This meeting is being sponsored by the FA General Service Office Literature Committee for the distinct purpose of creating tapes for the tape library. Those who wish to, please join me in the Serenity Prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
I am so grateful to be here today and to be abstinent and to be in the company of like-minded people who are also finding a solution in Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. We’re at the 2004 business conference, and I will start with my numbers. I am 45 years old. I’ve been abstinent in this program, by the grace of God, for 10 years. My highest weight was 212 pounds, and I weigh about 125 today.
A lot has changed in the last 10 years over the course of my recovery. And I want to tell you a little bit about what it was like, what brought me into the doors of FA and what it is like now. The way I describe my disease of food addiction is as a disease of fear, doubt, and insecurity. I lived with fear from a very early age, long before I remember starting to gain any weight. When I was a little kid, I remember being afraid of what was under the bed, what was in the closet. I was painfully shy. You know, it’s funny when I get up and speak at an FA meeting or in other areas of my life, and I tell them my story that I was so painfully shy as a child. So painfully shy. I walked around with my head held down. People would speak to me, and I wouldn’t answer back. I was terribly, terribly shy and afraid of people. I was afraid of things like…I was recently telling my story and talking about how, as a kid being in the bathtub and being afraid of being sucked down the drain if the water was let out of the tub. All kinds of fears. I was afraid of animals. There were things that I didn’t do as a child because I was afraid. I never learned how to roller skate. I learned how to ride a bicycle when I was a teenager. I didn’t learn how to swim until I was in college. And the reason for most of that was fear. I was just afraid.
So, what I remember from a very, very early age is living in absolute fear. And that fear continued throughout my life; it took on different forms as I got older. As I got older, I would later talk about… I never talked about myself as being a fearful person, but I would talk about struggling with anxiety and constantly being nervous. I remember times when I would go around and take my pulse all the time, and I had this little biofeedback card that if I put my thumb on the biofeedback card and it turned black, that meant that I needed to start doing my deep breathing exercises or whatever. I would take my pulse, and my pulse would sometimes be up over 100 beats per minute because I was in this constant state of anxiety.
I also want to talk, even more so, about the food than the fear about the food, and what I was doing with food. As a kid, food was important to me. I have a five-year-old son now, and I think a lot of times I looked at my eating and the way I thought about food as, you know, that’s just the way kids are. Well, I have this five-year-old son, and I’m discovering that’s not the way kids are. And the way that I was with food as a child was that I never would ask my parents for a toy or a doll or a book. I always wanted food. The special treat for me was always the food. That’s what I wanted. As a child, my parents would hide things from me. They would put things up in high cabinets, and I would climb up and get them. My mother would make something and put it out on the table to cool, and I would be the one digging my hands into it. I was always getting in trouble because I was eating something or taking something that wasn’t mine, you know, in terms of food.
I remember Halloween. It was a big holiday in our house. And we would go trick-or-treating. And I would come back with this huge bag of stuff. And I would eat the whole bag. And then I would start on my brother’s. And it was a constant source of conflict. They would get mad at me. We would have these fights with kids because I was eating their stuff. And I look at my son today, and I realize, just in watching him, that what I was doing with food as a child was not just normal kid stuff. You know, I have a little boy who can throw things away, who never climbs up and gets anything out of the cabinet that I put away, who never takes anything. I put some Halloween treats for him on our kitchen table, and he would always ask me before he would go and get them, and if he asked and I said you can have one, he would have one. If I said he could have two, he’d get two. You know, you could never do that with me. You had to hide it and put it away. Because when I went and got it, I wanted it and I wanted it all. And that’s how it was with food.
