Growing up I had a healthy attitude about food and eating habits and was comfortable with my body. I don’t recall feeling the pressure to be thin or having many of the overeating and weight concerns that many clients today tell me they experienced as children, adolescents and teenagers. But when I went off to college, my eating habits changed and I gained “the freshmen 15”, which weighed heavily on my mind and self-esteem. The summer of my freshman year a neighbor gave me a diet book for a 2 week diet. I followed the diet implicitly, lost the 15 pounds and then some, and felt great. I had a real sense of being in control. Yet my thinking had changed: I latched on to the belief that I could eat anything I wanted to because I could always go back on a diet and lose the weight. This set off a pattern of eating past feeling full, eating when I wasn’t hungry because others were eating, eating for emotional reasons, binge eating, and the false belief that another diet was the solution. A dangerous debilitating cycle had taken hold. And this cycle led to frustration, depression, hopelessness and despair, and diminished the quality of my life.