When food and eating are interlaced with guilt and shame, daily living becomes one long walk to the guillotine. Alice was twenty years old. One late winter night when she had just finished painting an image of two dolphins playing in the water ~ yellow, blue, orange acrylic paint crusty on her small hands and face~ Alice wobbled over to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

From the bright white emptiness she grabbed a lonely vanilla soy yogurt. And with the refrigerator door still open, her eyes half-closed, she mindlessly ate the yogurt with a black plastic spoon.

It was when Alice had discarded the empty yogurt container into the blue trash can in the kitchen pantry that something exploded in her mind, “It’s two o’clock in the morning, you just ate a yogurt and it’s going to make you fat, fat, fat! And nobody is going to like you, and everybody is going to hate you!” Alice’s feet became cold. She stumbled her way back into the living room and plumped her brick-of-a body onto the dark blue papasan chair. Her face fell down into her lap like a ripe Red Delicious apple and she sobbed.

All was quite except for a distant melody coming from a car parked outside in the snow. It was Sade singing,

“you think i’d leave you down when you’re down on your knees
No I wouldn’t do that.
And when you’re on the outside baby and you can`t get in
i will show you you’re so much better than you know.”

The following morning Alice woke up late and the first thing she did was pull out the phone book from under the kitchen table and look under the therapist section for someone who specialized in eating disorders. Alice was ready to ask for help.