So that sort of progressed. What I’ve learned about food addiction is that it is a progressive disease. And what I saw with my eating and with my fear, doubt, and insecurity is—I saw those things progress over time. I remember as an adolescent, kind of being this grazer. And the way I kept my weight down, I wasn’t fat as a kid, and wasn’t fat as an adolescent. The way I kept my weight down was to exercise addictively. And I now identify the kind of exercise and the way I was about exercise as part of my addiction. To give you an example, over some summers, I would, when I wasn’t in school, I would get up in the morning, I would jog a couple of miles, I would lift weights, I would then go to the park and play tennis all day long, like from 9 or 10 in the morning until 5 o’clock. I would come home, I would eat something, and of course, during this I was running back and forth to the convenience store while I was playing tennis and getting snacks. I would come home, I would eat something, and I took karate for a couple of years, and I would go…our karate lessons were an hour and a half long. Well, I would stay for two lessons in a row, so I would do these three-hour karate workouts that were so strenuous that I would take the, you know, the white karate uniform that you wear, it’s called a gi. I would take the top of my gi out in between classes and with one of the guys in the class, would wring the sweat out of it. That’s the kind of exercise that I getting. It was addictive, way over the edge exercise.
And that kept my weight down as I ate and ate and ate. But eventually the exercise got put down. Eventually, I graduated from high school and went to college and had to study and didn’t have all this time for all this exercise. And the weight started to come on. And, you know, I couldn’t quite figure out a lot of times why I was gaining weight. It was so funny. I think about the level of denial in my disease. I used to think that the reason that I was gaining weight was because I didn’t exercise enough. It’s kind of a joke considering what a history I had with exercise. But I just didn’t connect the dots.
I was doing things in college, like going out and eating at 11, 12 o’clock at night, eating in the middle of the night, getting all the things that college kids would get. But I couldn’t have one piece. You know, I had to eat half of it. And I remember times when I would go with groups of people to get something, sitting there being afraid that I wasn’t going to get enough. You know, counting the number of pieces that other people were eating to figure out whether or not I would make sure that I would get my share or get more than my share, a lot of times. So, the eating continued.
One of the things that came into my life, in addition to the eating and the fear when I was in college, was a lot of depression. I became severely, severely depressed to the point that I was suicidal for a number of years. And a lot of my depression had to do with the way that I thought about things. Nothing was ever enough. Two hallmarks of my disease, I think, were that I had to insist that I wasn’t enough and, no matter what I did, that it wouldn’t be good enough. And the other piece of it was this sort of sense that you know that I had to be perfect basically, and then couldn’t ask for help, you know, and couldn’t take a suggestion either.
So, I would sign up for classes that I wasn’t really prepared for, and then I would do poorly in them, partially because I wouldn’t ask for help and partially because I would set myself up with such expectations of perfection that I would have these huge anxiety attacks around performance. So, a number of things came into play, and I started doing very badly in school. I started getting into a lot of depression, and my eating just continued, and the weight kept coming on. And at this point, when I first started gaining weight, I was gaining probably about five pounds a year. It wasn’t huge weight gain. So, I went like that for a couple of years, where I would gain five pounds. The next year, I’d gain another five pounds.
I had a very stressful summer after my sophomore year in college and gained 15 pounds within the course of like three months. So, what started to happen over time was that the weight gain started to accelerate, and I started going on diets. I did the Scarsdale diet. I did it so many times that the book wore out. I mean, the binding came off, and it started to fall apart. I would do this diet over and over and over again. And I was never successful with any diet that I went on. I never did like the Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. I would get a book, or I would get a magazine article, or something out of the newspaper. I remember the US Ski Team diet. Grapefruit diet. This kind of diet and that kind of diet. And all diets did for me was that they, you know, I would lose three to five pounds on a diet. I never lost very much weight. Except for one. The very last diet I went on, I did lose some weight. But usually, it was like three to five pounds, and then I gained that back, plus half. And the eating would just progress and progress and progress.
I had a lot of rituals around food. I would do things like decide that I would get a package of things, and I would play these little games with myself. I would decide that I’m just going to eat two. And then I would do my two, and then I’d eat two more. And then I would kind of rationalize and say, well, okay, I can eat half the row. And then I finished half the row, and then I’d say, well, I could eat two more of the rest of this half of the row. Until I finished the row, and then I would be in the whole game all over again. I’ll just eat two of the second row until it’s all gone. That’s how I would do it. And I would eat everything in the house and decide, okay, I’m done now, just don’t go get any more food. Don’t do it. And I’d be right back out, going to the store, and getting more food.
