“Comfort foods they may have been, but helpful foods they most definitely were not. By merging my identity with certain foods and thinking of them as old friends, I found myself in the food equivalent of a co-dependent, destructive relationship. I was allowing food to have the power of defining me as a person. And those foods had defined me, all right; they'd defined me as fat, miserable, out of breath, lacking in energy and self-worth, and looking terrible in sweat pants. If I was going to insist on relating to food as a friend, then clearly I needed new friends.”