Learn About Group Coaching (Forum)
The quotes on this page are from posts in the Normal Eating Support Group. They are unedited except for some excerpting (some of the original posts were quite long). Names have been removed to protect privacy. You can find more testimonials, with names, in the review section of the book's listing on Amazon.com.
What Sheryl has written here is brilliant and concise and a great model and I feel really lucky to have found it. I reread sections all the time, just to have those words in locked in my brain, 'cause it's all too easy to get sucked back into being compulsive. When I started on this path I wore a size 18. Now I'm at a 12, which is totally amazing!
The past year or so has been really great for me: I stopped living the life I thought I was supposed to live/living for the approval of others, and instead started living for myself. I've finally gotten to a point where I can trust myself and know who I am and what's important to me. I've lost about 50 lbs by not dieting and doing the steps listed on Sheryl's website.
I used to laugh at people who "forgot to eat". Well, now, I am one of them. Since late spring, I have lost 30 pounds. But, really, I don't care. It annoys me when people notice because my weight has nothing to do with WHO I AM. I would rather allow my body to find its appropriate weight, and not focus on it at all!!
I still save my "Welcome to the Normal Eating Support Group" email in my inbox. It's incredible that in two months' time, I've traveled so much as a person. The scars on my hands from years of bulimia have miraculously disappeared.
I'm down 12 lbs (though that doesn't matter too much), and more than anything else am free of the emotional shackles I've worn for waaaay too long (food obsession/body weight obsession is such a weight for one to carry for so long!). I am so much more in tune with myself, which is a godsend, and am free of food-worry.
Last month marked the 5 month date for no throwing up. After 10 years. Just like that. One month of working on me, reading the website and corresponding via the forum, and I'm on my path to healing, being a recovering bulimic.
I am so amazed - it's like I've been fighting and fighting and what seems like all of a sudden (and I know it's not really) I've had a sort of click. It's just falling into place. .... Change is possible, something that, even just a few months ago I could not have believed. As they say in the 12 step rooms 'don't leave until the miracle has happened'. I truly feel like a miracle has happened to me.
I have been practicing Normal Eating for almost 2 years now, and I can't fully express how free and happy I finally am after decades of being ruled by food, diets, compulsions, and obsessions. I am a normal eater at a normal weight, and it's fairly effortless. Which is not to say I didn't work my butt off to get here - but what a difference there is between working my butt off on some diet that doesn't work, versus working my butt off at getting to the heart of my eating issues and permanently changing my behavior.
