This meeting is being sponsored by the FA New England 12-Step Committee for the distinct purpose of creating tapes for the 12-Step Committee Tape Library. Those who wish, please join me in a moment of silence and 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 a very grateful food addict in recovery today. I am grateful to have this opportunity to share what I was like when I first found this program, what happened when I came into it, and where I am today. And there is just a myriad of miracles that have happened in between. But to give you a little bit of background about my life and where I come from, I’ll start where I grew up in a small town in Vermont.
I have an older brother, five years older than myself, and then I came along. My dad, as far back as I can remember, was an active alcoholic, but he was a supporting alcoholic. He brought a paycheck home on a regular basis, and we had heat in the house and food in the refrigerator, and our needs were met. There was always a lot of tension in the household, especially when we knew it was time for my dad to come home.
We never knew whether he was going to come home in a pleasant mood or not. And it all depended on whether or not he had stopped off at the local bar and, if so, how long he stayed at the bar, how he was going to come home. You couldn’t always anticipate that he had been a happy drunk or if he was very angry. So that was always at mealtime, so there was always a lot of tension at mealtime. And I can remember at a very young age, I got used to eating with tension. In fact, I think I ate because of the tension. It helped numb out the feelings that I felt.
I don’t think at a young age I understood that, but it’s something that I just got into the habit of doing. So I never really looked forward to those times. If we got bad report cards, that was the time that it was discussed. If either my brother or myself had acted out, that was when it got talked about and then punishments were laid down at that particular time. As I grew older, that pattern continued.
When I got into my early teens and started getting interested in boys, I was already at that point overweight. My early years, through about the fourth and fifth grade, I was sort of average-sized, but I never felt average. I never felt the same as the other kids in school. I always felt a little bit different. Even though I knew I had not been adopted, I just didn’t really feel a part of my family.
I loved them because I knew I was supposed to love them, but even at a young age, I questioned my capacity for love. Did I truly love them? But then, when I got into those teen years, I found out that I felt like I didn’t even fit in with my peers. They seemed to be off doing things that I didn’t seem to be able to join in on. I wasn’t popular, I wasn’t really social, I didn’t know how to go out there and laugh and really have a good time.
So that was difficult for me. I tended to stay home more at that time. And the more you stay home, the less you get invited to things. So then you have no place to go, so then you’re staying home even more. And I found a companion at home. I found the refrigerator and I found the cabinets. And I found money in my dad’s pockets or in my mom’s wallet that I could take to the stores, and then I could have something to eat from the stores. So at a very young age, I started using food as a companion.
I also started going to the library and getting a lot of books, and I read a lot. So even in my early teens, that’s what I did a lot: I was reading and I was eating, and it was up in my room on the cooler days. If it was nice days, it was out on the front porch that had a lot of ivy growing in, and so it was like a secluded place outside. And I would see some of the other kids walking by, and I wouldn’t even call out to them because I was just more comfortable with the food and with the books.
And that’s when the weight really started coming on. Up to that point I guess I was chubby, but then I started getting so that it was hard to find clothes in the regular sizes in the regular stores, and I would have to go to stores that had special sizing for the “chubbette” sizes, which were always in a different section of the store. And I used to find that so hard, so that when it would be time to get ready for school, I would have to go to that different section and see other kids in the other part of the store. They knew where I was and I knew where they were, and it was just very uncomfortable.
And my mom would be in and out of the dressing room trying to find the right sizes for me. And I remember one time she said very loudly, not intentionally but loudly, to the clerk, “She needs the next larger size.” And I was just so embarrassed by that. And I thought, why can’t she just be quiet about it? And I know looking back, she didn’t do it intentionally, but it felt really hurtful.
And I remember being mad at her for several days after that and giving her the “silent treatment,” which I got very famous for. But she did try hard. She always wanted me to have the right clothing and to participate in the right things. And she got very active in the PTAs, I think partly for that, so that I would go there with her so that I would be included, because a lot of the things I didn’t want to go to on my own. So I’m grateful for that in that respect.
