I came through the doors of Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous 25 years ago. I never believed in miracles until I came here. My life has changed so dramatically that I’m still in awe when I look at where I am today compared to where I came from.
I was born 69 years ago into a family of six children. My parents were immigrants who worked very hard and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with their kids. My mother took care of the whole world. She cooked and fed everyone who needed something to eat. My father worked long hours. I had four older brothers who were pretty wild, and a younger sister just two years younger than me. I became her mother very early. I was always trying to make order out of chaos, because our home was chaos. No one communicated, there was a lot of yelling and control, and it felt dangerous. My sister and I sometimes had to hide behind the bed when the boys were fighting and running around.
Food wasn’t really an issue for me at first. I was thin until I was about seven years old, when I had my tonsils out. After that, food began to taste different. As I got a little older and could get my hands on a little money, I went to the store and bought what I wanted — mostly sugar. We didn’t have those things at home, so I can still remember the taste of store-bought chocolate milk for the first time. I remember what the food at school looked like, what the brands were, what it tasted like. I also remember it was never enough. Even when my stomach hurt from being full, I still wanted more.
Eventually the food took over and I began to gain weight. I was a heavy teenager and I missed out on a lot of what other kids my age were doing because of that. I pretended a lot. I lived in fantasy. On the outside I acted like a different person than I really was. Inside I felt insecure, ashamed of who I was and where I came from. I never really let people get close. When someone would tell me I was their best friend, I couldn’t even understand it. I couldn’t believe anyone would want me as a friend because I felt like I was two different people. I didn’t bring kids home. I didn’t tell the truth about what was going on with me. So of course I couldn’t really believe in the love people said they had for me. I never let them know me.
When I was 16, my father died. He was probably the only person in my life who really showed me love. He was compassionate, kind, and honest, and I adored him. Losing him was devastating. But nobody in our house talked about feelings. I would come home from school and my mother would be cooking and cleaning and silently crying. As soon as anyone walked in the door, she’d stop. Nothing was ever said.
I struggled in school after that. I wanted to drop to lower-level classes, maybe even leave school. The teachers wouldn’t let me — and I’m grateful for that now — but at the time I just thought I was lazy or weak. Looking back, I know I was grieving. I was in a lot of pain and there was no space for it. I probably needed help, and I didn’t get it.
After my father died, some of my brothers came home from the service. They looked at me — fat — and they were disgusted. They told me I looked terrible and I needed to do something. The truth is, I thought I looked pretty good. I was doing my hair, I’d started wearing lipstick, and I thought I was okay. But they were brutally honest and said I’d better go on a diet. So I did. I was a “good kid.” I did what I was told. I lost 32 pounds and I got down to what looked like a normal size. On the outside I looked like everyone else. On the inside I was still terrified, insecure, and constantly acting.
With that “normal-sized” body, I started living something like a normal teenage life — parties, dances. I met my husband when I was 19. I had this fantasy that I would meet Prince Charming: tall, handsome, dark hair, blue eyes. We would fall in love, get married, have children, have a beautiful home, and the chaos of my childhood would finally be over. I thought love and marriage would fix me.
I met my husband, Gene, when I was 19. He was everything I imagined. We had a very fast courtship — going steady in two weeks, engaged in two months, married in less than a year. We both wanted children. We had our first baby exactly a year after we got married.
The dream fell apart pretty fast. I had a colicky baby who cried and wouldn’t eat. I was trying to keep a perfect house, be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, and I was failing. The dust balls were growing on the floor. The baby was screaming. I was exhausted. I only knew one way to cope: I ate. I gained a lot of weight.
All I ever wanted in life was to be thin. That was the one thing I thought would make everything okay. So even though I was gaining, I went looking for help. Someone told me about a doctor. I went. He gave me diet pills and shots. I never even asked what was in them. I’ve always been a fearful person, but I wanted to be thin so badly that I didn’t care. I would have done anything to be thin. I took the pills. I got the shots. And I got thin. For a very short while, I had what looked like a normal body again. I tried so hard to be perfect, to control everything. I’d eat “just once in a while,” then clamp down again. Starve and control, then break and eat.
Then we decided to have another child. I got pregnant again — with twins, though I didn’t know it. That pregnancy was strict. The doctor gave me a very rigid diet and didn’t believe me when I said, “I’m not eating anything.” I gained 27 pounds and went into the hospital having no idea I was carrying two babies. I woke up and asked, “What did I have?” They told me, “You had two beautiful boys.” I didn’t believe them at first. That’s how disconnected I was from my own reality. I felt invisible, like people couldn’t even really be talking to me.
