Today is December 23. I woke up this morning thinking about this day in many years ago, my first day in an 8-week residential treatment program for food addiction. I was 41 years old and had been bulimic off and on for 25 years; I was underweight and unhappy. It was 2 days before Christmas and although I did not particularly want to be there, I didn’t want to be anywhere else either. How had I gotten there? At the time I had my own business and had been married for the past 15 months to a man I adored. Those were 2 of the things on the top of my list of “if only I had (fill in the blank) then I would stop this crazy eating”. Yet there I was unable to stop on sheer will. Thus I found myself in Florida where all the palm trees were... Continue Reading
I love my morning bus ride to work. I get to have someone else weave through the rush hour traffic while I relax. Relaxing was something I never did before FA. I was always racing to my diet club meeting, speed walking up and down the city streets, or heading to the gym to work off the slice, or plate, or cup of whatever I had just eaten. But today, I wasn’t doing any of that, and I hadn’t done it in the seven years since I’d found FA. Today, I was smiling at strangers, and feeling grateful for the fact that I could sit in one bus seat without spilling over into the next. In fact, I even have room to tuck my purse and my lunch bag next to me every day. Today was like most days in recovery. I had packed my lunch last night, and this... Continue Reading
It was the spring and I had been in Program for two weeks. Waiting for the meeting to start, I heard another newcomer share how she loved the program and how she was never hungry. “What’s she getting to eat?,” I wondered, because my hunger pangs were ever-present. “My sponsor is great! So loving and understanding,” she continued. Really? Give me a break. I felt like my sponsor was a dictator. Just that morning, she talked to me about how to do the required reading correctly. Yesterday she said I had to weigh my food precisely—4 ounces of protein, not 4.1, not 3.9, but 4.0 exactly! As I sat there, that song started in my head again. Michael Bolton’s voice singing nearly non-stop for almost a week now: “How am I supposed to live without you now that I’ve been lovin’ you so long?” His song was about unrequited love;... Continue Reading
“This program is portable, and you don’t have to stay home to stay abstinent.” I heard those words early on in FA, and took them to heart. Travel brought me into recovery and has been a constant part of my story. My food addiction set in when I was six years old. I was a shy, introverted, highly sensitive girl. I was afraid of my teacher and of being different from the other students. I remember coming home from school to my mother’s cooking and experiencing a feeling of warmth, refuge, and love. Those food associations became deeply ingrained in me. A boy called me “fatso” for the first time at age six, and I immediately replied, “I’m not fat – I’m big boned.” It was not until I came into FA that my family and I learned that I was not big boned after all. My real body was... Continue Reading
The break started with a memory of a place and a food connected to a moment saturated in grief for my spouse, who had passed seven years earlier. It was our favorite haunt. I had driven passed this food place many times and had learned to say, “This is not my food.” However, late at night three months ago, unhappy with my lonely life, I wished to connect again with my past. I thought that I deserved this one memory, and I indulged in a binge. Afterwards, I was filled with the self-loathing realization of what those mouthfuls would cost me. I then couldn’t qualify or get up in front of the room to tell about my 50-year struggle with food, shame, and compulsion. This break undermined my confidence and sense of usefulness. I couldn’t sponsor, share, or lead a meeting. I was at my goal weight, but couldn’t share... Continue Reading
