I found Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) in Atlanta in May 2014. I would frequently arrive early to arrange chairs for my meetings. Usually, around 10 minutes before the meeting started, multiple fellows would sprinkle into the room. When I moved to the FA frontier [term previously used to describe an area far away from an established in-person FA fellowship] July 2017, however, things were very different. On my first meeting night in my new fellowship, I walked into that cold meeting room without another fellow in sight and set up chairs as normal. The meeting time came and, after 10 minutes, no one had shown up. I later learned that most of the fellows who attended this meeting were visiting family out of town. So it looked like it would just be me that evening. I became a little emotional because the large and continuously growing fellowship I... Continue Reading
Before I joined Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), I never really learned much about the word “commitment.” When I agreed to be somewhere—a party, work, a class—I would back out if something better came along, if I didn’t feel like it at the time, if I didn’t think it was that important, or if I had some kind of mild physical symptom I later heard called “the vague alcoholic illness.” The result was that I showed up for my commitments perhaps 60 percent of the time. After I came to FA and decided it was for me, my sponsor suggested I commit to the same four meetings every week. Shortly thereafter, that became three meetings and an AWOL (A Way of Life, a study of the Twelve Steps). When I balked at meetings or something else seemed more pressing, my sponsor said that there were only three reasons to... Continue Reading
I came into Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) when it was 90-Day OA (Overeaters Anonymous) for one reason only—to lose weight. At 5’2” and 200 pounds (about 91 kilos) at my heaviest, I thought if I could only lose “a little” weight, everything would be great. The rest of my life was fine, thank you very much. Denial was working! Never having been to a Twelve-Step meeting before, this program was nothing more than another diet and I had a lot of experience with diets. You name it, I tried it. From the time I was a teenager, I had been on one diet or another. Weight Watchers, Diet Workshop, Cambridge Diet, Slimfast, cabbage soup, grapefruit, Atkins, counting calories, low carbohydrate, diet pills, shots, hypnosis, acupressure, and on and on. Almost every diet worked the first time I tried it, but once I lost a little weight I went... Continue Reading
Following a three-year break, I returned to FA. I was convinced that nothing could slow me down this time. My intention was to come back to FA and start over. I originally joined but dropped out a year later. During the time away, my father passed and my two adult children divorced and took turns living with me. One remarried and the other became engaged. I was happily spending time after work with my five grandchildren. Everything was okay except my spirit was ragged and scrapped up a bit. Because I had regained the weight lost the first time, I was feeling like a failure, physically and mentally. I had to buy my size in the women’s section of Dillard’s, my favorite store. It was time to come back and get busy. I was ready to get down to business and get happy, healthy and holy all at the same... Continue Reading
Unemployed, but abstinent, I had been looking for a job for over 18 months. I showed up to countless interviews, job workshops, networking events and more. I was reminded by this program to stay in action each day to keep my mind from going into any sort of despair about my future. On days where there was simply no action to take, I felt as though God was silent to my endless prayers, but my dear fellows and sponsor kept reminding me the goodness of my Higher Power and that I was being gifted with clean abstinence throughout the whole journey. One of my FA fellows kept telling me that I just needed to kiss a lot of frogs before finding the right job. Job searching was truly just like dating. I showed up to several promising looking job opportunities that seemed so perfect for me, yet I didn’t get... Continue Reading
