I have been away from the UK and have lived in Costa Rica now for four months. This has been my longest time away from home, and I have been able to do this because of this wonderfully supportive program that has enabled me to follow a dream. The last two big trips I had were to Costa Rica eight years ago, when my addiction crossed that all familiar line of no-return, and the second was when I spent a few months in the U.S., working as a summer camp counselor. Both trips had me use my creative skills to get more food, sneak into communal food supplies, and acquire the general package of misery, remorse, shame, and terror. I have been abstinent in FA for almost five years, and I have lost 40-50 pounds. Life feels a million miles away from those days of bingeing, living off of the state, attending mental health hospitals,... Continue Reading
“Call people I don’t know on the telephone? What will I ever talk about?” These questions rumbled through my mind when my first sponsor in 1988 told me to make three phone calls a day. At 210 pounds, I desperately wanted to be free of the discomfort and emotional pain. I was carrying over eighty pounds too much on my 5’4,” forty-three year-old frame. I felt miserable! I willingly did whatever that wonderful lady told me to do. I checked off each tool every day as I accomplished it to make sure I covered all my bases. The tool of telephone, however, stymied me. Sure, I talked to family and friends all the time on the phone, but I honestly had no idea how to talk to a perfect stranger! My sponsor gave me two suggestions, which I continue to follow today in FA. First, she said, “When you’re at... Continue Reading
Then… When I was a kid growing up in my food addiction, summertime meant a lot of unstructured time to do whatever I wanted. I would always take at least one trip a day to the corner store to get my food goods (mainly sugar and flour). I rode my bike a lot in those days, took many ballet classes, and swam. I burned a lot of the calories I was eating and didn’t think much about the effects that food was having on me. I was a chunky kid, but I was still having fun with friends. As I got a little older, I was less active, and my eating became more ferocious. I went to summer ballet camps, but every time I had a break from a dance class, I would go home and eat bowls of sugar and flour in front of the TV. When I got a stress... Continue Reading
There are many things that I am grateful to have lost since stopping eating addictively. I am grateful to be without the depression that I’d experienced most of my life, the regular anxiety and crippling fear, and 38 pounds of excess body weight, to name a few. More than anything, I am happy to have lost the voices. When I was trapped in the cycle of addictive eating, the voices in my head were so loud: “Eat me! Eat me! Just this once. You know your willpower will break eventually, so you might as well eat it now.” Sometimes these phrases would repeat over and over in my head like a chant until I gave in and ate. After that, different voices would chime in: “You are such a loser, “You’ve amounted to nothing,” and “You are hopeless, you might as well kill yourself,” were some of the things the... Continue Reading
I have tried to lose weight for the past forty years, but I never stayed on any diet plan for long, and I always regained what I had lost. I tried Weight Watchers three times, a nutritionist, a psychotherapist, Diet Center, a doctor-supervised, liquid-protein diet (three times), Jenny Craig, Weight Loss Center, and my own plans. I followed various diet books by diet gurus, and TV-hyped programs, and went to a hypnotist and a weight-loss specialist. I fell for it all! I’ve been through bouts of depression over being overweight, wishing that I would die because of the pain in my back, legs, and hips. I was taking medication for blood pressure, pain, my heart, indigestion, diabetes, and allergies and was sleeping with a CPAP machine nightly. I was killing myself by eating uncontrollably and would pray at night for God to let me die in my sleep because I... Continue Reading
