Bones: the basic infrastructure of your body, can teach us a lot. Caring for your bones can lead you to strengthen other neglected aspects of your life. This post is about the surprising benefits you receive when you tend to your infrastructure.

*Before you can put your attention toward building or maintaining a structure that supports your life well, you need to know what that structure is. What follows is a list of six questions you can answer, hopefully by writing and better yet, writing in your journal. My post on the Gurze Publishing website about new research in osteoporosis got me to thinking about what doesn't hurt but can break us by surprise.

Where do you go when you go into your eating disorder? What are you looking for?

What you show the world

When you have an eating disorder, you skate on the surface of being present with others. “How are you?” a friend asks. You answer, “Fine.” Yet you live in a deeper, darker world your friend knows nothing about. It’s full of pain where you use private, intense, ongoing strategies to bring you to peace and security and an encompassing love you crave but haven’t yet discovered.

Your secret world

Suffering from an eating disorder is a lonely business. You have to pretend to be happy, competent, and fine without letting the people around you know about your desperation. When you come right down to it, just about every action that stems from an eating disorder is an act of desperation. The binge, restriction, denial, purge, starvation, exercise, and controlling behaviors - these are all unhappy and desperate activities that you try to keep secret. When you have so many secrets, your loneliness increases to the level of despair.

The mother of three children wrote, saying she's had an eating disorder for two years since the birth of her last child. When the child was born, this woman stopped eating, felt depressed, lost weight and still sees herself as fat when she sees her reflection.

She feels elated when she loses weight and works out in the gym for three hours a day or more. She doesn't eat all day; she just drinks water and diet drinks. If she does eat, she purges as much as she can get out of her body.

Recently, Isabella Mori, a gifted psychotherapist in Vancouver, Canada, interviewed me about eating disorders. One segment of three was about mothers and daughters.

Since that interview, I've been thinking and feeling more about my mother. She died two years ago at age 90 while brushing her teeth one innocuous morning in Sarasota, Florida.