve often thought to yourself…”What’s wrong with me?!”

Perhaps you feel like you’re losing valuable time with your kids and loved ones because you’re usually distracted thinking about food – or overeating – which keeps you isolated, sneaking around and lying to the ones you love the most.

You’re consciously or subconsciously keeping a guilty running tab of how many days since your last binge…feeling like an escaped convict who’s about to feel the handcuffs slapped on them from a surprise trigger event or weak moment and suddenly you’re dragged back into your horrible personal prison of secrecy, lies and shame.

Have wasted waaaaaay too much money on food...you feel the Mt. Everest size regret of what else you could have done with all that money.  How much better your life could be now and for years into the future if you hadn’t pissed it away on junk food.

You sometimes ask yourself “Why can others eat normally, love themselves and their body and I can’t?” You wonder why you haven’t yet found that missing secret that would finally give you freedom from your struggles with food and allow you to accept yourself and your body just the way it is?

Here’s what I’ve learned – and teach in-depth and address through hours of video trainings and exercises in my recovery program (stay tuned for more on that in a minute…)

You’re self-sabotaging because you still have self-limiting beliefs

Many people will tell you you’ve just got to want recovery bad enough for it to happen.  If you don’t have it, you must not really want it. For some, that’s possibly true. But the majority of you reading this really, really want it…and want it bad.

However, you don’t have what you want because deep in your subconscious there is a limiting belief – or many of them – that conflict with what you say you want (so badly).

Your mind is designed to do what it THINKS you want – which means if you’ve conditioned it through time to believe that something about bulimia is serving you.  

The sad thing is we forget we conditioned these beliefs so long ago and we try to use our logical mind to out-think these thoughts.

You can’t out think the subconscious.

It’s tricky!  

You know when you’ve run into a subconscious belief that compelled you to do something because after you’re done you say to yourself “Why? Why did I do that?!”

In your “right mind” you’d never ever do such a thing, but when your subconscious steps in and creates impulses and urges to act and you can’t resist them you’re susceptible to those self-sabotaging behaviors because you still have limiting beliefs locked inside your brain…you just don’t know it.

In my recovery program, we bring those beliefs to the surface, reframe or release them and then you don’t wake up after a rampant binge and wonder who just took over your body.

You Eat When You Don’t Want to Feel Bad

Some of your binges are habituated.  They’re like a practiced ritual. They occur with precise and deliberate timing and execution.  You could do them in your sleep. And if you look at it from your mental perspective, you are doing them when your pre-frontal cortex is asleep and you’re run by your subconscious thoughts.

However, other binges are driven by uncomfortable emotions.  These occur more sporadically and randomly. You never see ‘em coming so to speak.

They sort of sneak up on you in peak moments of emotional stress.  Until I learned about emotional state management, I was always at the whim of my emotions – or to be more honest, I just ignored, avoided or stuffed them down.

I never understood emotions like I do now and without a fresh perspective of what they are, how they work biochemically and physiologically in the body you, like me, will continue to wage a war with your emotions avoiding the discomfort with overating.

What I want you to know in a nutshell (that is discussed in several videos in the Breakthrough to Binge Free Program) is that a percentage of your urges to binge come from a mis-read signal from your body that you have associated with eating to feel better.  Somewhere along your journey you tied eating to helping you feel better when you’re angry, upset, lonely, stressed, overwhelmed….or any other number of peak stressful emotions. You linked up in your mind that food feels better than the stress of those emotions.

Because sugary foods are so addictive and satisfy the hungry brain in so many ways to remove discomfort in the mind and body it very rapidly becomes a habit for some of us.  It’s not your fault that you mistakenly linked up eating to feel better, but until you learn how to change or break this association with practice and conditioning you will continue to self-sabotage when you’re emotionally triggered.

You’re Trapped in a Restrictive Mindset and Don’t Know How to Truly Nourish Your Body

While many treatment programs and nutritional counselors focus on re-feeding the body, it’s not the only work that you need to consider for lasting recovery. I’ve come to realize there’s something I call the “restriction mindset” that some of us fall prey to even when we try to recover by eating “normally.”

A couple things happen here, but to be brief it’s like when an alcoholic is considered a “dry drunk.”  They may exhibit the behavior of not drinking, but in their mind and through their body you’d think they were still just as much an addict as ever.  The addict mindset still exists.

When you struggle with food, calories, and spend countless hours trying to figure out what to avoid when you eat you’re sort of like a dry drunk.  You have a restriction mindset locked inside your mind and until you replace that mindset, you will continue to live trapped inside a mind and body that never seem to work together…possibly leading to weight gain when you stop the purging.

You Aren’t Treating Your Self With Love and Compassion

One of the greatest gifts you have to give yourself if you want to have lasting recovery is…compassion.  Along with self-compassion there are numerous related words like self-love, self-care, self-confidence, self-trust and self-forgiveness and more that are available to you as a result in a shift of mindset.

