Today I got a call from an FA member from the U.S. who was traveling with family in Europe. It was a call for help. I heard how difficult it was for her to get the food she needed to stay abstinent, to stick with mealtimes, and to meet her family’s needs. I could relate. I could relate so well because I had just recently been traveling in a country where I did not know the language. I stayed in four different hotels over a period of seven days. I had given a printed version of my food plan to each hotel before my trip started and had asked the travel agent to arrange for me to get my lunch to take out, before the daily bus tour started. I had been quite confident. Why should it be difficult to put something that simple into practice? They had it in... Continue Reading
When I entered the doors of FA at 155 pounds, I was broken in many areas of life, not just with food. As the AA Big Book says, alcohol was but a symptom. In the same way, what I did or didn’t do with food was but a symptom of far deeper personality problems that I have had from the get-go. I found FA after talking with someone from another food program I was in, who had been in FA for a few months. She talked about how she found help from the unity and structure of FA, and from FA’s definition of abstinence. She said that the clear-cut directions were helping to keep her abstinent, one day at a time, on life’s good days and bad. My eating began as a little tot, when I was told that I rummaged through open pantries and crawled with anticipation and delight... Continue Reading
Years ago, I spent nine years in Overeater’s Anonymous (OA), but they let me define my own abstinence, which didn’t work for me. My last diet before coming into FA was Weight Watchers. Week after week, I got on the scale and prayed I would weigh at least the same as I had the week before. It didn’t really matter what the scale said though, because if my weight was down, I would eat, and if I stayed the same, I would eat that day and then start back the next day. I thought that even if I ate that day, by the following week, I would have a weight loss. I often thought that if my weight was up anyway, I might as well eat. It always seemed that the best answer was to eat. Food and I had a love connection from the start. Food was my friend,... Continue Reading
After 14 years of binging and purging almost every day, and despite the overwhelming shame and guilt I felt about these things, I finally confided in a friend that I had a problem with food. I remember feeling instant relief after telling her. She told me about FA. I went to my very first FA meeting a day after confiding in my friend. There was a beautiful woman speaking at the front of a room filled with about forty people. I don’t remember much about what she said except that she did not eat flour or sugar. It took a little while for that to sink into my brain, as I could not imagine such a thing being possible. At the break, I asked the woman sitting next to me if she ever ate flour or sugar. She gently and lovingly replied, “I do not eat it—one day at a... Continue Reading
My brother’s voice sounded calm and clear when he said, “Our mother was found dead in her garden yesterday.” I stopped cutting vegetables. “Dead? What do you mean … dead?” I responded, “No, This is impossible. She was fine when she was here four weeks ago.” My brother said that he didn’t know what happened, but that she was, in fact, dead. I hung up and a dark and heavy cloud engulfed me that would stay with me for another year. Mom! My mom… My mom and I had a very ambivalent relationship. It has never been easy. Memories of a lifetime relationship with mom flooded my mind. The day she beat me up when I was 17. The day she had laughed out loud about my breasts when I was 14. The day she took me to the hospital after I had taken an overdose. Our relationship had become... Continue Reading
