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My healing journey

Lynne Baab • Wednesday September 24 2025

My healing journey

“You’re a binge eater?” my friend asked me, after seeing the title of my new book, Almost Peaceful: My Journey of Healing from Binge Eating.

“Well, I was,” I answered. “For decades.”

In various blog posts, I have mentioned struggling with my weight. I’ve never gone into much detail because I didn’t want to admit I engaged in binge eating. I also couldn’t write about it because I didn’t understand why I did it. For me, needing to understand what’s going on is primordial and utterly necessary. Binge eating, or compulsive eating as we called it back when I started doing it, felt like an addiction I couldn’t figure out.

My healing journey involved many small steps during my thirties, forties, and fifties. I was raised in a home where my parents spoke as if there was one right way to do everything, and they knew what that one right way was. Some of my bingeing came from self-punishment because I just didn’t measure up. Learning about spiritual gifts, Myers-Briggs type, and Enneagram type — spread over the years between my mid-twenties and my early 50s — brought initial steps of healing because I gained language to describe human differences, including my uniqueness.

Inner healing prayer in my 30s helped me experience viscerally that Jesus cares about me and defends me against the voices that criticize me. Eating disorders therapy, also in my 30s, helped me understand that my compulsive eating served a purpose in my life. It wasn’t stupid and counterproductive. Well, of course, in some ways it was exactly that. But in addition, overeating soothed me and conveyed forgiveness, while also enabling me to punish myself. A potent combination.

I was in my 60s before I understood why I needed to punish myself. Inner healing prayer in 2019 and coaching in 2021 gave me the final steps of healing and understanding. Learning about Intuitive Eating is helping me learn to eat reasonably well.

My last major binge was in 2019. In 2022, I had a small, muted binge that gave me some insights and lasted just over 24 hours. This feels like a miracle. My weight is stable, somewhere in the middle between my highest and lowest adult weights.

I started writing a memoir about all this in 2010. Whenever significant things happened related to food and eating, I wrote them down, including long conversations. But I wasn’t ready to complete the book until the past few years.

I chose to use the word “journey” in the subtitle of the book for several reasons. I have spent all of my life looking for one magic bullet that would enable me to reach and maintain my ideal weight. That wonderful and elusive magic bullet, I hoped, would also solve my desire to turn to food for comfort, forgiveness, and self-punishment. Maybe others have found a single solution that works for them. Instead, for me, healing has taken a long time and has involved many different steps. Yes, a journey.

I wrote the book in part to encourage others to stay on the journey of healing — whatever the wounds are. I hope my story will motivate readers to pursue steps of healing that might involve learning, therapy, inner healing prayer, coaching, support from friends, or whatever else God brings onto the path.

My new book has received very strong endorsements from six people, including an eating disorders therapist, an Intuitive Eating Coach, and a therapist who works with people who have experienced abuse. Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, the author of my beloved Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, gave a generous endorsement. Several endorsers said that they found the story engaging and hard to put down. That was encouraging!

Below, after my prayer for the week, I will paste in highlights culled from the endorsements. You can read all the endorsements on the Amazon page for the Kindle version of the book, which is available for pre-order. The paperback version will appear, ready to be ordered from Amazon, on October 15, when the pre-ordered Kindle edition will also fly through space onto your Kindles.

God of compassion, comfort, and healing, I pray for those who read this post and those who read my new book. I pray that you will help them experience your presence as they seek healing for whatever wounds they experience. Some wounds come from things that happened yesterday, and some of them date from childhood, our teen years, or our early adult life. Pour your healing balm into our lives. Holy Spirit, guide us to sources of healing. I praise and thank you for your healing work in my life, which came slowly and in many steps and which feels like a miracle.

Excerpts from endorsements for Almost Peaceful: My Journey of Healing from Binge Eating:

“Almost Peaceful is vividly written with rich descriptions that allow you to see Lynne’s life through her eyes, capturing both the joys and the darkness of her relationship with food and her body weight.”
—Kiki Kline, PhD, LSW, eating disorders therapist and researcher

“Lynne’s engaging and honest storytelling had me so invested in her journey that it was such a delight to see the moments of peace come in, too.”
—Amy Slabaugh, Registered Dietitian and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor

“This short account of a life affords insight into the vulnerabilities in our own lives and how to find a path through them.”
—Rev. Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, spiritual director, author of Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, and co-author of Spiritual Rhythms of the Enneagram

“Thank you for exposing your heart, Lynne, which will encourage others who struggle and feel stuck.”
—Julie White, Executive Director, The Unfolding Soul 

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Next week: Common discovery on the journey. Illustration by Dave Baab (watercolor) and Audra Mote (graphic designer of the book’s cover).

Posts where I mention my struggle with food:

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