About Me:

I think it was sometime around 1984 when I realized that I had a bizarre relationship with food and my body. I was ten-years-old at the time and although most of the adult women around me shared this idiosyncratic relationship with food and their bodies, I knew that there was something uncomfortable about it.

Everyone around me was trying to get skinny. All the time. Even those who were already skinny. Nothing and no one was ever good enough, not to themselves and not to others. No skinny was ever skinny enough and no skinny was ever good enough. And I certainly was never good enough.  When I look back at pictures of myself as a child, I realize that physically I was a normal, healthy kid. But I didn’t know that. I thought that I needed to be better and to be better I needed to be thinner.  And this lead to a very, very unhealthy relationship with food and my body.

It took me years to come inside of myself and become who I was and start to work on the inside and let the outside fall where it may. I learned how to love the good in me and around me. I learned how to accept and not criticize my body or anyone else’s. I learned how to be loving to myself and to those around me. I allowed myself to heal from the tyranny and the pressure to be skinny.

In 1999, I began working on helping other women heal their own food and body image demons after receiving my certification in Hypnotherapy at the Oakland Center for Hypnotherapy. I loved what I was doing and wanted to delve deeper into understanding the workings of the human mind and emotional pain. This spurred me to pursue my graduate degree in Psychology.   I then began working at treatment programs for people with eating disorders and learning everything I possibly could about treating them.

I received my Master’s Degree in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 2006 and became a licensed Psychotherapist in the State of California. After treating hundreds of people with eating disorders and collecting stories, thoughts, notes, and seeing what worked, what didn’t work and what did work for some but not for others, I sat down to write this book. It took me several years to write and I hope that if you choose to buy it, you find it healing.

My book, Reclaiming Yourself From Binge Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide to Healing utilizes everything I’ve learned from all of my clients, my teachers, my supervisors and my own process. I’ve condensed it into concise steps so that you take each chapter one at a time and complete that step before you move on to another one. You can use this book with your therapist or with a very close friend,  a sponsor or clergy, or anyone you trust to help you go through the steps. You can even use it on your own, though I do believe that recovery thrives and grows with support and love from someone you trust.