A Story of Recovery:

Enough is Enough

My life used to be very empty. I was sad, disillusioned, and often morose. I wasn’t afraid I was going to die, but rather that I was going to live for another 30 years in a miserable existence.  My body was deteriorating. I was pre-diabetic, morbidly obese, and had asthma, allergies, arthritis, depression, a skin condition, vein problems, sciatica, and the not-yet-diagnosed killer, food addiction. I didn’t know what food addiction was at the time. I believed everything I had been told when I was young, that weight problems ran in our family, that I was big boned, statuesque, and had child-bearing hips. I thought it was pretty much a done deal that I was going to be fat, so I figured I might as well eat.

When I reached 270 pounds, I paid a significant sum of money to a surgeon to remove 80% of my stomach so I could lose weight. I recovered quickly and the weight started to come off. At 158 pounds I figured I was done. My goal was to be a size 10 (I started at size 24) and 150 pounds, so when I reached size 8, I bought a new wardrobe. I picked up the food again, but found I could no longer eat the way I wanted to numb out. My life didn’t get magically wonderful just because I had lost weight, and I didn’t get magically healthy. I was still miserable; the only thing that made me happy was that my clothing labels had a single digit for the size. I resumed my affair with alcohol and rapidly became a blackout drunk.

I didn’t have a God in my life. I was bitterly resentful because I thought that if there was a God, I would never have been the victim of incest, born with a fat body, and serve as everyone else’s doormat instead of being a happy woman. Nonetheless, as God would have it (and I now believe in God), when I entered an alcohol rehab program, my intake nurse was an FA member. A few days later I went to my first FA meeting and I have never looked back. It turned out that I wasn’t supposed to be size 8 and 158 pounds; I was destined to be size 4 and 135 pounds, which I’ve maintained for well over two years. This far exceeded my wildest dreams!

My life is good. For more than two years I was “underemployed.” My sponsor kept telling me to weigh and measure my food, focus just on today, and have faith that my higher power would provide. I don’t understand why, but every month there was enough money to pay my bills, and some months I had extra to pay off my credit cards. I was told to have faith and that working for God was the only job I needed.

Every day I prayed, “God, please show me what you would have me do this day.”  Some days I got work as a highly-paid consultant and other days I worked for a temp agency as a file clerk. Many times I had no work except to look for work. I accepted almost every opportunity to be of service at my meetings, and I gladly did whatever God put in front of me. I was healthy, my home was in good repair, and my car was reliable.  One of my part-time jobs required me to drive two hours each way twice a week, and I used that time to make and receive FA outreach calls.

This past week, two employers kept outbidding each other to hire me. Finally one said, “The CEO says we are to do whatever it takes to hire you, so tell me, what would it take?”

I took it to quiet time and talked to fellows. After a night of tossing and turning, I came up with an idea that was not about how much I should be paid for the job, but how the job needed to be done. My energy really picked up.  I pitched my idea and they loved it. I then said that the money they had offered me was enough (boy, was he surprised), but that I wanted to work a four-day week and work from home whenever practical. He agreed.

So I still get to work for God! Four days a week I’ll be doing work that I love, and three days a week I’ll still be of service, rested, able to place my program first, and God willing, be abstinent. Thank you God I have learned that enough is really enough—enough money, enough food, enough work. Why would I want more than enough?