If I Could Just be Thin

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

All right, well, I want to begin my story by saying that I am a food addict, and I think that is probably the most important thing I can say about myself. It has defined my life, and when I think about where I was as a young child, I know I was drawn to food very early on. I’m not sure if I was born with a propensity for that, but I can remember early on in our family at holidays and Christmas getting up early and running downstairs at five or six in the morning and going for the sugar, the sugar stuff that was ready for me. It was kind of like, okay, it’s legally okay to start eating sugar at six in the morning or five-thirty in the morning. I was more excited by that than by what the holiday was about or even by other gifts. It was always what party was going to happen and what food was going to be served at that party. And could I get involved in making it? And if I could get involved in licking the bowl or licking the spatula. It wasn’t that I wanted to do the work in the kitchen. I just wanted what was in the kitchen.

I think food served as comfort to me. I think food very early on helped me address my fears. I was probably a scared, anxious child. My father described me as very intense. And I think food took the edge off from the very beginning. It progressed. If it had stayed at that level, it might have been okay. But as time went on and I got into high school, I started feeling that deep insecurity and fear underneath getting worse, where I was comparing myself to other girls in high school and I was always coming up short whenever I looked at them. They were somehow prettier or more attractive, or their body shapes looked longer and leaner. I’m only five foot two, and I felt like I was already feeling stocky or pudgy or thick. It wasn’t my ideal of how I wanted to look, and it wasn’t what I aspired to be, and it caused me a sense of discomfort.

I mentioned I’m five foot two, and I had a very comfortable weight, and I was probably only five pounds overweight, but I began the search to lose the weight. I began going to a commercial weight loss program to try to lose that five pounds that was making me uncomfortable. But in my head, those five pounds may as well have been 500 pounds. The way I felt about myself and the degree of obsession I had with that, I would be looking at my thighs or looking at my arms, and they just didn’t look the way I wanted them to look, and I didn’t feel good in my own body. I was very self-conscious. I think that is the word that sums up how I felt—very self-conscious about my body, how I looked, and my size.

So, I began this quest to lose weight. And I think along with that quest came this magical, wishful thinking that if I could just be thin, if I could just be thin, my life would be amazing. It would skyrocket beyond belief. Very immature thinking, looking at it now, but if I could just be thin, I’d be rich and famous. But I wouldn’t have to do anything to be rich and famous. I wouldn’t have to get a skill or learn how to act or anything people might have to do to become rich and famous. It would just be bestowed upon me if I were thin. That was the source of all my problems.

So, I kept striving. That was the beginning of striving. Because of the way I felt about myself, I had this sense of, “I’ll just try to achieve and make sure everything is looking good on the outside as best I can because I don’t feel very good on the inside.” That led to striving and driving, trying to fix myself by making everything look good on the outside. I didn’t know how to talk about my feelings. I didn’t know how to let anybody know I was feeling sad, fearful, and anxious. I didn’t know how to express my feelings, so instead I tried to avoid.

When I got into my teen years, I got into a deep depression at one point, and I was taken to a psychiatrist and given some antidepressants. That filled me with shame because nobody I knew at that time was doing that where I lived, and it was shameful for me to think that I needed that. I didn’t stay on them very long, just a short period of time, but from that experience, it created even more of that sense that I needed to control this. I needed to control my weight. I needed to keep striving and keep making everything look good on the outside because I was running from myself. I was trying to escape.

And I think that desire to escape continued on and on. I drank and ate for those reasons—to escape life, to escape my continued feelings of not being enough—and I kept seeking and searching for something that would fill that hole. I didn’t know that I had this hole. It was all I knew. And so, I kept looking for outside achievements to fill it. I kept working really hard. If you looked at me from the outside at times, everything looked pretty good. My family was intact, and I went off to school and then to college. But everything I was doing was being fueled by the food.

I realized that I had started to binge probably in high school, and that is when I really knew I had an abnormal relationship with food. I did try to diet. I tried several different kinds of diets. I can remember when there was a high school dance, I might be thinking, “Oh, if I could just lose those five pounds by Friday night.” So, it might be the week before, and I would start dramatically restricting and eating only very low-calorie foods for that whole week. I was telling somebody earlier that I can still remember a particular skirt that I wanted to get into so badly. I remember, to this day, the fabric and the color, and that skirt hung in my closet for years, but I could never lose enough weight to fit into that skirt. I never wore that skirt. And today I could probably wear it, but I don’t have it anymore.

