Yesterday was a rough day for me. I felt tearful several times as I processed my feelings about what food means to me, what food rules I have lived with for years, and how I got to this point. I was grateful to have two good friends (one at work and one across the country) and my boyfriend to support me. This was primarily precipitated by starting to listen to the Intuitive Eating CD set (Triblole & Resch).

I am listening to these CDs for two reasons: 1) to heal myself and my relationship with my body and food and 2) I believe that a program such as this is best taught if you live it yourself. As a psychologist, I try not to be hypocritical in therapy. If I advise someone to do something, I better at least be willing to do what I suggest. Answering questions for myself as the CD guided the process, considering my feelings about the questions and my answers, and again, realizing that I have gotten myself tied up in all sorts of rules and distortions that do me absolutely no good was very difficult.

“If you eat this way, you’ll get fat!”

As I talked to my boyfriend about all of this last night, I spoke of my fears about learning to eat intuitively. I told him that I had this voice, who I spontaneously named Chatty Kathy, that kept saying, “If you eat this way, you’ll get fat!” (note: this is not an external voice, rather it is my internal disordered eating voice – I am not hallucinating) Naming that voice was actually quite powerful and helped me to see that she may continue to chatter on, trying to get in the way of my moving toward health. And, I can ignore her.

I can imagine that some are saying…so what is this about your knee? Well, keeping in mind that I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary yesterday (no yoga, exercise, bumping into anything or twisting my knee), I awakened in the middle of the night with right knee pain. Unfortunately, the knee still hurts. The thought I had as I limped out of bed this morning was: Chatty Kathy got mad that I have identified her and plan to work to lessen her impact, so she kicked me in the knee!