THE GOODS

T-HEE GREETINGS

Add a little springtime to your table with fabulous new spring entertaining wares at both locations. Mockingbird & Abrams and Walnut Hill & Audelia 214.747.5800 t-heegifts.com

Yoga Mart

Yoga props of yoga. Mats, sandbags, clothing, jewelry 6039 Oram (at 214.534.4469 yogamartusa.com

North Dallas Antique Mall

12,500 sq. ft. of great shopping for antiques, collectibles, vintage, furniture, décor, retro, art, glass, fashion, jewelry, garden and much more. 11722 Marsh Ln. @ Forest Ln. 214.366.2100

Product,

The T Shop

The T Shop – special gifts and flowers. In the heart of Lakewood. Abrams Pkwy. and La Vista 214.821.8314

The Store In Lake Highlands

Brighten your life with BRIGHTON! Creative and beautiful purses, wallets, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and ID card cases (shown) that come in lots of fun colors. 10233 E NW Hwy@Ferndale (near Albertsons) 214.553.8850

Mon-Sat 9:30-5:30 TheStoreinLH.com

AbbieChesney

An eating disorder can be like a person. Like a deceitful, controlling, jealous, very bad best friend whose secret plan is suicide.

At least, that’s the way Abbie Chesney talks about her disease. Chesney, 34, grew up in LakeHighlands and lives in Lakewood. Now she is a counselor specializing in eating disorders.

“I strongly believe the connection I have with my clients maintains because I have spent a lot of time in their shoes,” she says.

She knows what it’s like to be afraid of pain and failure. And she knows what it’s like to be afraid of eating.

Her struggle started as a middle school misfit, where she learned at the lunch table that eating less and being thin was “better”, so she challenged herself to eat less than her lunch mates.

She always judged thin, boyish figures to be “better”.

In high school, she says she dated “the bad boy” just to fit in somewhere, lost her virginity and then was dumped.

She says she was devastated, full of guilt and self-loathing. So she tried drinking to numb the pain, but that didn’t catch on.

Soon, she found that if she didn’t eat, she thought about how hungry she was instead of how she felt about herself.

And by not eating, she earned compliments for being enviably skinny.

“I was also doing what I learned at the lunch table every girl should want to do,” she says. “Every girl should want to lose weight. Smaller had to be better.”

Sometimes, she would eat enough so that people weren’t suspicious.

“Snuffer’s cheese fries were safe as long as it was a few bites,” she says.

That was at first, but the “rules” of her eating disorder kept changing.

By the time she was really sick — her senior year of high school — she sometimes ate a bowl of rice with parmesan cheese for the day.

“I’d even go through the drive-through of Taco Bell to create some evidence to show my parents I had already eaten,” she says.

She was so thin, she had to wear two pairs of pants to keep warm.

At 5-foot-3, her weight dropped to 76 pounds within a year. By the time she started getting help for anorexia, her body was deteriorating so rapidly that all four of her heart valves were leaking.

“I was headed for a very slow suicide,” she says. continued on page 41