We came home with two babies. There were only two years between the twins and my older daughter. Life was nonstop work. I look back and I say: I had a nervous breakdown, but I didn’t have time to stop and have it. I cried at night when I was so exhausted that even my crying sounded like someone else’s voice.
I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t come from order or calm. I came from chaos. I tried to create order in my new home, but I had no pattern, no model, no one who had ever shown me how. So I ate. I stood over the bread box while bottles were heating and shoved food in my mouth just to get through the moment. I gained weight. And that started the real cycle. From that point on, there was never one day of “normal eating” for me. I was either on a diet — starving, white-knuckling, feeling like an outsider because “I eat less than everyone and I’m still fatter than everyone” — or I was binging and drowning in guilt.
I went on diet after diet after diet. Every program. Every trick. Doctors. Pills. Shots. Hypnosis. I can’t tell you how many. Nothing lasted. It was all a Band-Aid on a deep, deep wound. The struggle wore me down. I had no self-respect. Being thin meant everything to me, and I could not make it happen.
I cooked. I shopped. I fed the whole world. That was my model. That’s what I saw my mother do. I didn’t know how to break that pattern. I thought that was what you do if you’re a woman and a mother.
As the kids got older and went to school, technically I had “free time,” and that terrified me. I didn’t know how to live when I wasn’t actively mothering every second. The idea of going out to get a job or going back to school filled me with fear. I hid in my kitchen. I made excuses. I was always about to show up for something and then I couldn’t go at the last minute because I “didn’t feel well.” I always had some vague not-feeling-good so I didn’t have to leave my food and my house. I used to joke I was one of the healthiest sick people you ever saw.
Then we “decided” to have another baby — which really means I decided. I had a fourth child, my youngest daughter. Now I had two girls and two boys, and the whole cycle started all over again. After that pregnancy, I did not lose the weight. I delivered the baby and I still looked pregnant. I was 30 years old, and the weight would not come off. Before, I could at least starve the weight off for a couple months if I had to. Now I couldn’t even do that. I would start the day saying, “Today I’m going to be good,” and I’d be eating by the afternoon. Some days I didn’t even have the strength to pretend to start again.
I got up close to 200 pounds. I hated it. I had to shop in specialty stores for women’s sizes — cheaply made clothes that still cost a lot of money. I had to buy whatever would fit, even if everything that year was the same awful color. I had no choice. There were no options and no dignity in it for me.
By then I’d gone back to work part time. My life had boiled down to work, eat, and sleep. That was it. My husband and I were growing apart. He disappeared into the TV. The kids weren’t living out my fantasy script of “perfect children in a perfect home.” They had their own minds, their own problems. I was depressed. Vacations didn’t even sound appealing. When I thought about vacation, all I could think was: I have nothing to wear. I’ll have to go shopping. That’s too much.
I wasn’t actively suicidal. I wasn’t going to make a plan. But I was done. I was just waiting for life to be over. Life had nothing left for me.
Then, someone at my part-time job told me about a 12-step program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. She said she’d written away for information to see if there were meetings in our area. I said, “Sure.” I mean, lying down waiting to die wasn’t working. Nothing else I’d tried had worked. Maybe this would.
I went to my first meeting. The moment I walked through the door, I knew something was different. I heard hope. I felt comfortable. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. They talked about this as a disease, and that made sense to me. Why, with all my willpower and all my dieting, could I not do this basic thing — keep weight off? Hearing it called a disease let something inside me relax. I wasn’t just weak and disgusting. I was sick. I was full of fear, doubt, and insecurity, and there was a program that addressed that.
I was willing to do whatever they told me to do. I don’t even know why. I had never in my life done anything 100%. I always kept a little piece of self-will, a little adjustment, a little “my way.” But this time I was desperate.
They told me I needed a sponsor, so I got a sponsor. She was about 400 pounds. That might sound funny, but at that time the rooms were full of people of all sizes, a lot of very large people. She seemed kind and compassionate, and that’s what I needed. I believe God was directing my recovery from the moment I walked through those doors, because even though this woman never really recovered herself, her husband was in AA. She knew the AA program inside and out, and she passed that on to me. She showed up for me. She taught me what she’d heard. I listened to what she said to do, and I did it. I did not focus on the fact that she was still in the disease. I focused on what she told me about the solution.