The perspective – or mindset – you have about yourself and whether you’re worthy of things like trust and compassion are the glue that makes recovery stick.  Without self-love and compassion recovery won’t be sustainable.

You’ll find hours of video in the Breakthrough to Binge Free Program about how to shift your mindset to adopt these terms because you won’t act lovingly or compassionately towards yourself until you make the decision in your mind.

But most importantly…

You see, I used to have low self-esteem, was self-conscious about my body and maintained my weight by binging and purging.  People thought I looked ok on the outside, but inside I felt empty, alone and I was binging every day – sometimes 10 times a day.

Like most bulimics, I used to slave my body into shape by working out a lot and avoiding “bad” foods.

I was in decent shape, but definitely not healthy in mind body and spirt. It was only after I overcame my eating disorder, reclaimed who I was, fell in love with me and found a new approach to living.  

My life started over again in 2005 when I began living life based on my values. I stopped living based on how I looked on the outside.

In 2005 I attended a workshop called The Landmark Forum. It was my turning point.

What I learned in the Forum and for next few months afterwards as I put what I was learning into practice…

• Possibility Thinking – I was resigned to living life as a bulimic. I honestly wasn’t even trying to recover.  I was in the “why bother” boat because I had tried and given up on myself for twenty years I didn’t think there was hope left.  Then I found new hope in the word possibility and I began to open up to the idea that…maybe there was hope. I learned to live INTO that hope, the possibility that I could somehow finally do this.
• Create a Vision – As a teacher of visualization and vision board workshops now, I understand how important this was in hindsight.  With my resigned attitude came a lack of vision or any idea really what recovery could look like. I only knew bulimia because that’d been my life for so long. While working through the teaching of Landmark, I found that I could begin to open my eyes to what life without bulimia could look like, feel like…BE like.  I wouldn’t say my vision was crystal clear, but I did know it sounded so good to think about that I tried feeling my way into it..until soon I was living it.
• New Identity – In the Forum they have you declare who you are anew. I said out loud that I was “non-bulimic” or “bulimia free”.  It felt so foreign, but I kept telling myself this thought over and over. Whenever I would find myself in a moment of decision that could take me down the old road of bulimia and into a binge, I told myself “But I’m a non-bulimic.  A bulimia free person would do this or that.” It sounds a little hard to believe, but now I know how the self-identity is created and if we are sabotaging it’s because we often have an old identity we haven’t transformed and that keeps us locked into acting like the identity we think we are. (as a p.s.  I did this later in life when I gave up eating meat…I told myself I’m not a meat eater and I never had trouble choosing not to eat meat again once I changed my self-identified beliefs about who I am.)
• New language and Story – Probably the most amazing transformation that happened for me in the Forum was a complete shift of consciousness.  I mean like…I was asleep in my life and then I woke up. Sounds weird, but that’s how it felt. I had NO idea I was responsible for everything in my life because of the thoughts I chose to think, believe and act upon.  Once I realized the power I had, I forever take the power we have as creators in life as one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given. The self-actualization in the moment of embracing that I create my life with my thoughts instantly gave me access to transform things like self-care, self-compassion, self-trust and inner confidence.
• Sense of Community and Support – one of the primary human needs is the need to feel part of a tribe, a community, a social group.  It’s a survival thing – enough said. In the Forum they break you into groups you get to work on your stuff with for 10 weeks following the initial weekend. I had a wonderful community that was soooo committed to this work and to continuing to transform their lives it inspired me each week we would meet. I’d hear what they were up to, I’d share what was working or wasn’t, and I’d have support to try new things or just see things in a slightly different way. I owe so much of my success to having people around me during that period who not only didn’t judge me, but they totally understood because we all have struggles and troubles that bring us to this work.  My stuff paled in comparison to some of the miraculous transformations I saw in our community. Heavy stuff – and when you see someone carrying around decades of severe abuse and trauma let that shit go…you know you can do it.

The journey of personal development that I started by attending the Forum back in 2005 continues today. I will forever be a student, teacher and master of this thing called consciousness and living a life I love.  It’s never ending, but is so much sweeter each day since I left bulimia behind on my path all those years ago.

Today, I just want to help everyone who comes across my path to live a life they love.  Whether that’s letting go of bulimia, leaving a job or relationship that doesn’t serve them, or pursuing the dreams they had as kids, but thought maybe they never could do it.

You see, everything I’ve done to this point has brought me to a place where I can without reservation say that this is the best material you will ever find in one place to take care of all of the parts of you that need healing and support to create the transformation you’re looking for.

Food is a symptom of what’s eating you inside. How you are with food is how you are with your Self. And because I’ve been where you are I know how far apart you are in some ways to being fully connected to all the wonderful and beautiful parts that live inside of you.

Let me help you transform the relationship you have with yourself and in doing so I guarantee you will transform your relationship with food…forever.  

Yes, forever.

I invite you to join the millions of women who have transformed their lives and are now living bulimia free.  Join my Breakthrough to Binge Free Program and set yourself free.