“Am I allowed a different type of my breakfast food?,” I asked my sponsor a couple of weeks after joining FA. (I had eaten it that morning.) “You have 50 pounds to lose,” she said. “Just have the regular kind.” She paused and said, “Why? Have you eaten it already? “No,” I said. I was surprised that the lie had slipped out of my mouth before I had time to even consider a response. That was the first time I realized it was more important to me to appear to be doing well rather than to actually be doing well. It didn’t matter how awful I felt as long as people thought, “She’s got great recovery.” I believed that would make people like me better, which would make me like myself better. So I continued on my quest to hit the magic number of 90 days of abstinence, but it... Continue Reading
Most of my life, I’ve not been athletic. The only reason I exercised was to lose weight or to counteract my most recent binge. It was all about burning calories or toning, and I didn’t really enjoy the effort or experience. When I came into FA I was 52 years old, 200 pounds, depressed, and beginning what I thought was to be a lifetime of worsening arthritis. My joints and the high arches of my feet were hurting, and I resigned myself to a steady decline. I didn’t think there was another choice until I was lead, by the grace of God, to FA. I lost my weight in 11 months and settled on 123 lbs on my 5’4″ frame. It was nothing short of a miracle that all my arthritis pain disappeared completely. I was at my goal weight for a few months when an older, overweight co-worker asked... Continue Reading
On my drive home from college after graduation, I felt full of self-loathing, disappointment, and despair. The drive took longer than usual because I had to pull over a few times to get my sobbing under control. My despair was overwhelming and the only thing that could relieve it was food, so I stopped several times at fast food drive-thrus. I couldn’t really connect that food might be the cause of my despair. I read in the Big Book recently something that sums up my attitude at the time: “To my way of thinking, booze (and in my case, food) had been the answer to my problems – not the problem itself.” I had thought a college degree would transform me into the happy person I so desperately wanted to be, and there I was, feeling the same old misery and disappointment in myself that I had carried for as... Continue Reading
I walked into my first FA meeting ten years ago and saw five people in the room. There was no back row where I could hide, with my stuffed stomach and agonized nerves. I had just had a several day out-of-control-binge. The women spoke about the fact that they loved this program and enjoyed being in healthy, normal-sized bodies. They had that glow in their eyes. I had a normal-sized body, too, but boy did I hate it. I still can’t recall why I came back to those small meetings that you hardly could call a group. I knew lots of larger Twelve-Step groups and thought that something must be wrong with this program, when so few people attended a meeting. On the other hand, I felt that I needed help with my suicidal food intake. I also can’t recall what made me, after five meetings, shyly ask a member... Continue Reading
When I was 29 years old, I made the mistake of experimenting with freebase cocaine and experienced a brush with death after having inhaled some vomit as a result. I was in a coma for eight days; on two occasions, I was told, I had flat-lined brain waves. I should have died; but God had other plans for me. When I came out of the coma, I wrestled with three bouts of pneumonia. My weight dropped from 185 pounds to 143 pounds, and at 6 foot 3 inches I was now skinny and weak. The doctors removed the feeding tubes, and taught me how to eat again without choking on the food, because at that point I had lost all my motor muscle skills as a result of the anoxia. The nurses began feeding me double entrées and triple desserts in an effort to put the weight back on. It... Continue Reading