And then around the seventh grade, I noticed this one particular boy in school. His name was Bill, and I really liked him. And lo and behold, he liked me too. And we started walking before and after church a little bit, and once in a while he’d walk me home from school. So we were like boyfriend and girlfriend, and I thought that was just so wonderful. And we went to a dance that year, and I again wanted to go and have a dressy dress. There was nothing in the store, so my mom had a friend who was a dressmaker, and she took me and had a beautiful dress made. It was an emerald green dress. And when Bill came to pick me up that night, he said how pretty I was, and I felt really pretty that night. And to be honest, I don’t know what size I was, but I would say I was probably 20 to 25 pounds overweight, and at that age, that’s not a regular size. And I was a tall girl anyway, and I have fairly big bone structure, so I was bigger than most of my female classmates to begin with.
But we went to that dance, and his mom was a chaperone at that dance, and I had a really lovely time at the beginning of the evening. We were dancing and having a really good time, and then I happened to overhear a conversation that she had with a friend of hers that it was too bad her Billy was with this fat girl. I don’t think she said it intentionally loud for me to hear, but I happened to be at the right place at the right time, and I heard it.
And it’s like my balloon just deflated right there. And it was hard to forget that and continue on and have a good time for the rest of the night, but I tried. But it wasn’t long after that that all of a sudden he became uninterested in me, and I never knew—and I don’t know to this day—if that was just the natural course of the relationship or if his mom had said something. I will never know that, but it hurt me for a long time. And for the next year in school, the eighth grade, I can remember always pining over him.
When I would be in the same classroom as him, I would sit and I would stare at him almost like willing him to like me again. I would try and do extra well in the classes that we shared so that I might be mentioned as getting a good grade or having paid attention or given good input into a discussion that we had, thinking that that would make the difference. And nothing ever changed. So that relationship was over with.
And then it was time to go into high school. And in high school, there were three different schools that all came together to form the local high school. And so all of our classes were intermingled. And I started to meet different people that came in from the different schools. And at that point, I had sort of grown up with two or three friends. If you get mad at each other, you separate off into one or two and then separate again. But then it was like there were so many more kids in school. I found it even harder to become a member of the group, to get to know new people, to start even having conversations. So I think I even got more isolated at that particular time.
But my mom always encouraged me to try and do different events. So there were school plays that went on, and I was not someone who was out there and active, and I certainly didn’t want to be the center of attention because at this point I was definitely overweight. I was probably a size sixteen or eighteen going into high school, and I would go and do things in the back scenes. I would do makeup for the plays, but there always seemed to be the girls who weren’t popular who were doing the makeup. They were either the overweight ones, the shy ones, the ones that weren’t perhaps as good scholastically, and those were the people that I fell into. And those people, according to my mom, weren’t good enough for me. So I don’t think she understood that I didn’t feel up to being with the popular crowd because I didn’t feel I belonged, but then there was this group of people that I felt comfortable with, but my mom didn’t think were good enough for me, and I didn’t know where I was. So again, it was easier to just stay home rather than cause that conflict.
I was a fair student. I was a very lazy student. I didn’t want to do homework. I wanted to stay up and read or watch TV or whatever. So I skirted by. I got some A’s and B’s and some C’s, and a D in biology and geometry, which I had to repeat both of them to get marks so that I could go on and take the classes that followed. At that point, my brother, who was five years older than I, had already gone off to college and he came down to Boston. I think I said in the early part of my qualification that I grew up in Vermont. So he came down to Boston. That was what I wanted to do. I said, “This is the escape I want.” I want out of this community. I want out of this household. Not that it was horrible, but it wasn’t fun either. And I said, I want to go to college.
You would have thought, in a normal person’s mind or a normal teenager’s mind, that they would do really well in school so they could have the pick of the schools they wanted to go to. But I didn’t. With the food being such a priority, my thoughts of other things were fleeting. They didn’t stay with me. So I did okay. And when it was time to look for schools, there weren’t a lot of schools that would take my grades. But I did find a secretarial school that accepted me, and I came down for an interview.
But in that course of high school also, I put on more weight. And when it was time to get ready for school, I wanted to be able to have nice clothes to come down to go to a Boston college. And we were also told that you had to dress in appropriate clothing for the career that I was choosing, and I was going to be a secretary. So the clothing was that you needed suits, needed to wear hose and the appropriate shoes and the pocketbook and the gloves. We’re talking 1966, when that’s what they did, certainly not what they do today. Again, to go out and find those clothes was such an effort. So I did try and lose some weight to get the appropriate clothing to come down to school with.
