She spent her younger years trying to numb her restlessness. "I always have to feel like I'm accomplishing something not sitting," She says. "I'll paint something that doesn't need to be painted; I put stuff away. That's one of the most unconfortable things for me--to sit in a grey area and not try to fix something." The key to finding balance, she knows, is to stay in the moment, not in the wirlpool in her mind. "I've been working for years on knowing the second those thoughts are coming in, to reconize them, to get rid of them, and move on to whats happening right now." The eldest of three, Anderson says she "used to show off a lot as a child. My father found that very distasteful. I have a built-in mechanism, and red lights start flashing whenever I start to behave in any kind of diva-esque way." As a result, she can seem too restriened. "Ally my life, what I've put out is that I'm completely in control. Ans sometimes that's not true." It didn't help that Anderson was hitting her teens when her brother was born ( a sister followed four years later). "I was an only child for 13 years-the master of my parents' attention," she says. She started theorpy a year later. "But I lied to my therapist! I think I learned very early how to act and lie." At DePual Unviersity, she tried yoga and meditation. But by then she'd find other ways of suppressing her feelings. "I was ingesting everything and doing yoga afterwards," She says, laughing at the absurdity. "I remember it was 3 in the morning and I'd just come home and was going to do yoga. I did this one posture that you're not suspose to do if you've had any alcohlic beverages. And I did it collapsed on the floor." Along the way, her weight climbed to 147 pounds ( on her 5-foot-inch frame). "All my life I've been very body conscious in a not-so-good way," she says. Bingeing compounded the problem. "I used to eat twixes and skor bars. I liked the stuff that gets you down in your stomach and sticks. I would get pounds of brach's candy-anything carmal. I would constantly have something in my mouth. That was an escape."

After college, she moved to New York to pursue acting, a more constructive outlet for her feelings. She worked off-broadway and won a theatre World Award. But she still had to trian herself to eat carefully. Moving to LA in 1992 helped her discover the importaance of exercise. By the time she had won the role of Scully, she was down to 118 pounds. Her diet continues to evolve. "I am my own guinea pig," she admits. In fact, just prior to her recent cleansing treatment, she says, "I was on a program of carbohydrates, protein and supplements--and starbucks decaf coffee four times a day." While she says the cleansing "changed my life,"