A Story of Recovery:

Quieting the Chatter

I found FA through a tortuous route that took years of self-discovery. I had weighed well over 200 pounds for 20 years, my body felt as though it were seizing up into an inflexible mass, and I despaired of ever again being below 200 pounds. I could not take another day in my life.

I grew up an optimistic child in an optimistic family. Even though we moved a lot and my parents were separated for three months out of the year, they maintained their loving attention to their three children.

I had an attraction to sugar from the time I was just two years old; my parents had to hide sweets from me. When I was in first grade, I stole money from my piggy bank to buy forbidden sweets and hid in a vacant lot to eat them. I don’t remember having enough sugary food—there was always a feeling of something missing when I ate those things.

Then I developed tastes for fatty and flour-made foods. These were readily available in our house, but never in the increasing quantities that my growing addiction seemed to require.

I was known in my family for being a good eater and was sometimes criticized for having “eyes bigger than my stomach.” I was willing to try any new food.

By the time I was a freshman in high school, I recognized that food was number one in my thoughts, above boys, clothes, music and a future, a future that was laid out before me like a shining path.  I patiently proceeded on that path, but it grew increasingly dimmed by addiction. I married, divorced, and finished my education.

I got my first job in my chosen profession, a great apartment, and a kindly man to love, who loved me back. When he died suddenly, I surrendered completely to sugar, flour, and alcohol. Alcohol was a gateway drug for me, because with it I could eat much more. I developed rituals around food that disturbed me when I was sober, but I was never sober for very long, only long enough to go to work, get to the store for “supplies,” and return to my apartment.

I became very unhappy at work. I believed I was entitled to salary and position advancements that the company was not willing to consider. Even though I was hugely frustrated, my optimism never left me. I found a job with better pay, more responsibility, and a lot more autonomy.  I weighed 306 pounds, wore a lot of black rayon, and was developing kidney disease, high blood pressure, urinary incontinence, sleep apnea, and clinical depression, along with an inability to stand or walk without pain or numbness in my back, legs, ankles and feet.

Gradually, even though I loved where I lived and worked, I became conscious of living only the surface of my life; there was a whole coral reef of possibilities under the surface, waiting to be explored. I began seeing an eating disorders specialist and then joined, in succession, three different Twelve-Step eating disorder programs (none were FA).  I did not have a sponsor in the FA sense of sponsorship. I weighed and measured my food, but it was food chosen by me, not by a sponsor. I did not attend meetings and did not make phone calls, read the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) Big Book, or surrender to a Higher Power. And surprise, surprise, I could not sustain any recovery beyond 90 days.

It was time. Throughout my life I allowed myself to be guided by intuition, instinct, and an innate optimism. Addiction finally robbed me of my confidence. I started over in a community near my birth family that had an active FA fellowship. I had the distinct sense that this was going to be all or nothing for me—that if I refused to do every task and follow every direction put before me, the self I considered true would cease to be, and I would become, as I had seen other women my age become, sad shadows of themselves. So I threw myself whole-heartedly into the program FA offers, and have been abstinent since.

Along the way, I have found a place to put my feelings and beliefs about God. I have realized, as the Program promises, that God is doing for me what I could not do for myself. When my addiction to food was active, I felt empty, and I sensed a deep unease. Now, in recovery, God is giving me things I need, and the formless gremlin boogie that played constantly in my head (some people call it “chatter) is gone.