My name is Julia, I am 44 years old, I have been married for 18 years and I have four wonderful children. In my teenage years I developed severe eating disorders that greatly limited my life, and I felt trapped inside myself. My daily routine revolved around what I would eat and when, so I could then get rid of it as secretly as possible. On top of that I felt driven to exercise excessively and would often get up in the middle of the night to run up and down the stairs in the house. I went to psychotherapy but still couldn’t break the cycle. After finishing secondary school (Matura) I decided to travel to get some distance from home. I crossed Australia, New Zealand and finally India with a backpack. I tried to run away from myself and my problems. After two years of travelling, I realized that I could not escape from myself.

On my trip through India — traveling alone as a 21-year-old woman to remote villages in search of answers about the meaning of life — I felt a supernatural protection. During the eight months I traveled very carelessly, I neither fell ill nor had anything stolen or done to me. This surprised me a lot, because I met many travelers who told me terrible stories. In addition, people in India invited me — as I later found out, they were Christians who were persecuted by Hindus — to pray for them, because they assumed that anyone who is white believes in Jesus Christ. Everything I experienced in India led me to question my faith.

When I returned home from India, my sister, who by then was living in Vienna, invited me to stay with her. While I was in India she had become a believer and experienced how Jesus completely healed her of her drug addiction. I attended services with her at her non-denominational evangelical congregation and discovered that my sister and her believing friends had all been praying for me while I was traveling through India. My sister gave me a Bible and I began to read it. I came to the passage in John 8:31 where Jesus said to his disciples, “If you abide in My word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Those words struck deep into my heart and I knew there was someone who could free me from my “prison,” someone who had paid for my guilt so that I could lay everything down and begin a new life and in whose grace and love I could be healed — Jesus Christ.

I accepted Jesus as my Savior and experienced how a relationship with Him, His forgiveness and love, filled my heart so fully that I was able to forgive, and my eating disorders lost their power over me and vanished from my life forever.

I am convinced that what Jesus did for me He wants to do for others as well, and so the idea to start a support group came about. His love for us is so infinitely great and more than I could wish for everyone to experience true freedom from eating disorders, this is His heartfelt desire for each individual. He wants to bind up our wounds and bring healing.

 Love, Julia