I had a lot of shame around my eating. I tried to hide it. One of the ways I tried to hide what I was eating was by going to multiple grocery stores. I would go from store to store to store because I didn’t want anyone to know how much I was eating. I would do things like go into…there was a particular confectionery shop that I would go into, and I would buy a box of things and ask them to wrap it, because it was going to be like a hostess gift. Or I would go and buy things and ask the person who sold them to me, “Oh, how many do you think this will serve?” That kind of thing. As if they cared that I was eating it. I don’t think that they really cared, but I cared. I thought everybody was looking at me, and what I was eating, and I had a lot of shame around my eating, so I would do those kinds of dishonest things to try to hide the quantities of food that I was eating.
I would also do things like, of course, I ate in secret, I ate in my bedroom. You know, it amazes me today, and I’m so grateful that I do not…there are certain parts of my house that we, our family, eat in. The kitchen and our dining room. And I don’t eat in the bedroom, I don’t eat in the bathroom today, I don’t eat in the living room in front of the TV set today. I don’t eat down in the basement, you know, I don’t eat in the car. I don’t know how much eating in the car that I did over the years because a lot of times in those trips from one grocery store to the next, whatever I was buying at the last grocery store, I was eating it in the car on my way to go get the next thing at the next grocery store.
So, needless to say, all of that eating was adding the pounds on, and I was doing various things to try to lose the weight. And various things changed in my life. I don’t know if I mentioned, but I grew up in Austin, Texas, and then went to college in Massachusetts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And actually, it’s funny, the first time I ever got sort of even slightly introduced to a 12-step program around food was when I was in college. I would take psychology courses, or sociology courses, or whatever, and decide to study, and do my final paper on eating disorders. I would always do that. I remember getting two jobs at a hospital in the town where I went to college, and both were on eating disorders units with psychiatrists who dealt with eating disorders.
So, I was in a sociology class, and I went to a 12-step meeting having to do with food to do research. And I still remember this woman chasing me out of there with a food plan. That’s how it felt. It felt like she was chasing me with a food plan. I remember fleeing. And I think even then, maybe God was trying to tell me that I belonged in a place like that, but I didn’t quite get it. I thought it was something to study or observe about other people.
But at any rate, I was in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ended up moving back to Texas and then back up to Massachusetts in 1986. My father had been very ill that year and had some major surgery, and I moved back in 1986. I just continued to spiral downward. One of the things that was happening while I was doing my moves, looking for that geographical cure, was whether I could be in this place or if I could be in this relationship. A lot of that had to do with…there was an ongoing relationship there, and I was moving back and forth to be with this person. And these things were always going to make me happy. The other thing that was going to make me happy is if I could find the right career, the right job, you know. So, I would get the, you know, God has been good to me in that way. I would get the right job. I would get just the job that I thought that I wanted, and I wouldn’t be any happier.
My life continued to spiral downward. It continued to become more unmanageable over time, and I continued to eat and to get bigger and bigger and bigger. One of the last diets that I went on was at a hospital where I worked in the Boston area, and I’m so grateful for that diet because I knew it was a good diet. We worked with a nutritionist and a physical therapist. There were weekly exercise sessions. There were weekly meetings. I met like twice a week with a nutritionist. We would have these group meetings. We would talk about our emotions. We would talk about how much you should eat and when you should eat. I had all of this, what I knew to be good information. And yet I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it on a consistent basis. I did, on that diet, lose some weight the first time that I did it, I gained it back plus, and then I did it a second time. I lost less weight, and I gained it back quicker. And at that point, I was pretty much convinced that diets didn’t work for me. And I think I came to a place, too, of realizing that my problem really wasn’t the weight. You know, I thought that my problem was just that I was fat and that if I exercised more, I wouldn’t be fat. I think I came to realize about that point that I had a problem with eating. That there was something bizarre about my eating.