And I remember my mom took me to a diet doctor. I went a couple of times, and he asked me a lot of questions about what went on in the home and why I ate. I had tried to diet a little bit with Diet Delight and cutting back and things like that, but it never really worked. And when he started asking me questions about my family, I answered to the best of my ability. I don’t recollect all that well, but I remember him saying that maybe we needed to have some family counseling. And I remember that he brought that up to my mom, who was the one taking me back and forth, because it was to a community that was about half an hour away. Our local town was so small, we didn’t have counselors. He suggested that we have family counseling. I don’t know the outcome of that conversation. All I know is that I never went back for counseling. And I was just fine with that. I didn’t care, because I wasn’t getting that much out of it and it was like an inconvenience. So that was never brought up again.
But looking back, that probably was my first recollection of understanding that there was a problem in the family. It wasn’t just me. But I thought going off to college was going to be the answer. I was probably, at this point, 180 pounds. This disease is very progressive. The eating was progressive. And I was very nervous about coming down and meeting totally new people. I wasn’t going to know anybody who was coming down to this Boston area. Or if they were, I wasn’t in the loop of the students who were going to the four‑year colleges. I didn’t know who they were, and I was going to a two‑year secretarial school.
So I came down and was assigned to a room with three other girls, and I honed in immediately on one of the other girls who was overweight, and we became eating buddies in school. Our food plan at school was that we got breakfast and we got supper, but we had to take care of our own lunch. And I was given a very small allowance that was supposed to take care of my lunch, my shampoos, maybe dry cleaning, or if I wanted to go to a movie or something. But before I knew it, that month’s allowance was gone, and with me it was gone on food so quickly. Then I would borrow and have to pay back when I got my next month’s allowance. So it was always gone before I knew it.
I did start going to classes, and I started doing really well down here in school. I took the secretarial classes, took steno and typing and some accounting classes and English for secretarial, which was writing English, I believe. And I did really well on it. In my first few tests, I got great marks. And that spurred me on to stay a good student.
But one thing did happen in the second part of my first year. I had met this boy, again named Bill, which is just a total coincidence, and we had started dating. And he was someone who, when I first met him, was a very small‑framed person, very thin. It was the era of the greased‑back hair. And when I met him one night on a blind date after talking on the phone, and I peeked around the corner, and I thought, ooh, God. But I hadn’t dated much in high school, and this was a date. So no matter what, I was going out on that date. So we did go out on that date, and in a week’s time I had his ring.
And I wanted to stay out later than curfew because we had to sign in and out of the dormitories. But I didn’t in the beginning. Things are very progressive with me, and also with addiction—not just in food addiction, but addiction in other areas too. And so I started signing in late and saying, oh, we had car trouble, and all sorts of different things. Then I saw other kids who were signing in at night and then sneaking out the window. So I did that, and I got caught, of course, I got caught because I stayed out for the weekend, and I got suspended from school. When I got suspended, I was sent home for a week, and I had dropped off going to classes, obviously, for that week. I got so far behind in my Spanish classes that I dropped Spanish. Now, when I went to sign up for this course, I wanted to be a foreign service secretary because in my sophomore year in high school I had traveled to South America and had visited my aunt and uncle who were in the foreign service, and I thought this is a great career. But, you know what, I didn’t want to put in the effort of catching up that week that I’d lost in Spanish, so I just dropped it. And I just said, well, I’ll just be an executive secretary. So I followed the courses and I did graduate after the two years, and I did very well in that.
But during the time that I was dating this boy, he would take me out on dates, and, you know, I would eat in the dormitory, and then he’d say, “What do you want to do tonight?” And I’d say, “Gee, I don’t know.” And he’d say, “Do you want to go out and get something to eat?” And I would lie, of course, and say, “Yeah, the food wasn’t very good in the dorm tonight. I didn’t eat that much,” which was not the truth. Whether it was good or not, for me it didn’t make a difference. I ate it whether I liked it or not., I ate it. Whether it was good or not, I ate it. And then we went out, and of course you know what you do on dates, you stop at all these fast‑food junk restaurants, which are loaded with fat and grease and calories. And so the weight started coming on.