What I’m trying to communicate is the preoccupation with food or body image or my weight or not eating or eating. It was consuming. It was consuming my life and my mind. I was living my life in one sense, but there was this whole other constant monkey on my back that I could not get relief from, could not get free from.

As time went on, I left home, and there were a lot of lost years. I had a marriage that ultimately failed. The disease of addiction was progressing, and I was a lost soul going from job to job, feeling very lonely, on the outside, always on the outside looking in. I remember someone reminded me of this today. I remember having a job as a mail carrier in this very posh town, and it was close to the holidays, and it was dark and gloomy, and I was all by myself carrying this mail around, looking in all the windows of the houses and seeing all the pretty lights and things inside the houses and wishing I could be in any one of those houses. Just to have somebody take me in and comfort me and make me feel like I’m a part of something. I’m just out here floating around the universe. But could I do anything to create that for myself? No. What I would do is feel that way and then eat, feel that way and then eat. Oh, I feel miserable. I’ve gained weight. My solution would be to eat.

From that point on, I tried a lot of other things. I tried exercising to control my weight. It was a lot about trying to control that weight. I remember days when I would go for an eight-hour run, isolated. I’m just going to run all day, and that somehow will control my weight. I remember one time going off by myself—this is later on as an adult—I had a good job in a large city, and I took a month off from that job and went in my van and drove all the way up the North Coast, north of California. My main reason for going off on my own was to not eat. I went on a self-imposed fast. I think it was close to a month. I didn’t want anybody to know what I was doing because I knew it was crazy. At the end of that month, I walked into a bakery, and I saw something, and I said, “I’ll take one of those,” and the one progressed to another binge, a whole bag, and I ended up in the emergency room with this distended belly, sick, alone, wondering how I got here. I remember the ER doctor coming in and asking what happened. I said, “I don’t know.” I couldn’t say out loud what happened. I knew very well what happened. But I couldn’t look this man in the eyes and say, “Yeah, I’ve been not eating for 30 days and I just stuffed an entire bag of flour and sugar items into myself.” I knew what that would sound like, and I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want to admit to myself how crazy that was.

Of course, I got down to a low weight and proceeded to eat myself right back up within a couple of weeks. Nothing would work that was sustainable. It might work for a week, it might work for a month, but nothing I did would work for any length of time. I ultimately came and tried a couple of other 12-step programs for food.

And they didn’t work for me because I had too much latitude and too much freedom to do what I wanted to do in those programs. But I’m grateful for having experienced that because it began to teach me what addiction was, and I knew that I needed this kind of help. Ultimately, someone introduced me to the program of FA, and I came into the rooms of FA. I didn’t get abstinent right away. In fact, I struggled for seven years in the rooms of FA. I think the reason for that was when I got here, I knew this was the answer. But in the meantime, I was still under that constant drive for success, and I had a job as a consultant, and I was traveling around the world, and I felt like I had this successful facade on the outside. I didn’t want to give any of that up because I thought that was what was bolstering me up. I thought that was what was keeping me together. That way of life for me wasn’t working. It wasn’t conducive to me doing the things I needed to do in this program in order to stay abstinent. What it really was, was that I wanted what all of you had, but I didn’t want to do what all of you were doing. I thought I’d just stick my toe in the water and do some of the things you were doing. But the other part of it was that I just wanted to lose the weight. It was all still in my head about the weight. If I could lose the weight, life was going to be good.

I did adopt enough of the program to lose the weight, and there’s a saying I’ve heard in this program that thin is not well, and that was me. I got thin, but I could not sustain it. I kept going back to the food eventually, even in FA. I think one of the problems I had was when I got thin, it bolstered my ego. This is a spiritually based program, designed to promote the concept of humility and ego deflation. But what I was doing was thinking, “I’m thin now and I’ve got the job and I’m feeling really good about myself.” I would start thinking, with that addict amnesia, that I’m well now. I have since learned that the disease of addiction doesn’t go away, and I need to do the same things today that I did when I came into the program in order to stay abstinent. I would get high on being thin and then go back to the food.