My life began to change. I had always been shy and quiet. They told me I needed to participate at meetings, that I should get up and read one of the tools. I thought I was going to die. I had high blood pressure, and I was sure standing up there would kill me. Honestly, what scared me most was letting other people see how scared I was — my shaking hands, my quivering voice. But I did it anyway. I’ll never forget the pounding in my head the first time I read. God used even that. My terror helped someone else who was just as scared.
I went to meetings no matter how far I had to drive. I knew something real was happening. I had what we then called “abstinence,” which in those days was basically a diet wrapped in a beautiful 12-step program. It worked for a while — but eventually I picked up the food again.
Back then, very few people stayed abstinent very long. If you had a couple weeks, that was a big deal. You’d make phone calls and reach people and half the time you’d catch them in the middle of a binge. But I saw people from AA come in and lead meetings. They told stories of absolute destruction — losing everything — and then you’d see them in front of the room, respectable and responsible. And I thought: if this can work for a drunk like that, it can work for me.
So even when I relapsed into the food, I still believed. I’d feel so much better when I wasn’t eating, and then out of nowhere the fear and the doubt and the insecurity would come roaring back and I’d pick up the food again. I didn’t even always understand why. I just knew the food quieted it for a minute.
There was another layer: when I was abstinent and other people weren’t, some people got angry at me. There was resentment. So sometimes I’d pick up just to not stand out. But of course when I picked up, every bit of hope I had went down the tubes. That’s when I finally saw clearly: the bottom line was the food.
Around my third year in program, I hit a point where I knew I could not pick up the food, no matter what. I stayed abstinent for about a year. Then I heard about AWOL.
AWOL changed everything for me. AWOL was a structured step study — a way of really going through the Twelve Steps as a way of life. I found someone who had an AWOL kit and was willing to lead one. She said she needed a co-leader. By that time, I was considered an “old-timer” in my area because I had more abstinence than most people around me. After some back and forth, I ended up being the co-leader. I was willing, because in my heart I already knew: the food had to go down, but there was more to this than just not eating. I needed a way to live.
I am so grateful for AWOL because it became the foundation of my life. These Twelve Steps are not just about food. They are a design for living.
In AWOL I learned something that finally explained my entire life: this is addiction. We used to talk about “compulsive overeating,” but I knew it was bigger than that. I finally understood why I could tell myself, “I’ll just take one bite,” and the next thought would immediately be, “Forget it, I’ve blown it, might as well eat everything.” That “one bite” was the biggest lie I ever told myself. That wasn’t weakness. That was physical addiction. Flour, sugar, and quantities. Once I put those things in my body, I no longer had a choice about stopping. The only time I stopped eating was when I was so full I literally couldn’t put one more bite in my mouth and I would just pass out. That’s not “overeating.” That’s using to the point of blackout. That’s addiction.
Step One became real for me: I am powerless over this. My life is unmanageable. And if I’m powerless, then I have to ask God for help, because I absolutely cannot do this by myself.
So I started doing what I’d been told, but now with understanding. I got on my knees in the morning and asked God for help. I said thank you at night. I read the literature. I wrote. I weighed and measured my food. I did not eat flour and I did not eat sugar. I went to meetings. I was of service. I learned that the road to recovery is unity and service: unity around the food, and service to the next person.
The miracles began to show up in every part of my life.
My marriage changed. My husband and I had been living like roommates, not communicating, walking on eggshells so we “wouldn’t hurt each other,” which of course just built resentment and distance. Working the Steps forced me to get honest with myself about who I was, and that honesty slowly made its way into my marriage. We started talking. We could actually say when we were angry instead of swallowing it for years.
I learned something that nobody had ever taught me: I mattered. I had always been at the bottom of the list. I took care of everybody else first — kids, husband, mother, whoever — and there was never any time left for me. This program told me I had to move myself to the top of the list. They called it “a selfish program.” I like to call it a self-caring program. I had to learn to sleep, to rest, to weigh and measure my food, to take care of my own health. That wasn’t indulgence. That was survival.
I also had to learn how to let go of my children. That was brutal. I only knew how to beg and bargain with God: “Please fix this and I promise I’ll be perfect forever,” which of course never worked. In program I learned a different kind of prayer: “God, watch over them. Show them the way. Help me to help them.” I learned to say, “God, they’re yours today. I will not interfere today. I might take them back tomorrow, so please do a good job, but today they’re yours.” And then I would see things actually work out. One day at a time adds up. Just like with the food.
