On my visit to my first meeting, my weight was 330 pounds and I was desperate to lose weight primarily because of the physical effects that obesity was having on my body and the mental anguish I was experiencing being overweight. At 55 years of age, my body was no longer able to cope with or buffer the long-term effects of daily binging and food abuse. These included dangerous hypertension—my blood pressure was 240 over 120, sleep apnoea, arthralgia, pre-diabetes, incipient heart failure, and renal failure secondary to the hypertension. These diagnoses manifest as swollen legs, shortness of breath on exertion, tiredness, insomnia, and fatigue. I have lost 160 pounds through working the programme. Since Day One, I had been journaling my food and keeping a daily diary, and there had been not one day that I have missed speaking and talking to God and writing my food in my... Continue Reading
I think the fact that my mom’s side of the family is Norwegian has something to do with the fact that my family approaches the morning coffee break with an almost religious dedication. In the historical life of my family, no matter what’s going on, when 10:30 comes around, an internal alarm clock goes off saying that it’s now time for “coffee break” – the perfect combination of caffeine, flour, sugar and fat. Weight has never been an issue for me. But then I started living with chronic illness. With the onset of the illness, I went from being a cross-country cyclist and a long-distance runner to being someone who couldn’t run across the street without exacerbating unexplained symptoms of exhaustion, weakness and fogginess. For lack of a better term, I identified as someone living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Early on in my health challenge, I became convinced that if... Continue Reading
I have been in FA for over a year, and so far the journey has been amazing, interesting, and at times, frustrating. Before FA, I did not contain or even express my feelings in any meaningful or consistent way. I simply ate through them, pushed them down with food, and or shifted into work-a-holic mode and ignored them. My emotions were strewn about amid food wrappers and crumbs that littered the floor as they fell from hasty hands and fingers feverishly shoveling food into my mouth while driving or sitting in front of the TV. My emotions were also contained in volumes of food; some empty calories and some healthy calories, but always a lot of food. If it was not food, work palliated my emotions through long hours and a jam packed schedule of non-work commitments. Twenty-one year old journal entries evince my desperation to lose weight and stop... Continue Reading
When I was a kid, my favorite summer activity was to go down to the beach and build a sandcastle. Not a little one either. We’re talking a massive endeavor with several layers of fortifications. It generally required the concerted efforts of three or four siblings and cousins to excavate and construct the sand behemoth, and the bigger it got, the more effort it took to maintain it. We’d build it close to the waves and with every added ring of walls, our construction would come perilously closer to the water. Nothing beat the thrill of trying to keep a layer of wet sand from collapsing under the onslaught of a vicious, uncaring wave. The satisfaction when a monster wave came along and almost, but not quite, annihilated the outer fort was unmatched by any other pleasure I could experience as a ten-year-old boy—except, of course, for the joy this... Continue Reading
I remember walking into my first FA meeting expecting it to be like a scene out of the movie, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had never been to a Twelve-Step meeting, so my expectations were based upon how group sessions were portrayed in movies and television. I pictured someone like Nurse Ratched leading the meeting, stoically asking each member to share. I pictured a bunch of overweight, comic-book type characters, all sitting around in a circle, listening to each other talk about stuff that wasn’t going to be useful to me. I also pictured myself as Jack Nicholson, the hero character who was all too wise for the group, realizing he was surrounded by a bunch of fat idiots. I expected to be entertained. I thought, at best, I could walk away with a story that I could share with others about the experience – perhaps to get... Continue Reading