And I want to tell you about an incident that happened right before I came around Program. It was the summer of 1993. And I had yet again made another career change, another job change to this perfect job that was going to make me happy, reduce my stress level, and therefore, I was going to be able to stay on a diet. I had also moved out into an apartment by myself and away from roommates. It was always my roommates’ fault that I ate because they ate something, and I had to eat it. So, I found this nice apartment by myself. I had this great job that summer. Actually, I was self-employed. I was working for myself. I was a month behind on the project that I was supposed to be doing because I could not stop eating. I had gotten to the point… I think I found a lot of my self-esteem came through my work. No matter what may have been falling apart in my life, I’d always manage to get a pretty good job and to do well in jobs. And so, a lot of my self-esteem was invested in my work, yet for the first time, I was really not able to work because I could not stop eating. My work involved typing, and I could not type with one hand and eat with the other. I literally could not stop for 15 minutes at a time because I would sit there and battle with myself. “Just work for 15 minutes. Just work for 15 minutes. And then you can go get something to eat.” And I couldn’t do it.
I would play games with myself. I would be the pest. I would eat everything in the house, and then I would decide, well, if there’s nothing in the house, I won’t eat, right? And then I’d beat a path to the store. And I’d buy just one small item at the store. Because I thought, if I just bought one small item, then it’d be done, and I won’t have it in the house, and I’ll be okay. But I would beat that path, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth to the store.
I remember having what I identified as my first blackout with food during that time. What I remember is sitting on the couch, doing again the whole mental battle of “Don’t.” I’d eaten everything in the house, “Don’t go get any more, don’t go get any more.” And the next thing I knew, I was at a grocery store, and I was at a grocery store that I had walked to; it was at least a 20-minute walk, and I had no memory between my couch and standing in a particular food aisle. I had no memory of what happened in between. And there I was. And of course, I bought what I wanted, and I went back home, and I ate it.
And I began to really get desperate. My eating at that point felt degrading. It wasn’t fun anymore. It didn’t taste good anymore. I was eating against my will. And I actually asked for help at my church, and someone at my church took me to my first meeting. Actually, she told me about it on Sunday, and she said, I remember what she said to me. She told me she was a food addict and she had gotten some help. And I said, “What did you do?” And she said, “Would you like to come to a meeting?” She never identified the organization associated with this meeting. And I never asked. I would have gone anywhere with her. You know, I never asked where we were going, what this meeting was, what the details were. She told me she’d take me to a meeting that Monday night. She told me she’d help me with my food that day. And I said yes to both of those. So I went to a meeting that Monday night. And she had said to me, you know, go to six meetings, get a sponsor, and, you know, do what that person suggests that you do.
Well, being hard-headed as I was, I was going to do it a different way, different from her. So, I chose not to get a sponsor. I chose to go to one meeting a week, and I modified the food plan according to my liking. And what resulted from that was a small amount of weight loss, but I never got any relief from the mental obsession; never got any relief from the cravings. And I did that, I was around Program for about six months.
In March of 1994, I came back, and I followed her suggestions. I got a sponsor. I began to do exactly what that sponsor told me to do. I had the wonderful gift of being, especially at the Chelsea meetings in that area of program, for the first six months of my abstinence. However, during that time, I also got engaged, and my husband got a job in Daytona Beach, Florida. And I was suddenly faced with having to leave this wonderful, supportive fellowship and go to a place where there was absolutely no fellowship. And I have to tell you, for that reason, and a number of others, I cried my eyes out. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified.
But God took care of me. And I went to Daytona Beach. I had just started sponsoring. My very first sponsee was in Daytona, waiting for us to come together. And eventually, meetings got started in Daytona Beach in that area, and a fellowship began to grow. And I love the part of the Big Book that talks about “Into Action,” and it talks about the joy of watching a fellowship grow up around you, and I have had that joy. And I’ve also had, I think, the gift of having to fight for my program, having to really voice and have the courage of my convictions because people didn’t always agree with what we were doing and what we were talking about. And I think that that kept me from becoming complacent.
I had a wonderful…I thought I was losing a fellowship in the Boston area, and that’s not what happened; what happened is that my fellowship just grew. Because I had wonderful support from people in the Northeast and eventually from people all over the place. And that, you know, that service that got me abstinent, and I think that has been passed on to so many other people, is such an important part of my story and of the hope of that day.
So, anyway, I was never one for being able to stay in the day. So, there I was, newly married, no children, and planning the college education of the child that I didn’t have. You know, where would they go in Florida? Where would they go to college? I thought like a newcomer. God taught me better because we were in Daytona Beach for about two and a half years, and my husband had another job change to San Antonio, Texas. And again, you know, I had the joy again of watching a fellowship grow up around me, watching people who were willing and who were ready and who had been as desperate as I was come into the doors of meetings that got started and ask for help and hear the same hope that I had heard when I came in as a newcomer.