And here I was already larger‑framed than he was, overweight, and he wasn’t, and I was putting on more weight. Size just wasn’t an issue for him. He had always, for whatever reason, dated girls who were heavier than he was. So it wasn’t a problem. And he came from a very different background than I did. He came from a very poor background, very disadvantaged, hadn’t really excelled in school. He went to a Boston trade school, did car repairs, then went off to the service, did whatever the service told him to do, and then moved back home and got a job on an assembly line.
So for him, he looked at someone who was in college and came from a little bit better economic background. I think he looked at it as he was in awe of who I was, and I took advantage of that, to be totally honest. I took advantage of anything that I could take advantage of. I learned that very early on in life. So I started ruling what we did and how we did it and when we did it. I had come from being told what to do at home and not liking it. So when I found someone that I could tell what to do, I really reveled in that. And he didn’t really know any different because he had come from his home where, he was, out of five children, the best one and he was his mom’s favorite. So he was told what to do, but he went along with that. Then he went in the service, was told what to do, and went along with that. Then he went back home, the same thing again, and then met me. That was just the natural thing for him. So I sort of ruled the roost.
I went home that summer for break, and I wanted to lose weight. So I started a diet. And I actually lost a lot of weight that summer. I was up to about 200 pounds, and I think that summer I lost weight and got down to probably back down to 180, which is where I was when I believe I went to school when I started my first year. So when he came in the late summer to meet my parents, which was not a fun time, my parents totally disapproved of him and made it very known that they disapproved. But I had gotten a new wardrobe and I felt really good about that. Whether they approved or not, this was someone who liked me, loved me I believe, and it didn’t make any difference whether they liked him or not.
So I went back to school for my senior year, the second year, and it went along well, and that January, got engaged. I kept waiting for my husband to propose and waiting and waiting. Finally I brought the conversation up again, the control, and said, you know, aren’t we going to get married and shouldn’t we get a ring? I don’t think he ever actually proposed, but we did get engaged. We went to the jeweler’s building and got a ring. I never even told my parents that we were engaged. We just went about our business.
We went home for some particular holiday. I don’t remember what it was. Actually, he didn’t go with me. I went home alone, and my parents happened to see the ring and said, “Well, what is that ring?” And I said, “Oh, Bill and I are engaged. We’re getting married.” Just so nonchalant, like, how important is it to them? And they just, again, were not happy about it, but at that point, they knew there was nothing they could do about it.
So we did set a wedding date. And where I was in Boston, because I got a job after I graduated from college, and my parents…I was going to get married in Vermont, and my mom did most of the planning. But at this point my weight was up to about 200 pounds again, because it was always like I could do a diet for a little bit, lose a little bit of weight, never get down to a goal weight for sure. And then it was too hard and I would go back to the eating, and I was always back to more weight.
So at the time that I went to a diet doctor because I really wanted to be thin walking down the aisle, I went to a diet doctor and got a bag full of pills. Some of them were fluid pills, some of them were—I’m sure, looking back now, though I didn’t know it then, were amphetamines. And I also remember getting a shot, which I believe was a shot of B12. And I started losing weight really quickly. In the first month, I lost 30 pounds, and I was ecstatic. I thought, this is great. I went with a girlfriend of mine who was overweight also, but not as overweight as I was. And she, I believe, lost around 20 pounds. But that was great for both of us. But you know what, I found when I could lose, on taking all these pills and everything, so of course the next month I was still taking the same type of pills and everything, but we started playing more games with what we could eat and how much we could eat, and started buying diet foods so we could try to follow calories but get more out of the calories. I went back, and of course the next month I didn’t lose as much, but I kept going back. My goal weight was to get down to 140 pounds. At my height, that was what we decided a goal weight was.
And always playing games with the food. The two or three days before I had to go back for my appointment, I would just about starve myself so that there would be a bigger weight loss. But then leaving that night after weighing in and having to go out and get something because I had deprived myself of the food. Always so many games with the food. And my husband was really liking that I was losing weight because we were looking more the same in body size than we ever had. And he was thrilled with that.