My relationship with my mother also shifted. My mother was very controlling. We lived in the same house and to her I was still a little girl whose time belonged to her. It didn’t matter that I had four kids and a job. If she wanted me, she wanted me. She would ring my doorbell and say, “When are you getting off that telephone?” I started answering calmly: “Is there something wrong?” She’d say no. I’d say, “Then I’ll come when I’m done talking.” I didn’t scream. I didn’t fight. I just stated reality and held my boundary. And over time she began to respect me. I didn’t change her. I changed me. That was huge.
My oldest daughter, especially, was very enmeshed with me. Her life got very messy. She married a very sick man. She would call me multiple times a day, dumping crises on me, asking me what to do. I didn’t have answers for her. I hadn’t lived what she was living. And in my early abstinence, those calls were dangerous for me. She would call right at dinnertime. I’d be surrounded by food and pain and fear. I’d hang up the phone and I’d want to eat.
One night I came home and she called, and I said, “I’ll call you right back.” I served dinner. Everyone ate. Nobody said a word. They all left the table with all the leftovers still sitting there. I wanted to eat so badly I could feel it like electricity. I was full of feelings I hadn’t told anyone. I had a real choice in that moment: pick up the food, or pick up the phone.
By the grace of God, I picked up the phone.
I called my sponsor. She said, “How are you?” I said, “Not good.” She asked, “Is it the food?” And for the first time I told the truth. I told her everything — about my daughter, about the daily crisis calls, about how I felt like I had to fix it and I couldn’t.
My sponsor said to me, “Do you know what your daughter is doing?” I said no. She said, “She has made you her Higher Power. Why don’t you give her to your Higher Power?”
I got goosebumps. I couldn’t even answer her. I hung up the phone, went into the bathroom, and cried. I said, “God, I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do. Help me.”
And I had a spiritual experience. I will never forget this. I felt like the hand of God reached down and lifted the weight off my shoulders. Two minutes later I was in the kitchen doing dishes and singing. I was listening to my own voice and thinking: I’m singing? After what I just felt? That experience has carried me. Now I know: if I turn to God with real humility and real willingness, help is there. I do not ever have to do any of this alone.
The biggest miracle is this: I don’t eat. I don’t want to eat. The automatic response in my brain used to be: feel something, eat. Discomfort? Eat. Fear? Eat. Sadness? Eat. Now the automatic response is: ask God for help. Say the Serenity Prayer. Be willing. That is freedom. That is total freedom around the food.
My life today is peaceful. I have serenity. I have healthy relationships. I have total freedom from the food and I have a thin body. I will never take that for granted. I came in here fat and miserable and depressed. “Depression” is not even a word I use about myself anymore. The Twelve Steps taught me how to look honestly at myself, to tell the truth about what I’m feeling, and then to let God work with that instead of eating over it.
AWOL didn’t just change me personally. It also changed our meetings. We started talking about food addiction instead of just “overeating.” We started talking about abstinence with clarity. We saw that we needed unity around the food the same way AA has unity around sobriety. That’s hard with food — we all have to eat — but we began to move toward a shared definition: no flour, no sugar, weighed and measured food, and no individual binge foods. That gave us a singleness of purpose. If we can put the food down, we can get on with living the Steps.
From that came 90-day meetings. These were meetings where you committed to 90 days of abstinence — no flour, no sugar, weighed and measured — and you committed to sit and listen and learn. Those meetings worked. Miracles happened. People who had been in other programs for years, up and down and up and down, started coming into those meetings and finally getting stable recovery.
That structure, and that unity around the food, eventually became Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. It grew because we needed a safe place where people could surrender to the same solution, talk the same language of addiction, and support each other in real recovery. I am so grateful to God for the direction and for the fellowship that brought that about. I am touched every single time I go to a meeting and I hear people in recovery, people still in pain, people who are brand new, people who’ve been here a long time, all doing the same thing: being honest, surrendering the food, asking God for help, and living these tools.
It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been here. I still do everything I did in the beginning. I work all the tools. I live the Twelve Steps. I use the slogans: first things first, easy does it, live and let live. I take these into every area of my life. It’s not just about meetings. It’s in my home. It’s at work. It’s in my relationships.
My children now live their own lives. They are respectable and responsible people. My husband and I have a relationship I never dreamed was possible. We actually talk. We can even get angry and say so. We don’t have to stuff it and let it rot into resentment in silence.
I have a life today. I have peace. I have dignity. I have God. And I have freedom from the food.
As long as I can walk — or be carried — I will be at a meeting of Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous.