A Story of Recovery:

Put Back Together Again

In my first 90 days of abstinence, I was kind of a disaster. I cried my eyes out for the first 30 of them. I felt exhausted, irritable, self-conscious, confused, and totally unsure of who I was. It was a week before my twenty-fifth birthday when I started, and my dad had just sent me a cookbook as a gift. Seeing it in the box made my heart sink because I knew I would no longer need cookbooks in my life. I also knew I’d soon be letting go of my Bon Appetite and Gourmet magazine subscriptions, my juicer, my fruit dehydrator, my pasta maker, my top-of-the-line Cuisinart, and all my other fancy cookware. I no longer needed this type of paraphernalia in my life. I had heard in a meeting that first week, “Our food is in black and white today so our lives can be in color.” As a gourmet food snob that had been using cooking and eating as a drug and as a way to get attention pretty much my whole life, hearing this quip both disturbed me greatly, but sheepishly, it also resonated quite strongly.

All that said, it wasn’t even letting go of the food in the beginning that was so difficult (though I do recall crying when my sponsor suggested I let go of a condiment I’d been using since I seemed a bit attached to it—only a food addict would respond like that!). Harder then giving up the food as I’d known it was learning to accept this new way of life that FA offered. All the new principles I was being taught went against my better judgment. I’d been vegetarian for seven and a half years because I thought I could help save the animals and the environment—and I thought it made me different and special—so when my sponsor suggested I consider not making food a moral issue anymore, I was aghast. She also intimated that my perfectionist tendencies were actually quite self-centered. And she told me that when I’m really upset, I might benefit from picking up the phone to call a newcomer so as to get outside of myself. What?! How about me and my pain? And then there was the God thing. As a staunch atheist and person of immense intellectual pride (in my family, we made fun of religious people), talking to and believing in “God” was a big joke. All in all, FA provided a host of foreign concepts that made me extremely wary.

In many ways, my entire identity was being challenged by FA. Who I thought I was and should be was suddenly up for grabs. I felt like Humpty Dumpty—I’d been tossed up in the air, only to fall to the ground in a bunch of scattered pieces. But my sponsor and the people in this program began to help put me back together again, this time with a new foundation built on recovery principles, which was much more solid than what I’d been standing on before. My arrogant mind began to open up. To combat the pain of having to change my reactions to life, I went to extra meetings, called my sponsor incessantly for help, and walked around saying “Don’t eat no matter what, no matter what don’t eat.”  Ever so slowly, one quiet time, prayer, and meeting at a time, a new me started to grow that was much more grounded, even-keeled, content, and mature.

Today I am 43 years old and thrilled beyond belief that I have the privilege of being in the divinely-inspired program of FA. I have been a solid 110 pounds for the past 19 years due to the disciplines of weighing and measuring my food—a delight that never gets old. My mind is more open, my thoughts are more clear, my heart is more full, and my spirit is more settled. I’m so grateful I was willing to tolerate the searing discomfort of those first 90 days when I really didn’t know which end was up. I’m grateful that when FA friends told me it wouldn’t always be this hard, I listened. I’m grateful my sponsor told me to call fellows in the east where members had long-term recovery, because now I have deep friendships on both coasts—and everywhere in-between. I’m grateful that service to others and looking for the good are now built-in parts of my personality.  Because of the disciplines of FA, today I have solid financial security, I hold down a satisfying, responsible job, I keep my little cottage in the woods tight and organized, my car is clean, I exercise regularly, and much of the time, I have contentment. Most importantly, I have a Higher Power in my life today (and I can say the word “God” without squirming), and I have rich relationships with people today rather than with food.