But I never got down to that goal weight. I got to 143 pounds, and that last three pounds I just could not manage. But it was enough to get into the wedding dress that I had bought. I went down the aisle, cried the whole day of my wedding. They were happiness tears. They were also tears of, thank you God I have someone that loves me, and that I was grateful that I was getting married because I didn’t think for a long time that that was possible for me.
We celebrated. We had a lovely wedding. It rained that day, and it was sort of appropriate with my tears, but it was a lovely day. And we went to Montreal for our three‑day honeymoon. That’s all we could afford for our honeymoon. And I remember getting to Montreal and I could not wait to hit the restaurants. It wasn’t about seeing the sights, which I had been to Montreal before, but my husband hadn’t. And it wasn’t about seeing all the sights and the chapels and all that type of thing. It was getting to that first restaurant. Because, you know, when we got to the hotel, they gave us all these buffet places that they were famous for, and that’s what the highlight of our honeymoon was. We did do the chapels and seeing the beautiful spots in Montreal, but it was all around the eating. It wasn’t the other way around, as it is for most people. It was around the eating. And I came back from this three‑day honeymoon, and we had something that we needed to attend. I can’t even remember what it was, but I was going to wear my going‑away outfit to, and my going‑away outfit at that point was tight, and it was an A‑line dress, and it was already riding up, so it was really short because of the weight that I put on just in those three days.
Because I was an eater, and I could eat tremendous amounts of food, it was nothing for me to put on probably fifteen or twenty pounds in that weekend, which is probably what I did. But I wanted to stay thin, so I would ultimately go back and forth to this diet doctor, and I would do the pills for a couple of weeks and lose some weight.
But I started getting really nervous and agitated and very mean on these pills. And my husband would say, you know, just try to do it on your own, I don’t like who you are with these pills. When I was losing the weight for the wedding, I didn’t seem to have that anxiousness or that anxiety or the viciousness because I think there was the excitement of losing weight, of getting into a thin dress, of the marriage coming. And so I think my thoughts were elsewhere. But afterward, it just was not a good result. Those chemicals in my body were not a good reaction.
So it was like, oh, that’s all I needed, was my husband was okay with a little bit of extra weight. Don’t go back to the diet doctor. So I fought my way back up to 175 pounds from 140 pounds. And then about two years later, I thought I was pregnant. Again. I didn’t tell my parents. They were down for my birthday or Thanksgiving—I’m not sure which it was, but it was before Christmas. And I said I needed to go to an appointment, and I came back from the appointment. And I guess I just didn’t have a good rapport with my parents, obviously, because I never told them about getting engaged. And when I came back from the doctor’s and I was pregnant, I just gave them some pamphlets that the doctor had given me about pregnancy and I said, “Here, I just came from the doctor’s,” and never even said, “Gee, we’re going to have a baby,” “We’re excited, aren’t you” or whatever. It was like, here—like, I guess how important am I in their life, and also how important am I? Well, when I found out I was pregnant, I was like, yay! I’m going to get fat anyway. I might as well let go of watching my weight. So I did eat all good, nutritious foods because I grew up in a home with diabetes, so I knew that I needed to do that. So I watched, making sure that I ate the good foods, but I ate all the junk foods, too. And I went up to 234 pounds before I delivered. And I had a lot of problems in my delivery because of it.
I wrenched my back, had migraines, and was in the hospital for two or three days in a lot of pain. But came home, and I was in such fear, because I hadn’t babysat a lot as a child, didn’t have any younger brothers or sisters, and was in such fear of taking care of this child, that, you know, that baby fat that supposedly comes off after you have the baby never came off. Plus, I never even lost any weight from having my daughter in the hospital because—somebody was mentioning at a qualification the other night—is the menu, the circle menu in the hospital. I circled everything that was on that menu. So the weight that I probably lost by delivering a baby that was seven pounds and three ounces, I ate that in everything that I had circled. So I didn’t lose a pound when I came home. But being in fear of taking care of this child, I ate, and I never lost that baby fat.
