I am very grateful for having been raised in Christian Science, which early taught me I could trust God to meet all my needs.
When I was a freshman in high school, my physical appearance became very important to me. I was overweight, though, and I felt I was much too heavy to be attractive. This became such a concern that I started dieting to remove the excess pounds. As I began to lose weight, I became very self-satisfied. But then I started giving more and more power to food, and found myself eating less and less. Over a period of two years, I gradually cut back on my eating until I was consuming almost nothing. I had started dieting at one hundred and seventy-five pounds and by my junior year of high school, I weighed ninety-eight pounds and was losing weight daily. I stopped menstruating during this time, and I no longer expressed the joy and energy that were natural to me.
Newspaper and television reports today indicate that the medical profession calls this illness anorexia nervosa, but at the time of this experience no one was sure what was happening to me. My family became frightened. With my consent, my mother had prayerful help for me from a Christian Science practitioner from time to time. This certainly did get me through some difficult periods, but the mesmeric hold of the fear of eating continued. (My father, though not a Scientist, always agreed to us children having Christian Science help in times of need.)
