An eating disorder is a coping mechanism keeping you from more pain, but you have to ask yourself - is this in my best interest? And it's not. It only causes more pain and suffering.

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.

Eating disorder sufferers cannot be told to 'pull themselves together', to 'stop doing that' or to 'just eat'.

The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.

Pain moves us forward, changing us into something else, something we need to be.

Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.