I went back to work after about two and a half years. I did lose a little bit of weight, thinking that going back to work part‑time was going to be taking care of it. But I lost a little bit of weight, was able to get a little bit of a wardrobe, but it didn’t last. By this point, I was just too dependent on the food to get through life. Because I wasn’t “Suzie Mother.” I wasn’t comfortable in the mother role. I wasn’t comfortable being a part‑time worker and being a mother role. I just wasn’t comfortable in my life. I wasn’t comfortable in my relationship with my husband. It wasn’t good enough, but the food gave me some distance from my feelings, so the weight just never came on.
And then I met a girl who lived down the street, and she walked by, and we became friendly. She had a child about the same age as my daughter. She was overweight. We got very enmeshed in each other’s lives immediately, and within 10 days, we were going on camping trips together. And camping trips were all about, you named it, the food. We cooked for days before we went camping, getting things ready. We cooked every meal; it was like an extravaganza. On the fireplace, with the butane cookers (or whatever they’re called), I mean, it was just unbelievable. And we were just getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And so big that we couldn’t do the typical things we saw other mothers doing with their children. Getting on the swings. Both of us, our rear ends were so large, that to get on those swings would squash your butt was just so uncomfortable. So we could not do that. And we would see other parents and we would want to do that, but we just couldn’t. I remember…my husband took a picture of me that I was pushing my daughter in a swing, and if you push them hard enough and then you run under the swing, I did that, and it’s like, I couldn’t run fast enough, and the swing came back and got me and knocked me on my face. And don’t you know, that was when my husband snapped the picture. Here I am, this large woman, snapped, spread out on the ground, with my daughter swinging over me. And that’s one of the pictures that I have. That’s one of the humiliating places that this disease of food addiction took me to, and so many others, also.
But I did meet this girl, and we actually came into a program called OA about 15 years ago and she started, actually, about six weeks before I did, and I saw something different, because we had known each other at that point for about two years. And I saw something different about her doing this “diet” than I had seen in her in other diets. She said, “Just come, just think about it, just come.” And I saw her losing weight, and I thought, “Gee, maybe I’ll give it a try.” But I wasn’t quite ready. So I found another overweight friend that I worked with, and one night we went to a meeting and, you know, I listened at that meeting, and I saw people that were thin and were peaceful, and I thought, “Gee, maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility for me.” So I wanted this girl from work to go back with me again, but she heard things that she just wasn’t willing to do, as far as putting certain food items down, with the no-sugar and the no-flour. She wasn’t willing to give up her breakfast choices. So I went back on my own, and I listened. I went to a couple of meetings, but it was in February and I knew there was a holiday weekend coming up and our plans were laid out for what we were going to do that holiday weekend and I didn’t want to miss out on that, because again, it was all around the food.
But I did go away on that weekend, God knows how much I ate, but I remember coming back in the car, so uncomfortable. I had rolled down the waistband of my pants to give me a little bit of extra room. I did go to a meeting that Thursday at the Chelsea library, which is where I live in Chelsea now, and the woman that I heard a couple of times share, I wanted her as my sponsor, and she wasn’t there. The reason I wanted her was…I think part of it was because she was in a thin body, but more so she talked about having children and that she wanted her children to be able to go to school, to go to college, so she always tried to take care of finances to be able to do that when they grew up. And that is what I really admired about her was hearing that. That’s what I wanted for my child. But she wasn’t there that night. So I had a starter packet with some names on it. I called her the next day and started rambling off my food and she said, “Well, are you asking me to be your sponsor?” I said, “Yes, your name is on the starter packet. I would like to have you be my sponsor.” She didn’t have time for me in the morning, but God bless this woman, she made time. She gave me an evening slot, which she hadn’t been doing. She must have heard something or…this program is all about willingness and giving this program away, that she made time for me in the evening. And thank you God for that. She started sponsoring me and I started listening. I didn’t always want to hear what she had to say, but I did want to follow the food plan. So I did start weighing and measuring my food immediately, and giving her my food every day off of a food plan that did not have sugar and flour, that was weighed and measured three meals a day with nothing in between. That’s what I followed, and I kept doing it day after day. There were days it was hard, there were days I was hungry, there were days that my mind kept going back to the food, but it was something different.
