A Story of Recovery:

Been There, Done That

As a child, I was complimented for cleaning my plate and having a good appetite. I ate quite a bit, but I spent hours running around the city streets, jumping rope, and twirling my baton, so my body stayed a normal size. But by college, I had begun stealing food and bingeing. I stacked desserts in napkins at night to bring food back to the dorm.

My eating really accelerated when I married and became pregnant. I was a newlywed, alone in Hawaii. My husband had gone to Vietnam, and I was trying to fill an immense hole in my soul with large quantities of food. I would stand in my kitchen, missing my husband, and make flour and sugar concoctions. I binged voraciously. The Navy doctors cautioned me to stop gaining weight so quickly, and I tried, but I could not control my eating. I had become a food addict.

By my early thirties, I began attending Weight Watchers, followed by Diet Workshop and long periods of intense exercise. I tried walking five days a week, studied Karate for six years, joined Gloria Stevens, and then tried another health club. I sometimes lost 10 or 20 pounds and then I’d gain it all back and put on more. I hated being fat.

At one point I decided that the reason I couldn’t stop eating was because I felt deprived. So began the years of eating whatever I wanted, so that I wouldn’t crave food so obsessively. I just had to accept my body as it was. So what if I was overweight? I stopped weighing myself when the scale hit 167; who knows how big I got. I convinced myself that size 18 to 20 pants were not so bad.

By my 40s, I was utterly depressed and confused. I was nearing a bottom but didn’t know it. After talking it out, the grace of God broke through my denial and I knew in my heart that, in addition to food issues, I was an alcoholic.

I began going to Alcoholic Anonymous Twelve-Step meetings. Now my food addiction roared into a habit of grazing all day and eating enormous quantities. I was stopping at convenience stores and supermarkets, buying sugar and flour products, tearing off wrappers, and cramming the stuff into my mouth on the ride home from work. Then began the opening of cabinets and the refrigerator and eating one thing after another.

My mother died suddenly, and my stepfather developed terminal cancer. I became his caretaker. These were my darkest days. Flashbacks of childhood abuse by my father began to surface, and all the food in the world could not numb out my emotional pain. I thought I was going crazy. I dreamed of being put into a nice private psych hospital with clean sheets and white walls. I was nearing a bottom point in my life.

One morning my husband was reading the newspaper and cried out, “Here’s a program for us!” He had read about a Twelve-Step program for people with eating problems, and the meeting was that night at a hospital three miles from our house. And so we went to our first meeting, with me grumbling all the way. I hated the meeting and was furious with God for cursing me with a second addiction. It just wasn’t fair!

I received the miracle of putting down sugar that first year through Overeaters Anonymous (OA), which allowed me to better care for my poor stepfather, but I was one raging woman. My stepfather died and I stayed abstinent, with much support from my Higher Power and my fellows. It would be four years before I fully surrendered to being powerless over food. Then I got a sponsor who began to teach me how to weigh and measure my food, no flour, no sugar.

Now I was thin, but still searching for more strength in my meetings. My sponsor found out about a new program called FA, and strongly suggested I come with her. I stubbornly fought this suggestion and then broke my abstinence. I once again became desperate.

I stumbled into the halls of FA, confused and miserable. I found the break at the meetings to be excruciatingly long. I would run to the bathroom and hide out there. My sponsor gave me all kinds of literature and phone lists and told me to make phone calls. Yuck! I hated to talk on the phone. Then she said I had to go out and buy a digital scale. Ridiculous, I thought. But I was desperate, and the people at these meetings were mostly thin. They seemed to have the strength I’d been looking for.

Today I have been abstinent in FA for seven years. I have maintained over a 50-pound weight loss. I have been blessed with closer relationships with my husband and two daughters. My 12 and 14-year-old grandchildren have never seen me fat and crazy from active addiction. I am blessed with wonderful sponsees, am freed from so many resentments and fears through the study of the steps in AWOLs, and am able to do service to pass on some of what has been given to me. Most of all, I am aware that “God is doing for me what I could not do for myself. I love FA!