If you haven't asked yourself yet you will be asking yourself eventually, "What is the meaning of life?"

More to the point, you'll ask, "What is the meaning of my life?"
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Now could be the best time to start your gratitude journal. It will be ready to welcome and support your emotional life on New Year’s Day,

Begin by placing a reminder note on your bathroom mirror that reads, “Add one item to your gratitude journal, no matter how small.” This give you motivation and moves your energy away from binge eating.

Meet Your Critic with a Smile

The “no matter how small” is essential.  Looking in any mirror at any time fora person who binge eats can be a trial.  Mirrors, like scales, bring out the ferocious and unrelenting inner critic, merciless and condemning.

Meeting your critic with a gratitude reminder can help prevent you from spiraling into a bleak emotional state.

Bias Clarity and the Therapeutic Alliance 

Bias in psychotherapy needs to be on the table. This is critical for a cooperative alliance between client and psychotherapist.

With or without an eating disorder, we all live our lives based on our agendas with our values and perceived survival needs leading the way. If we balance our emotions and stress levels with overeating we will get short term benefits. If we let overeating continue to balance our tolerance for stress we move into isolation, self-criticism and loneliness break our own hearts and can't save ourselves from our pain.

                                           Compassion is powerful yet has a light touch.

Eating disorders overwhelm a person's life. A person with an eating disorder needs compassion for herself and compassion from others.

I wonder, and ask myself and you and anyone who will listen, why is compassion so difficult to achieve in this or any culture? We all need it, and the benefits of sharing it are huge. Or better yet, we can skip the why question and get to the more practical one: how can we develop compassion?