I have been in FA for more than 19 years. I came in at age 22 weighing 280 pounds. My life was completely unmanageable. I was not only obese, but I had trouble showing up for the basics of life: work, friends, and family. I also was in a really bad live-in relationship and spent hours sitting on the couch in our dark basement apartment, smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day. I had panic attacks, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and bad credit. In my first decade in FA, many miracles happened in my life. I lost 150 pounds and got a body I never could have imagined. After about a year, I got the strength and courage from the Twelve Steps and the fellowship to leave the relationship I was in, which I never thought I could do. I quit smoking almost immediately, something I also never... Continue Reading
When I first came into FA several years ago, my sponsor made many suggestions to help me get abstinent and stay abstinent. I quickly got into the habit of taking them all. One of her earliest suggestions was about attending meetings. Because there was only one FA meeting in my area, some of my meetings would have to be AA meetings. This horrified me! It was bad enough that I was a food addict, but going to meetings with alcoholics was asking too much. I doubted if I would ever find enough willingness to take this suggestion. Luckily I was granted a morsel of willingness and soon started researching AA meeting possibilities. To avoid running into anyone I knew, I strategically picked meetings outside of my immediate area and started scouting them out. For many weeks, I simply drove to the meetings, sat in my car, and watched as people walked in. I wanted to... Continue Reading
I just had a very interesting birthday. My husband and I had plans for a “double dip” celebration for my birthday and our second wedding anniversary. We made reservations two months in advance at our wedding hotel. The anticipation of a wonderful, intimate weekend sustained us through the end-of-semester stresses both of us faced with our jobs. I was going to see my family on Friday night to get the weekend rolling. We had planned an anniversary dinner with special friends on Saturday, then a romantic private lunch for my birthday on Sunday. The weekend would be topped off with a visit to my dear favorite aunt, who is 90-years old. In the past, I would have just eaten over the stress. I would have been busy planning all the favorite binge foods I was going to reward myself with on my special day. Birthdays were always an excuse to... Continue Reading
After 14 years of binging and purging almost every day, and despite the overwhelming shame and guilt I felt about these things, I finally confided in a friend that I had a problem with food. I remember feeling instant relief after telling her. She told me about FA. I went to my very first FA meeting a day after confiding in my friend. There was a beautiful woman speaking at the front of a room filled with about forty people. I don’t remember much about what she said except that she did not eat flour or sugar. It took a little while for that to sink into my brain, as I could not imagine such a thing being possible. At the break, I asked the woman sitting next to me if she ever ate flour or sugar. She gently and lovingly replied, “I do not eat it—one day at a... Continue Reading
When I was heavy, I didn’t enjoy shopping at all and had no interest in it. It was way too hard to find clothes that fit, and it was a chore trying things on. Of course, nothing fit. I’d end up trying a size bigger, first a 14, then a 16, and before long, in order to get something that didn’t bind or feel too tight, I was in the 1X section. That was the ultimate humiliation. I was embarrassed to even be in that section, and I felt as if everyone was looking at me and judging me. I couldn’t believe that I was that big, but I was. I could never go shopping alone, and I went only if I had some special event. The whole shopping thing always seemed impossible, and I avoided it like the plague. I basically had no fashion sense whatsoever. I didn’t know... Continue Reading
