I used to love to swim in the ocean. As a child I spent many years living near the beach and was always happy to go swimming. I liked to dive into the waves, to swim far out and watch the people on the shore. I would stay out there for hours – the sense of floating, of being lifted up by the waves, of swimming with or against the current were all fun for me. As my disease progressed, I went from bingeing and dieting in my teens to gaining 30 pounds and then battling to lose the weight. I discovered bulimia and excessive exercise and spent my 20s and 30s bingeing, throwing up, running 10 miles at a time, and lifting weights for hours at the gym; the weight was managed by these drastic methods. I found FA 10 years ago, but kept breaking my abstinence, and the... Continue Reading
The slogan, “Don’t eat no matter what, no matter what, don’t eat” completely baffled me when I first came into FA, because I ate over everything. It was my go-to solution for all things in my life, good and bad. If my mind was racing at night and I couldn’t sleep, I ate to numb out. When something good happened, I celebrated with food. If something bad happened, I needed to soothe myself with food. If I procrastinated on a work project and faced a deadline, the food would help me tackle it. If a friend didn’t say hello to me and I thought she must be mad at me, I needed to eat. It didn’t matter if it was a big issue or small, the bottom line was that my answer was food. This meant that I was a 30-year-old woman with food hidden in my dresser drawers, stashed... Continue Reading
I have always been single and independent, and I thought I was “terminally unique.” I came into FA, got abstinent right away, and starting working the program. As time went by, I became more and more unwilling to share what was going on with my life. I had a couple of breaks in abstinence in FA, which I considered minor, because each time I slipped, I started back the very next day. I released about 65 pounds, studied the Twelve Steps in an AWOL meeting, went to meetings, called my sponsor, and had sponsees. I had arrived. But I wasn’t weighing and measuring with vigilance. Whether my scale said 4.1 or 5.9, I thought, What’s the big difference? I wasn’t taking a full 30 minutes of quiet time every day, I made calls—on occasion, I didn’t share what was really going on for me, and I prayed without intention. I... Continue Reading
A few years ago, I left FA for five months after being abstinent for almost six years, and being in recovery from food addiction for more than 11 years. It was a failed experiment at doing things my own way, but it taught me a valuable lesson: that I had never fully surrendered to FA and that I needed to do so, so I wouldn’t keep leaving and eating. How had I never really surrendered to the FA program in almost six years of doing it and looking like I was surrendered? Well, some of it boiled down to negativity. I complained to myself constantly about meetings. Most of the shares seemed boring and repetitive. I didn’t want to hear from people who were doing FA differently from me; newcomers aggravated me with their own difficulties and complaints about FA. Intergroup was a waste of one Sunday a month. Sponsoring... Continue Reading
Shortly after joining FA, I signed up for an AWOL, a meeting where we study the Twelve Steps. It didn’t take long for me to get stuck on the first step, where we admit that we are powerless over food and that our lives are unmanageable. People talked about how they had discovered they were food addicts. I was never quite comfortable saying, “Hi. I’m a food addict.” I was a professional and to me, addiction was for the homeless and the down and outs. I was not sure that addiction was my problem. I thought addiction was something that only alcoholics and drug users are subject to. In the AWOL, I heard one woman share that the “addict in her” was a voice in her head that was totally self-defeating. It wanted her dead. It said things like, Why not enjoy yourself now while you still can. Don’t think... Continue Reading
