Elizabeth Pope was an 11-year-old living in Tokyo when she realized she had an eating disorder. Her symptoms included not just vomiting, but also going for periods without eating and restricting herself from certain foods and then bingeing on them.

But it wasn’t until she went through a traumatic divorce at the age of 26 that she began to “fix the ways that I abused my body.” For her, that meant getting into yoga.

The practice of yoga has become increasingly popular across all walks of life in the U.S. in the last decade. Pope’s own mother got interested in it by watching PBS programs on the subject, but it was only during her time of crisis that Elizabeth herself got into it. She says that yoga helped her to recognize she had a problem and to “begin to deal with it in increments.” And studies are showing that she is not alone; yoga has been shown to have tremendous potential for helping people who have issues with food.

This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2011.