First of all, my friend who had come into this program was on her abstinence about six weeks ahead of me, and I was competitive at that time, and if she wasn’t going to eat, I wasn’t going to eat. She wasn’t going to beat me. And she never ate. And so I didn’t eat for weeks and weeks and weeks. I had my first weigh-in and I lost 22 pounds. And I was disappointed because it wasn’t as much as my first weigh-in going to the diet doctor. But my girlfriend’s husband said, “Do you realize that’s the size of a Thanksgiving turkey?” When I put it in that frame, it’s like, my God, that’s a lot of weight off me. So I kept doing it and doing it. My friend didn’t eat and I didn’t eat, and all of a sudden I started hearing more at meetings. My head started clearing. I started hearing more hope. I started hearing changes that happened in people’s lives, not only around the weight loss and their physical, but about their spiritual living, about their relationships with people; about their ability to challenge themselves. That is what kept me going. So I started getting off the competitive mode and on to getting my own life and having hopes of my own.
Then, the saving grace was getting into an AWOL, which was about eight or nine months after I got into Program. I already had quite a bit of weight off and I had already heard a lot in Program about the recovery process that happens in AWOL. I got into an AWOL, and I don’t know what I got out of my first AWOL, honestly, other than it was another reason not to eat, because if you ate in an AWOL you were out. Again, I think there was a little competition in there, and of course, I had gotten a little bit of self-pride and self-integrity. I didn’t want to blow that because it had been a long time since I had any integrity and self-pride. It felt good that I could start standing straight, looking people in the eyes. I was being honest with my food and it helped me to get honest in other areas of my life, where I realized I had been very dishonest, a lot of it through dishonesty by omission, but also blatant lying and white lies up the ying/yang. I was getting more honest with myself and with other people and I liked that.
I went through my first AWOL, did my inventory, and gave away my step to my sponsor, thinking after I give away my AWOL inventory, my fourth step…oh, I was really nervous about my relationship with my sponsor. But it only got better. It was such a gift to share my life with someone else, as honest as I knew how to be in that first AWOL, and the next day to call her on the phone, and she was still kind and loving and nurturing. The relationship only got better because she knew me more intimately. She was just so giving, and I got to know her more through giving away that step, because it was an interchange of ideas and we related to each other. I’ve gone through many, many AWOLs since then and now I have been co-leading AWOLs for many years. I’m so grateful for the process. I know that we can put the food down in fellowship, which today is in Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous. I am so grateful for that, for the disciplines, for the unity of our purpose, for the unity of our meetings, for the structure that is combined so that I can go to any meeting in any state and know the meeting I’m going to get and the program that is going to be worked. I’m grateful for that. And all of that has come out of this commitment to not eating, one day at a time. To clearly defining the recovery process and what works. The courage of people in this area that have taken on this new fellowship. And my sponsor was a strong part of that. And I am now active in the intergroup, which I never was before when it was the other fellowship. I’m grateful for that. It has spurred me on to new challenges. I continue to grow with being in AWOLs. I know that that is what I need to keep focusing on in my life.
So today, I am down to a goal weight around 135 pounds, give or take a pound or two. That’s coming from my top weight, which I don’t think I mentioned, of 282 pounds. When I came into the program, I was 262. Don’t ask me where I went from 285 to 262, but that was my story back then. But to think that I have maintained about a 130‑pound weight loss for about 14 years is an absolute miracle. But I’ve gotten so much more than that. I’ve got a freedom to live my life today. I have so much living in between my three meals. And before I came in program, my life was all about eating. And there was no such thing as three meals because I was picking and grazing throughout my whole day.
A lot of times there was no beginning and end to a meal because there was all that grazing. So today I have a life, and I have a wedding coming up for my daughter. And thank you God, I am available, I am present, I am clear‑headed, I am joyful. I have a relationship with my daughter that is wonderful. And I’ll be able to walk down the aisle in a dress that is a size 10, and I’m coming from a size 48.
If that isn’t a miracle and doesn’t speak well for this fellowship, I don’t know what else can. And I will have fellowship at that wedding for me that I want to celebrate with. So for today, I am grateful that I have this fellowship. I am as gifted to work this program today as I was in the beginning. And for anyone who hears this recording, thank you for being there and for listening, and for everyone in this room, thank you.
And would all those who wish, please join me in a moment of silence and 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.