I knew there were sponsors and people in this program who were doing the program the way it was designed and the way it has been lived out for 30 or 40 years. But I was not choosing any of those people to ask for help. I wasn’t choosing them to be my sponsors. I was choosing people where I could run the program my way, do the things I wanted to do, and it didn’t work.

So that continued. That process was very difficult, to be in the rooms of FA, coming and going, and feeling like a failure because I kept going back to the food. I think the main positive thing was that I stayed in the rooms. I didn’t leave. I think that’s why I’m here today, and I think that’s probably why I’m alive today, because I just kept coming back. I felt ashamed of myself. I felt like, oh no, everybody is saying here she comes again. What a loser, she’s still eating. I’m grateful that, for whatever reason, I had enough guidance from God or strength to stay put and keep coming back.

What happened was I still had the big job, and I remember one time we had a convention in another country, a very high-end resort, because for those of us who were doing really well on the job, my husband and I got to go. I was sitting at this big event, seated at a table with the CEO of the company, dressed in this beautiful dress, and getting a trophy and all of this. The next morning, I woke up and ditched my husband. I snuck out of the room, and in my mind I was thinking I would just tell him I wanted to take an early morning walk. But I waited until I could sneak out, and I went to the breakfast buffet and got three huge containers of food and went out onto this beach and proceeded to eat those three containers of food. There was not a lot of vegetation on this beach, but I remember thinking I had to try to find a palm tree or something I could hide behind, because what if the CEO and his wife were taking a leisurely walk on the beach and there was their little star performer stuffing her face. One thing I put in my mouth actually lodged in my throat, and I had a moment where I thought I was going to die on this beach because I was choking. At the last minute, it dislodged. For me, this is no joke. I easily could have gone one way or the other, and thankfully, I’m here today, but it was scary.

My husband was used to this and picked up on the fact that I was once again doing this bingeing behavior. I remember telling him in all sincerity that after that binge, I felt so sick, physically ill from ingesting all that food, that I said to him, “I’ll never do this again.” That’s the good news. The good news is I will never do this again. I am so sick. I promise you I will not do it. The next day, we flew home. I ditched him at the airport, went to a sugar shop, got a bag of sugar, went into a dirty airport bathroom, got in a stall, and proceeded to stuff that bag into myself. Again, ditching my husband. Within 24 hours of believing I would never do this again. I don’t think I was lying. I think I thought that I wouldn’t.

The other thing I did was try to get my husband to police me. I would give him my car keys. I was so desperate to get abstinent that I would ask him to do that. I asked him one day to drive me to a Saturday morning FA meeting so I wouldn’t eat on the way to the meeting or on the way back, which I did a lot. He said he would do it. When I got there, he dropped me off. I reached into my pocket. There was a $20 bill in my pocket. You can imagine. I left the meeting, crossed the street, bought a bag of stuff, ate it, came back to the meeting, cleaned myself up, and then walked out to get into my husband’s car and said “Hi,” pretending that I had been at the meeting. My point is this disease of addiction turns me into a liar, somebody I don’t want to be.

The good news is that was my last binge. I went from that meeting—he dropped me off at an AWOL, which is a way of life, the way we work the 12 steps in this program—and I took the commitment for the AWOL that day. That was my last binge. I’ve been abstinent today for over a decade, and I’m extremely grateful to this program, to all of you, to my fellows, to my sponsor, to my family. It’s just a miracle. That depiction I gave you compared to the person I am today and the life I have today—there’s no comparison. The gifts of this program have been immense. They’re beyond belief. I can’t even believe it myself sometimes. In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, it talks about being rocketed into the fourth dimension. When I first read that, when I was newer, I thought, oh, it’s not going to be me. I might just slug along somehow and barely stay alive, because that’s how I felt about life. I wasn’t thrilled about getting up in the morning. I definitely thought about not being here somehow. But the truth is, the miracles of being in a right-sized body for all this time, getting less obsessed about my body, getting freedom around that, and being more comfortable in my own skin—that is a miracle enough right there, from where I was to where I am today.

My brother was diagnosed with leukemia after I had been abstinent for many years. The doctors at a major medical center told him that there wasn’t any hope, and we went down essentially to say goodbye to him. We thought that was going to be terminal for him. But we did a bone marrow test, and I was a 10 out of 10 match, and I became a bone marrow transplant donor for my brother, who is now five years post-cancer, enjoying his own family and grandchildren. God gave me this incredible gift, and at the time, I had the healthiest body you could possibly have. When I sat with the medical people, they ask you everything when you’re a donor, it was no, no, no, no, no to everything. She finally put her pen down and said, “I’ve never met anybody like you.” And I thought, yeah, you don’t even know what goes on behind the scenes. This doesn’t come naturally for me. But I was grateful to know that I had my body in optimum health and was given that opportunity to help my brother in this way.

The other thing that happened in all those lost years in addiction was that I went through all my normal, natural childbearing years. But deep down, I knew I wanted to be a mom. I knew I really wanted to be a mom. I thought it was way too late. I was much older than anybody would dream of to have a child. But I kept talking to my sponsor about it, talking and talking. She kept saying, pursue all options, pursue all options. She gave me that hope. She was the first person who listened to me and said, “Yeah, okay, pursue all options. Let’s see what God has in store.” And I did. I don’t have time for the whole story, but I can tell you I’m the mother of a three-year-old little girl today. I’m having the opportunity to be a mom. It’s beyond my wildest dreams. Absolutely beyond my wildest dreams. I have been so blessed. Blessed beyond measure. And all I do is weigh and measure my food and work the tools of this program. When I heard that when I first came in, I thought, really? No, you don’t understand. I’ve got a lot of problems. And the sponsor would say, “That’s fine. Just weigh and measure your food. Things will work out.”

I don’t know how this works, but weighing and measuring my food and doing the daily tools and disciplines of FA—that is my life today. It’s unrecognizable compared to that lonely, self-obsessed, driven, unhappy, miserable soul that I was as a food addict in the disease. The other thing is, I didn’t get along with people very well throughout all that time. How could I? I was so self-obsessed.

I was super sensitive, so anytime anybody looked at me wrong, it could be the clerk in the grocery store, and I would think, they don’t like me. They don’t like me. Nobody likes me. Nobody in the whole world likes me. I don’t know where I got that, but that seems to be my disease. I couldn’t get along with my family. I was estranged from them at various points through all this traveling around. Today, my mother, who is 101 years old, lives with me, and we love each other, and we get along really well, and it’s wonderful. She, at 101, is getting to experience the birth of my little girl, and the two of them are two little pals today living together under the same roof. From a lonely, isolated food addict to a house with a 101-year-old mother, a husband, my little daughter, and two little doggies as well. It’s a full house, and it’s a miracle.

My relationships with fellows, my relationships with friends, my relationship with my husband—it’s real today. He reminded me, he said, “You know, when we used to go out to eat, you were gone. You would be picking up the menu, ordering, and then when the food would come, your head would be down. I may as well have been with nobody. You were not present.” I noticed that today, when we go out to eat, which sometimes we do, I’m present. I’m there, and we’re connected, and I’m in love. I’m in love with my mother. I’m in love with my husband. I’m in love with my baby girl. I’m in love with my friends, and I’m in love with this program. I think I owe all of that to the spiritual development that was presented to me when I came into this program. I was told ultimately that this is a spiritual program. It’s a three-fold disease: the physical, the mental that I’ve described, but ultimately, I was in spiritual bankruptcy, and that was what was driving me down.

For today, I know I’m grateful that I found a God of my own understanding, and that God has been so merciful and so loving and, as I said, has given me the gift of a life that I hope I can share with others, because I know that’s a big part of what this program is about. I was really scared to do a tape, I’ll admit that. It’s not something that is in my comfort zone at all because I’m still a control freak. I like to be in control of everything. But everybody helped me. They said, “Relax, ask God for help, tell your story as best you can.” I hope that if anybody is ever listening to this, it will be of some help to somebody, some poor suffering food addict somewhere. So, thank you very much.

Would you please join me in a moment of silence and the Serenity Prayer?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.