A lot has changed in my life over the years. As I said, I got married. I had a wonderful abstinent wedding and honeymoon. I’ve had a child. I had an abstinent pregnancy in this program with the help of a lot of people. I had pretty much nine months of morning sickness during my pregnancy, and I had a lot of people telling me that if I ate flour products in between meals, I wouldn’t have morning sickness. What this program has taught me is that my food addiction is my number one problem. It is a potentially fatal disease. Morning sickness was a temporary discomfort and inconvenience. And what this program taught me was how to ask God for help, how to ask other people for help, and how to not eat flour or sugar in quantities, no matter what situation or circumstance I’m facing at any given moment.
But I had a wonderful pregnancy, a wonderful abstinent birth. I had the opportunity and the gift and privilege of raising a child in this program and raising a child in an abstinent environment at home, which is such a gift. I have a little boy who is developing a spiritual life at the age of five, and a little boy who knows how to eat. I think he does. I think he’s learning that from his mom, how to sit down at a table and eat a meal, and the types of things that he can do to take care of his body, and how to do things like get enough rest. It’s amazing to me that that stuff begins to sort of seep out into your family.
Other things that are happening, I changed careers. I went back to graduate school. And what a gift that was. What I remember about my undergraduate years in disease was fear, anxiety, depression, never feeling like I belonged, never feeling like I could interact socially with other people, and doing very poorly academically because I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t do something like… I would read three paragraphs in a book, and by the time got to paragraph three, I had forgotten what was in the first paragraph. So, I was able to go back to graduate school in abstinence and discover that I had a whole different brain. I was terrified in the graduate program that I did. I was required to learn a couple of foreign languages, and as an undergraduate, I always had difficulty with foreign languages because I’d say I can’t memorize anything. But I get into school again and discover that I have a great memory. I can memorize, and I can learn foreign languages, and I can do a number of other things.
It was the food. You know, I thought it was just me. This is just the way I am. It was the food addiction disease. So, I had a wonderful opportunity to have a do-over with that. And I was in San Antonio going to graduate school and doing all that for a couple of years, and my husband had another job change, and we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we have now broken a record because we’ve now been there for five years, and it’s the longest place we’ve been anywhere since we’ve been married. And I have yet again had the opportunity to watch a fellowship grow up around me. To have someone…there was a fellowship down a little bit south of us, and to have someone commit from that fellowship to come with me and start a meeting and to take on sponsees and see people get abstinent, see meetings start, see AWOLs start, and see something happen, that is such a joy to watch.
One of the things that I’ve heard at one of the first meetings that I ever went to, is I heard a woman get up and share, I remember her. She had five years of abstinence, and she was, at the time, my interpretation was “annoyingly perky.” She got up, and she said something I’ll never forget, and I repeat it all the time. She said, “You never again have to hurt yourself with food.” And the reason it impressed me so much was because it identified what I was doing; what I had been doing all along.
I had called my eating a lot of things. I had called it treating myself. I had called it you need to be good to yourself, giving yourself a special treat or whatever. I thought of it that way a lot. And as my disease progressed, it became very clear that all I was doing was hurting myself. I hurt myself financially with food. I also came to this program in a lot of debt. Thank you, God, I’m not in debt today.
I hurt myself relationally with the food and with the disease. I isolated. I could not relate to other people, so I was terribly lonely. I hurt myself physically. You know, the physical manifestations of 212 pounds on this body. You know, my ankles hurt, my knees hurt, my back hurt. Various things were happening to my body that were not good because of the food. I hurt myself spiritually because I could not have the kind of relationship that I have today with my Higher Power. I could not have that when I was so fogged out and driven by food. And I hurt myself mentally and emotionally as well. I’m not depressed today. Life happens. I have good things. I have bad things. I lost my dad about eight months ago now. And I have gone through a process of grief, but I am not suicidally depressed today. I don’t get…I don’t suffer from depression today, you know, and that’s a gift.
