A Story of Recovery:

Old Dog, New Tricks

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 a laugh from others whose opinion of me really mattered.

Today however, I thank God that I was open-minded enough, just barely enough, to decide to make that drive to the meeting location and walk into the room, because it was nothing like what I had expected. The chairs were arranged in rows. People in the room took turns reading a standardized meeting format. Thin, attractive people volunteered to stand up in the front of the room and share their experience. They showed pictures of themselves before their weight loss and spoke of their misery when they first came into the program. They spoke of recovery. They spoke with self-revealing honesty. They greeted me with smiles and made me feel welcome.

There was a light in that room that illuminated me. In short order, I realized that I was the fat idiot in the room and the people here in the room were the true heroes.

Shortly after, I began working with an FA sponsor and started to learn the disciplines of the program. I started working on all of that wrong thinking that was going on between my ears. I began seeing that many of my beliefs about myself and the world were simply wrong. I had many inaccurate assumptions, or what I call false truths, such as, “I can’t lose weight at 55 years of age.”  I had partially true paradigms, such as, “I need to have a vigorous exercise routine in order to lose weight.” I also had self-limiting beliefs, such as, “I am an old dog and I certainly can’t learn any new tricks.” I had conceptions about myself that were just plain garbage. I thought I was dumb, boring, and that I couldn’t succeed.

I gained an understanding that my weight was not the problem, but that it was just a symptom – a symptom of the underlying cause that something was not right in my head. My garbage beliefs were the cause of my garbage life.

I also learned that there was a force keeping me from learning those greater truths. There was this very real lower power within me that didn’t want me to open my mind further to greater possibilities. There was this rugged exterior of a man who had been through so much in life – a person who had learned to cope with the world by putting on a false face and hiding his true self for fear of ridicule, exclusion, or failure. Further, I learned that I couldn’t get better without a spiritual element and that’s when I really got on the road to recovery, a journey to recover that true self.

I started listening to that small quiet voice that was deep within me. This was the voice that gave me just enough of an open mind to come into the FA meeting in the first place. This was the voice that was connected to something bigger out there in the universe. This was the voice of the person that God really wanted me to be. I started getting better spiritually – which gave me the courage to face fears and to be open-minded enough to learn those greater truths about myself and the world. And then the pounds just started coming off.  My symptoms started disappearing.

One of the greatest truths that I discovered is this: “If I focus on my recovery, I will lose my weight. But if I focus on my weight, I could lose my recovery.”  When I hear the term “recovery,” I think of recovering the true self that lies within me and bringing him out to the world, to do things like stand up in front of a room of people after 90 days of abstinence, to share my story, and to help be a light to the true selves that are locked within the rugged exteriors of others who may have walked into the room with ill-conceived notions and false truths as I had when I first walked into the room.