Every night ended with the same demoralizing and endless stampede of negative thoughts: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just eat right? I know it’s not good for me, but I can’t stop. I have no will power. I guess I just don’t care enough. Every morning would start with the same lofty promises not to spend money I didn’t have, to be more loving and less irritable, to be more compassionate, and to work out to make up for the horrible choices I had made the day before. I would invariably break all my commitments. No matter what the consequences, or how much guilt or embarrassment I felt, I couldn’t seem to will or think myself better. My issues with food were my complete and total preoccupation. I was consumed with how to lose weight, how to maintain weight, and how to avoid everyone when I gained it... Continue Reading
I came to my first FA meeting with no idea what it was about, except that it might help me lose weight. I wasn’t feeling particularly desperate about my eating or my weight on that day. I had given up hope, but was just going through the motions because someone had suggested it. In fact, that someone was my adult daughter, who had watched my utter inability to control my eating, over the previous six months. She had watched me eat as I prepared our customary Friday night dinners and Saturday lunches; as I fed my family, and cleaned up after the meals. She watched me, as I just kept putting food into my mouth. What she didn’t see was what happened after she and her family went home, when I finally collapsed with exhaustion in front of the TV with a large bowl of my favourite sweet cold treats. ... Continue Reading
I began life in a small Michigan mining town. I was a skinny kid for my first six years. My mom fed me and my siblings a farmer’s diet. Sweets were plentiful as well. I became a chunky, husky kid during my middle school years. The summer before I started seventh grade, my parents moved to a new home just outside the town. I believe that one afternoon changed the course of my life forever. I was biking back home from visiting friends, when a group of about ten kids started running toward me and screaming at me. I began to get away, when one swung his football helmet and it brushed by my back and hit the seat of my bike. I broke away, ditched the bike, and ran into my house. After that, I rarely left the protective walls of my home again until I turned eighteen. I... Continue Reading
I ate addictively because I am a food addict. I believed it to my core. Yet, knowing this truth, why did I continue to pick up that first bite for all those years? During the first 90 days in recovery, I found out. In those first 90 days, I was told to remember my last binge. I pictured how I felt after that binge. I recalled lying on the couch in the fetal position with a bloated stomach, gas and cramps. I cried and prayed for some physical relief. I ached all over. I felt like I had squeezed into jeans three sizes too small that cut at my belly, waist and hips. On many of those first 90 days, I remembered what it was like to binge and see no way out of my hopeless dilemma. I recalled the insane, insatiable desire to eat flour, sugar and quantities, while... Continue Reading
Something about driving makes my mind race and fragment into shards of to-dos, and my body itch to multi-task in all sorts of crazy and dangerous ways. Probably the most insane thing I’ve ever done in the driver’s seat was one time when I was wearing a skirt and sandals and noticed I’d forgotten to shave my legs. I reached into my gym bag, unzipped a pocket, took out a razor, and proceeded to scrape the black stubble from my legs—all while driving through a busy thoroughfare. Before I joined FA, when I was constantly eating, there was almost no time I’d be in the car without having food to munch on while tooling down the street or highway, no matter how much traffic, how curvy the road, or how drippy the food. The only thing I questioned about this practice was the embarrassment of inevitably arriving at my destination... Continue Reading