So, you know, what I would say to the newcomer, to anyone out there listening to this recording today, is that you don’t have to hurt yourself with food, and there is hope in FA. I’ve seen enough people get up and talk about getting abstinent and staying abstinent. And there’s something in the Big Book that I love that it talks about sobriety being not just getting sober, but about, not just about stopping, but about staying stopped. And that’s what FA has taught me. I stopped a lot of times. Every time I went on a diet, I essentially stopped. The problem was that I could not stay stopped for any length of time.
So, I am so grateful. I tell people today that I have a life second to none, that is not bragging, it’s not in comparison to anyone else. It is just that I have a life that I could not possibly have imagined ten years ago. And I have a life that I know will continue to get better. I know that I will continue to grow spiritually, that I will continue to grow in my relationships and how I deal in my relationships with people. I spent most of my adult years not knowing how to relate to people, not knowing really how to relate to myself. And I’ve learned that, in this program…I shouldn’t say I’ve never learned anything, but I am in the process of learning that.
And so, I always like to say what I do because I needed, as a newcomer, I needed to hear it over and over and over again. This is what we do. This is what we do. When I get up in the morning, I get on my knees, and I ask God for an abstinent day. And the reason I do that is because I don’t have great willpower. There’s nothing in me that is doing this. If there were, I would have done it a long time ago, you know, and I would have done it on my own, but I was not able to. So, I ask God for an abstinent day daily because I need a power greater than myself to be abstinent on a day-to-day basis and to help me live the kind of life that I want to live in abstinence.
I read a page of the Twenty-Four Hours a Day book, and I’m so grateful for that book, for the unity that’s represented in that, that I know I can pick up the phone and talk to any other food addict wherever, and we can relate at least to that. You know, there’s a common thread there, and it has taught me so much about the addiction. I learned from the literature that we read about the addiction, and then I learned about the spiritual solution that’s offered through the 12 steps.
I take a half an hour of quiet time, and I remember when my first sponsor talked to me about quiet time, and I couldn’t sit still for three minutes. I could not sit still in my own skin. And today, my quiet time might stretch to 45 minutes if I have the time to do it, and I love quiet time. I think of quiet time today as how I nurture myself. You know, if I need a little treat? Well, I can take extra quiet time. That’s how I think of it. I don’t think of it as something that someone makes me do, that I have to do, but I think of it as a way of taking care of and nurturing myself today.
I take phone calls from sponsees. I have a sponsor. I do believe, and I’ve been told over and over again, that to keep this recovery you have to give it away. And it is a joy to sponsor people, to hear people change and grow. To see people get abstinent and lose weight; it’s like I get to live it all over again vicariously. And it’s absolutely a gift. And through my sponsorship, through being sponsored, and also sponsoring others, I have grown. Sponsees teach me how to let go. I remember my first AWOL…an AWOL, for those who don’t know, is an acronym for a way of life. It’s a study and working of the 12 steps in a closed group. My first AWOL, I wanted to learn how to be… my goal was to become less controlling. Well, my sponsees teach me how to let go and how to put things in God’s hands and how to trust.
I go to meetings. I’m in an AWOL; I’m actually co-leading another AWOL. I was told when I came to this program that AWOL is where the long-term recovery is. And I believe that because if I were the same person now that I was 10 years ago, I would need some sort of a drug to be that person. I absolutely would. I would need to eat. Unless I change and grow and continue to change and grow, I will need to use something. And what keeps me from needing that is the 12 steps and the AWOLs and the constant process of growth and change that happens through AWOLs and working the 12 steps.
I make phone calls to people, and I receive phone calls, and that keeps me out of that isolation, which is such a part of kind of my default as an addict, and it helps me to do service and to pass on something to someone else on a daily basis.
At night, you know, I get down on my knees after I’ve read my Big Book and I thank God for giving me an abstinent day. I do an inventory of my day and take a look at, you know, what I could have maybe done better and what I did well, and knowing that I am not perfect, never will be, but I’m in a constant state of growth. So, I can’t say how much, how grateful I am. The life I have today is because of what God is doing in my life. I will be ever grateful to God and to FA.
Thank you for listening. Okay, all those who wish to, please join me in the Serenity Prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thank you.