A Story of Recovery:

A Gymnast’s Story

I was always obsessed with how much I weighed and how my body looked. I constantly sized myself up in mirrors or tried to avoid them altogether. I battled with what I should put in my mouth and with the guilt that followed eating something that I “shouldn’t have.” My self-esteem was tied to my weight. When I walked into a room, or when I encountered another person, I played the “compare and despair” game. If you were thinner that I was, you were the better person; if you were heavier, I was the better person. I could not look anyone in the eye when I was feeling fat, which was almost always, because even when I was five pounds overweight, I felt fat. I even felt fat when I had eaten something that I thought I shouldn’t have eaten. I felt guilty, and was afraid that you would see how deficient a person I was for not being able to control my weight, my food, or my life, for that matter.

I used food to dull my pain before I was 15 years old, but it was then that I crossed the line into food addiction. I was a gymnast from an early age and into high school. At one point, some new coaches took over our team, weighed us, and proclaimed that many of us had weight to lose. At 5’3” I weighed 118, and the coach thought I should weigh 110. This travesty prompted my first crash diet and my descent into food addiction. I lost the weight over Christmas vacation in nine days, but gained it right back. I never felt that I looked okay since that sole time when I saw 110 on the scale.

After that, I “succeeded” at many of the same diets I’ve heard fellow food addicts talk about: Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, Cambridge, Beverly Hills, South Beach, Fit for Life, The Master Cleanser, etc. I’ve come to see that I have a very strong will and a ton of will power, even though I so many times castigated myself for being weak-willed. But what I failed to see, until the bitter end, was that I was successful many times at taking all the weight off, but I never was able to keep it off. Therefore, I was really not successful at any diet. The insanity of trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results was a constant in my life that finally drove me into despair.

Even though I had a husband who was the man of my dreams, two delightful young children who needed a mom, and an incredibly fulfilling job, I did not want to be alive. I was pathetic and despondent. I was desperately unhappy because of the size of my body and was extremely uncomfortable in my own skin. I felt demoralized because of the yo-yoing weight. I had run out of diets or any hope that any diet would work for the long haul. I was waking up most mornings wishing that I did not have to “appear in public,” which was the way I thought of showing up for life—as though I was some movie star whom everyone was watching or something.

Two and a half years ago, at the age of 45, at 140 pounds (my highest weight was 162), I dragged my doubting self into the rooms of FA with the attitude that I had been beaten. Nothing was working, and so I stood ready to do anything. In fact, I was so desperate that I didn’t care what they told me to do. I thought I would do anything. I would weigh and measure straw three times a day if that’s what they required. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that, and thankfully I have remained that willing.

Despite my doubt that it would happen, I have attained my normal weight, and did so rather quickly. I had thought that I had so messed up my metabolism with all of the weird and constant diets and binges I’d been on that there was no way I was going to get thin, especially at my age. I am grateful to report that I was very wrong.

Today I live in a thin body. At the age of 48, at 119 pounds, I wear a bikini at the beach and at public pools, and am not too self conscious to run and play in the sand and the water with my two young children. I do not measure my success in life by how much I weigh. I eat three satisfying weighed and measured meals a day. I work a very precise program, as prescribed by my sponsor, which treats the food addiction that I wake up with each morning. The first treatment is getting on my knees and asking for help, something that was never part of any of my diets. And because of this program and my ability to ask for help from a Higher Power and from my fellows, I have a reprieve from my food addiction for one more day.