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Balance. I have always known balance. Years ago, I saw it a lot when I was swinging between extremes. While I never spent much time in this middle ground, I did see it every time I would swing from black to white or from all to nothing. My particular swing was made of anorexia and bulimia. I was swinging back and forth for over twenty years, and my life was anything but balanced. I have always had a tendency to think this way or that way, right or wrong, black or white. I thought in absolute terms: “every,” “all,” or “never.” Even as a small child, I had difficulty seeing the middle of the road. As I grew older, my all-or-nothing thinking played out in school. If I did not make a 100 percent on an exam, I felt like I failed. My brain could only compute perfection or failure --- nothing in between. For me, being the best meant being the thinnest girl in the room. In the beginning, I restricted food in an effort to lose weight and to avoid gaining weight. But then the restricting of anorexia gave way to the uncontrollable bingeing of bulimia. I found myself having either “eating” or “non-eating” days. I was all-or-nothing with food just as I was with the rest of my thinking. Each day, I promised myself I would get back on track and that I would never engage in eating disordered behaviors again. So my life was filled with broken promises. I finally enlisted help from a dietitian, therapist, internist, and psychiatrist. I went to Twelve Step meetings and a therapy group. I told all of the people who were helping me that I needed to get my eating back on track. They told me that I needed to get my life back on track. To my surprise, they talked not only about balancing my views of food and my body but also about finding moderation in all things. I had sought out help for an eating problem and discovered that I had a living problem. My dietitian gave me a food plan that included three balanced meals a day with snacks in between. What seemed worse than having to eat everyday was that she provided variety and flexibility within my food plan. If I wanted to eat an extra cookie on Monday, I could. If I chose a banana over an apple on Wednesday, that was fine, too. I had thought that she would spell everything out in black and white, that she would tell me exactly what I was supposed to eat and when. But there was nothing black and white about my food plan. She was all about that strangest of colors: gray. Speaking of gray, let me introduce you to my therapist: Thom Rutledge. His creative and unique approach to therapy helped me to open my mind and to fight against black and white thinking. In my first therapy session, he actually encouraged me to think of anorexia/bulimia as a man named “Ed” (an acronym for “eating disorder”). Thom taught me to think of my eating disorder as a relationship, rather than an illness or a condition. I learned that the negative thoughts in my head about food, body image, and myself came from my eating disorder, from this fellow Thom called Ed. Slowly I learned to develop healthy thoughts of my own. My new, healthy, balanced thoughts felt weird at first. I soon learned that weird is good when it comes to recovery. Thom told me that feeling weird in my new recovery meant that I was taking risks and making real changes for the better. My medical doctors were into balance and weirdness, too. My internist talked about moderate exercise. “Moderate” rolled off his tongue like the most natural thing in the world while I had to look the word up in the dictionary. My psychiatrist talked about my extreme moods, and we tackled my tendency to be unstable emotionally. He helped me to make changes in my life to deal more effectively with my ups and downs. He also worked with me to balance the chemistry in my mind. In order to recover, I had to embrace the concept of balance. The process of walking in that strange, unfamiliar middle ground felt unnatural. Like walking a balance beam, it seemed impossible to do, let alone master. But walking away from all-or-nothing thinking and balancing on that beam is possible. Stopping the swing is possible. And it turns out that learning to do just that, learning to walk the middle ground, is the cornerstone in my life of freedom today. Jenni Schaefer is a singer/songwriter, speaker, and the author of Life Without Ed: How One Woman Declared Independence from Her Eating Disorder and How You Can Too (McGraw-Hill). She is a consultant with Center for Change in Orem, Utah. For more information, visit www.jennischaefer.com or email jenni@jennischaefer.com.