I’m so grateful to be here. I’m grateful to know that I’m a food addict and that there’s a solution for me. I didn’t know that when I came into these rooms, which was in May of 2001. I didn’t know what a food addict was. I’d never heard of it. All I knew at that time was that I used to call myself an alcoholic with food.
Because I knew that once I took that first bite, I couldn’t stop. I like to say that I was a fat kid, I was a fat teenager, and I was a fat adult. And I thought that was going to be my future, that I was just going to be fat for the rest of my life. I was 37 years old when I came into FA.
And in that time, I’ve been maintaining a 133-pound weight loss. And that to me is amazing. When I first came into these rooms, I had no hope. I was suicidal. I don’t know if I would have actually done anything about it. I was too afraid to actually do anything about it. But I was certainly depressed and considered suicide and thought about ending my life.
At 37 years old, I thought my life was over and why bother? If anything had happened, I would have been just fine.
And I can say that today that is not true for me. I have hope today. I have a life today like I didn’t have those many years ago. And I think when I first came into this program, I had so little hope that I was not a person who ever dieted because I didn’t believe that diets worked.
I knew that I couldn’t stay on a diet. I couldn’t deny myself food. I couldn’t deny myself anything really for very long at all. So I had given up on dieting and I just thought I was going to get fatter and fatter. I remember thinking when I first came to FA maybe I could lose 35 pounds. That would be good.
So 130-plus pounds later, my life is different, my body’s different, but it’s really the spiritual and mental recovery that has been so important for me today. Just a very brief family history: I come from a family of six kids. We were very poor growing up. And I learned very early that there wasn’t enough of anything really, certainly not enough money, not enough food.
Although when I think about it, there was plenty of food in my house. We had gardens, we froze food, we canned food, but we were always trying to stretch it. My mother knew how to feed eight people in the family on very little. And I remember my mother worrying about whether the leftovers from Sunday dinner were going to make it through the week.
I’m the youngest of the family and my older brothers and sisters are many years older than me. When I was a little kid, my brother was in Vietnam, so there was a long span between us. I learned very early that I always wanted more. I was trying to keep up with my big brothers. I wanted more. I wanted to do everything they wanted to do. I thought I should have everything they had, including all the food that they ate.
I remember a lot of turmoil in the late 1960s, early 70s. My family was a family that liked to discuss politics, so there was a lot going on at that time. I remember chaos and a lot of anger. Raised voices meant angry to me, and I was scared. I was a real sensitive kid and I was scared a lot.
But it wasn’t okay in my family to be scared. It wasn’t okay to be angry. It wasn’t okay to be sad. So I learned how to stuff that down with food. I used food to cope with anything that was going on in my life. I had no other tools. My family is a family of addiction. Both my parents were alcoholic.
There was a lot of anger around. I never really saw either of my parents drunk that I knew of. There was just alcohol around all the time. Until I became a teenager, my parents divorced when I was about 13. My mother became an emotional wreck at that point and she became an active alcoholic. So I lived with a lot of chaos in my life.
But what’s more important is the way that I reacted to that. I reacted by stuffing things down, by hiding, by lying, by stealing food, stealing money. I became a compulsive liar in junior high. I made up whole fantasy lives because I didn’t feel like my life was good enough, and I wanted to be more.
I did well in school. I grew up in a small town, so there weren’t a lot of cliques. Everyone pretty much hung around, but I didn’t feel like I belonged. I didn’t feel like I was good enough, even though I was in the classes for advanced kids. I never really felt comfortable in my own skin, no matter where I was.
I went into a high school that was much bigger and kind of got lost. My eighth-grade class was 40 people. My ninth-grade class was 450, so I got lost. But I faked it really well. I got involved in things. I did well. I was sort of the teacher’s pet for a while.
But I also went around the lunchrooms and asked people for food, or I stole people’s food. I would go into people’s lockers and steal their food, or into desks and steal food. When I went to a party, I would hang out by the food table. I remember one sleepover where I went upstairs and raided the refrigerator and freezer while the party was going on downstairs.
I couldn’t cope with all those people. I didn’t know how to have a good time. I didn’t know how to talk to people. I was always wondering what somebody else wanted me to say, how I could be exactly what they wanted me to be. The idea that I could be who I was or who I wanted to be didn’t really occur to me.
