A Story of Recovery:
Awakening to Life
“Here, eat this, you’ll feel better.” From my earliest years, these comforting words formed a bond of love between my mother, food, and me. However, it wasn’t long before it turned into an unhealthy relationship that took over my life. My growing pathological attachment to quantities of food, used to comfort or to calm me in the moment, became the basis of what I now know as my addiction.
Food became my “drug of choice.” Obese, with stretch marks by age five and secretly eating in excess, my entire life was characterized by shame and humiliation around my behavior and my body image. I would manipulate others in order to gain access to more food. I would lie about, or steal, quantities of food, primarily flour and sugar products, which elevated my body weight to 300 pounds by age fourteen. I was the heaviest person in our village and, later on, so too at university.
Teased from my first day of school on, I coped by moving into that safer world of isolation and “pretend.” I became the people pleaser, the obedient child, and the class clown in order to gain acceptance and to avert the constant bullying and humiliating comments made by a world that did not understand. I had no words to express what was going on inside of me, so I lived in my fantasies. I created a world where I could be accepted, perhaps even loved, and could have a life with meaning, and most importantly, a world where I could be thin.
I lit many candles in church in those early years. I experienced constant breathing and back problems, bloody noses, and chaffed raw skin, and tried many short-lived, unsuccessful diets. I prayed desperately for the miracle of a normal body weight. Constant denial of self, of thoughts, of feelings and inner yearnings, fed my world of growing fears, doubts, and insecurities, and of isolation and hopelessness.
Already in these early years, I had innocently believed and “bought into” who the world, including my frustrated doctor and family members, said I was: a fat, lazy slob, who was morally weak, with no will power. By age 15, I felt my only future would be travelling with a circus, on display in the fat man’s trailer for all the curious to “pay to view.”
During these teen years, I wanted the inner pain to end and frequently contemplated suicide, feeling like a victim, both friendless and alone. By age 25, I’d experienced years of obesity-related diseases, including gout, kidney stones, high blood pressure, rheumatic fever, unhealthy skin conditions, and hopeless medical assessments. This is when I reached my top weight of 390+ pounds, yet I was still smiling and trying to pretend on the outside that life was okay; that I was managing it well. But inside, it never was okay.
At the core of every addict is that self-centered fear, that I am not enough. As an addict, I over-reacted to what was going on outside of me and underreacted to what was going on inside. I repeatedly “used” and medicated with my “drug” of choice to numb out the pain. I had lost the power of choice to stop. My distorted thinking and mental obsession condemned me to eat what I didn’t want to, and the phenomenon of craving condemned me to continue eating once I started. Food had me.
At age 28, I had succeeded in losing 220 pounds by dieting. The world of Weight Watchers celebrated my weight loss. Mistakenly, I felt my “problem” was over. At that moment in time, I was slim, yet inwardly frightened of this new, exciting life. Nevertheless, I was thin at the scale!
However, as soon as I left the expected weekly weigh-ins, my unmanageable, “focused-on-self” life continued.
I proceeded to regain 170 pounds over the next 20 plus years. By age 55, my life again had become like the billboard sign seen in Las Vegas: “All you can eat! 24-hour buffet! $19.95! Blackout periods may apply.” Mostly in the evenings, I grazed and secretly binged, numbing the pain in my life. I didn’t know how to stop or to stay stopped.
It was at a time of great physical and emotional distress and desperation in our family, that I found the fellowship of FA. The moment I walked into the room, feeling that I was powerless and hopeless, knowing my life was still unmanageable around food, I began to listen to their stories, their truths. I wanted what these people had! Everything shifted; hope in me was reborn. I felt I had “come home.”
In this Twelve-step recovery program, I heard a different kind of thinking than I had heard at all of the previous diet organizations and groups in which I’d placed my hope—and much money! Here was a solution to my problem. I was graciously welcomed. It was free, and there were no weigh-ins!
Since that day 15 years ago, my journey in recovery (an on-going process), has given me a new life! I asked for and got a mentor (sponsor) who guides me daily and shines the light of his experience on the path he has walked so that I could also walk it and have my own “awakening.”
Since being given a healthy food plan, a set of daily tools and a supportive fellowship (not only in my area, but around the world) of others whose stories are similar to mine, I have found hope and the freedom to live differently. To my own and my doctor’s surprise and delight, I got rid of my last 150 pounds of excess weight. To this day I continue, med-free and very grateful, to attend FA meetings where I get my nourishment by hearing of “miracles” happening in the lives of other addicts in recovery.
The Twelve-Step program of FA promises much, and it delivers—if I am willing to show-up and learn from those who have come before me and from a sponsor who guides me. Only my resistance, my will, takes me off track. The impact of my recovery on my new life has been much greater than the total of my own effort. Besides weighing and measuring my food, I now am learning how to weigh and measure all aspects of my life. My addiction had robbed me of all that.
I have learned that addiction is a “disease” that uses up spiritual desire. It is the only “prison” where the keys to get out are on the inside of us. This structured solution of FA gives me freedom from a life that had me imprisoned for many decades. It is like I was asleep to the “real” problem, which never was the food, and now I get to “wake up.”
Though I have had some brief periods of relapse back into earlier behaviors with the food, which have shown me I have more yet to learn, my life today flourishes with meaning, purpose and adventure. A “new life” beginning at age 55! What a blessing! As one grateful FA member commented recently, “Come in, get a sponsor, pay attention, stay open, and be willing to be surprised!”