A Story of Recovery:

Up the Rabbit Hole

For the first 60 years of my life, my weight was always at the high end of normal, although I was in a right-size body during my teens, thanks to drugs. I learned to graze rather than eat normal meals, so I developed the habit of eating small amounts all day long.

As an adult, I would lose the same 25-30 pounds over and over by increasing my exercise and lowering my caloric intake. But the weight came back on as soon as I would try to eat what I perceived to be “normally.” When I was 50, I injured my back and was unable to exercise, and my weight shot up to over 200 pounds, then to 225, and finally to my highest of 251 (10 pounds higher than when I entered FA.)

While I became increasingly more depressed about my weight and the toll it was taking on my body and psyche, I became more depressed about my inability to do something about it, especially when I was diagnosed with very early stage colon cancer. My cancer was treated surgically, and I left the hospital 33 pounds lighter, vowing to stop grazing all day on sugar and sugar-flour products. That lasted 90 days, until I thought I could eat that one treat I picked up in the pharmacy while on line to pay for an anti-hypertensive prescription. But I couldn’t eat just one, and my sugar addiction took hold of me. I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole.

I had friend who was in a right-sized body and who would occasionally reference her recent weight loss of about 70 pounds. Given that I had spent the previous decade in a serious flour and sugar haze, I knew that I needed help. But I also knew that once I asked how she had lost her weight, I would have to choose between asking how (and possibly committing to trying her plan) or lying and protesting that her plan would not work for me. I wasn’t ready to do anything. I didn’t want to sound weak, so I took the coward’s way out: I adeptly applauded her and changed the subject. Over the first year of our friendship, I quietly watched what she ate, and more importantly, what she didn’t.

Meanwhile, I was pouring increasingly larger quantities of flour and sugar into my already 5’7,” 241-pound obese body. As I faced turning 60, I promised I would do something about my weight to help slow the aging process. But my birthday came and went, and I was still deflecting any opportunity to take control—to change.

One day my husband and I were playing golf with my friend and her husband. She and I shared a golf cart. I once again complained that my body was getting in the way of my swing, and she again mentioned her own struggles with weight and that she had given away about 70 pounds a few years before. This time something clicked inside me, and I asked her how she did it. Her simple “no flour, no sugar” response struck at the core of my being, and I interrupted her to ask if I could go with her to a meeting. She responded with an immediate “yes!”

Two nights later, she and her husband picked me up. When I got into the car, he quietly said: “I didn’t think you’d go.” I responded with a very quick: “You don’t know how desperate I am.” Five minutes later, I walked into my first FA meeting and was introduced to a group of women and men who would become, as one fellow in the meeting says, “my sisters and brothers.”

I felt a great weight lifting from my shoulders as I sat in the meeting. For the first time in my life, I was given permission to stop eating addictively. I don’t remember who led the meeting or what was said during the shares, but I knew I could do this program, I knew I could give up flour and sugar, and I knew I was home. I secured a temporary sponsor that night. I also went home, tossed out all the foods I wouldn’t be eating, and took back control of the kitchen, which my husband had controlled for 15 years. No last binge, no looking back, no more self-recriminations, and most importantly, no more procrastination.

Despite being a control freak, I have been able to turn over my will to my sponsor and my higher power, which is still something new for me, since I came into Program a devout atheist. I believe I now am a devout agnostic.

While I do have days during which I struggle, I work my tools and focus on what’s more important than taking that bite: maintaining my abstinence, because I’ve already been Alice down the rabbit hole too many times.