I used food to temper those feelings, to try to act bigger than I was, to be bigger than I was. Which is kind of funny, because my body just kept getting bigger and bigger, but inside I felt small. I felt less than.
I did well in school and went to college, which I was very grateful for. My sister and I were the first in my family to go to college. But again, I didn’t feel like I fit in. I compared myself to my roommate, who did really well in school and had boyfriends and was just a nice person. I’m grateful she’s in my life today, but I didn’t know how to be a nice person. I wanted to be, I just didn’t know how.
After college, I went to Washington, D.C., thinking the big city would be my answer. But I was afraid to be in a big city, so I stayed inside a lot and worked a lot. It was easy for me to work.
Still, no matter how many jobs I had or titles or promotions or raises, I didn’t feel like I was enough. I felt like a fraud. My weight slowly climbed. I was a grazer, not a binger. I would eat all day long.
I had a boyfriend who was a healthy eater and he helped keep me somewhat in control. I used to work several jobs, and one job was at a mall. I would think, good, I’m working tonight, I can eat healthy. But I couldn’t eat healthy on my own. I would buy vegetables and they would rot, and I would eat other things.
I would have a kitchen full of food and still go out and get more food because what I had wasn’t exciting or enough. I studied Chinese Kung Fu for four or five years, but every year I got a bigger uniform. I kept getting bigger and didn’t know what to do.
I felt lost.
Right after college, I started seeing a counselor. Counseling helped me, but I wouldn’t talk about my weight or eating. I lived in denial. I didn’t want to face that I was overweight, or big-boned. I wouldn’t even use the word fat.
I tried to exercise, but I would get injured. I tried videos, gym memberships, but I would stop. I also knew there was a God in my life. I tried different spiritual paths—Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, meditation—but nothing stuck. I always thought I didn’t have the right conditions to do it properly, so I gave up.
That’s what I did most of my life. If it was too hard, I gave up. I denied myself a lot because of this disease.
I studied religion and spirituality, but it was never real or practical. It never changed me. I would try something, then move on when it didn’t work.
In my 30s, my mother died when I was 27, and I think that really kicked off a lot of my food addiction. Life got harder. I wasn’t the golden girl anymore. Relationships, work—everything got harder. And my food addiction got bigger and stronger.
That’s when I really started eating heavily. I gave up hope of changing or losing weight. I wore bigger clothes and tried to figure out how to look better, how to be better than others. I compared myself constantly.
I couldn’t feel like I was enough unless I was better than someone else. And yet I didn’t feel as good as others, so I made myself better than them in my head. I became very judgmental.
At least I’m not as fat as her. At least I’m not blank.
Today I don’t compare as much. I’m not cured yet, which is why I’m still here, but it’s leaving me.
By the time I got here, my eating was out of control. I started eating at 6:30 in the morning, fast food breakfasts, eating more than everyone else at meetings, taking leftovers, eating sugar products at my desk, and not getting any work done.
I would go home and go straight to the refrigerator, looking for anything to make me feel better. It never lasted. It wasn’t enough.
I remember sitting on a chair on New Year’s Day with a towel on my lap, eating hot food from a pan, crying, feeling fat, useless, and hopeless, knowing I would keep gaining weight.
I was seeing a counselor and a psychiatrist for depression, and I finally started talking about food. She gave me a flyer about FA, which I carried for six weeks before going.
When I finally went, I saw happy people, and at first I was angry because I thought I was joining a group for fat people. But I listened. I met people who had lost 60, 80, 100 pounds. I started to have hope.
I got a sponsor and a food plan. I didn’t know what to eat anymore, so being told exactly what to eat helped. I didn’t have to count calories or points. I had resisted weighing food, but eventually I just agreed.
My life changed from that day.
I was told to call my sponsor every day. I didn’t want to, but I did. It took me about six weeks to get abstinent. The struggle was more about surrender and honesty than food itself.
I started doing service and working the steps. I became more honest and more stable. I learned to rely on a higher power. I stopped worrying about money and food. I can go into rooms now and feel like I belong.
I can travel, attend events, and not center everything around food. I went to a wedding recently where I knew almost no one, and I talked to people and didn’t think about the food table. That’s a miracle for me.
Today I have gratitude. I have a meditation practice. I rely on this program, my sponsor, and my FA fellows. I take it one day at a time without relying on food.
And that is a miracle to me. Thank you very much.