A Story of Recovery:

I Never Felt Satisfied

I depended on my thumb for comfort until I was in fourth grade. My mother says I was a picky eater, always needing special textures, and that I favored only certain foods. The vision when I looked into the mirror was that I was heavy and cumbersome. If I sat down on a chair and my skin folded a certain way, I would get angry and anxious. I was a self-declared “fatso” at five.

I was an active, athletic child, so although my physical body was a normal size, my perception was deeply skewed. I wore big sweatshirts and baggy pants. I bought dresses that were three sizes larger than I was, and I wore men‘s T-shirts to cover up my body when I wore swimsuits. I would go to sleep and check to see where my bones were and how far they stuck out, and unless they were protruding from my body, I would be disgusted with myself. My evening prayers were hateful rants.

I had a strong desire to be thin and an internal craving for flour and sugar that ruled my inner psyche. I would do anything for flour and sugar. I stole money from my siblings. I risked my life crossing freeways and highways in middle school to get flour/sugar items from the supermarket. I ate entire bowls of beautifully wrapped sweets in my grandmother’s candy bowls, hiding the wrappers so she wouldn’t think it was me. When I babysat as a teenager, I would eat whole bags of chips and binge on baked and frozen treats.

The refrigerator in my family home was literally chained so that I would not drink the sodas my mother stored for her own addiction. At Halloween I would scurry like a rat through closets to find food. I would steal food, and in high school I would bully my best friend into stealing money from her parents so that we could go to McDonald’s or 7-Eleven.  Stealing was a habit that became easier for me as I got older. It went beyond the scope of food, until I was stealing books, clothes, and other items.

As I got into my late teen years, I became addicted to the euphoria I got from deprivation. With the help of diet pills and extremely restrictive diets, I learned to feel a powerful sense of accomplishment from being in control. I learned from fashion magazines and diet review about the many different diets, and I tried all of them. Diets helped me to feel in control, calmed me, and provided a formula that often kept me from what I most desired, which was flour and sugar.

In college in my early 20s, I figured out the “formula” to thinness, which drove me to complete insanity and finally into the rooms of FA. During those years, I calculated that I could be thin and have my drug of choice. The girls in my sorority taught me about throwing up after eating (the pipes in the sorority house were always being serviced). Some girls literally ate nothing and starved themselves into the hospital. The method to my madness became my addiction to exercise and the obsessive cycle of bingeing and purging.

Up until my early 40s, my daily routine became a conversation around what I was going to eat and how I was going burn it off.  On the day before my wedding, I held a “forced march” for my bridesmaids in the foothills of Boulder, CO so that I could eat my wedding dinner.

I often would run in the morning and in the evening. Any time I ate any food, I would calculate how many calories went into my body and how many I would have to burn on a treadmill. I went to boot camps with military-type trainers, where my nickname was “mom on meth,” which I accepted with pride.  One of my worst moments was when I trained for a bodybuilding competition. The final week was a total starvation diet, where I had to walk out on stage in sleazy high heels and a bikini to be judged on my muscle tone.

The saddest thing was that there was never a day when I felt satisfied. I was in a thin body, but I was obsessed with being thinner, stronger, and more beautiful; nothing I did was ever good enough. I always felt so angry and like a failure, and my nightly rants as I went to bed were cruel, hateful, and self-deprecating. This negative energy affected my intimacy with my loving husband, and my patience and role modeling with my four young children.

When I turned 40, my “formula” stopped working. I craved more, and my excessive workouts weren’t keeping the pounds from creeping on. I couldn’t stay on a diet for the life of me, and the disease voices in my head were getting louder and louder.

I had heard about FA from a woman at a conference. When I read the questions in the pamphlet to determine if I was a food addict, I answered “yes” to almost every single one. Soon after, I ran into a neighbor who had lost some weight, and in true addict form, I asked, “How did you lose your weight?”  She shared with me the program of FA and I attended a meeting. I got a sponsor and began weighing and measuring my meals that day.

By simply weighing and measuring three meals a day and using the tools that are suggested in the program, I felt the voices subside in my head. The hateful rants turned into gratitude prayers and conversations with my higher power. The insane exercise routines have turned into walks with my children, friends, and my dog. Instead of binge eating, I sit down for family meals with my family and listen to them share their stories of the day, or I sit quietly and eat with God. I am no longer trapped in the fishbowl of my body. Instead I feel exuberant, alive, and at peace with my bones and my skin and my beauty. I have moved from a place of self-centeredness and self hate to love. One day at a time, I get to peel away the layers of fear, doubt, and insecurity. Slowly, but surely, I have transformed from a food addict into a food addict in recovery.