I’m from Geneva, New York, and I’m a grateful recovering food addict. Glad to be here today. I talked my family into getting together with some relatives in Boston, partly so I could participate in this qualathon. I’ve always wanted to be at one. I don’t know why I wanted to make a tape because now I’m nervous, but I think it’s a good service. I wanted to make a tape because all the years I’ve been in the program, I’ve been so grateful for the tapes that everybody else made, and I just wanted to add my service to that, to the tape library, because it’s very crucial for those of us who are in outlying areas. We really need these tapes because we don’t have enough speakers in our own areas.
I’ll start with statistics. I’m 51 years old. I grew up in Minnesota when I was young, and now I’ve been living in New York State for about 10 years, which is great because now I live within a day’s drive of Boston, and I love to come back here whenever I can to connect with all my dear friends from the beginning days when I started in the program.I was at my top weight in my early 20s. The pictures I’m passing around are from my early 20s. It’s a little hard to recognize me because I’m older now. I’m grateful that it’s been a long time since I’ve been overweight. My top weight was 160 or 165. I’m 5’5 and a half. When I came into the program in 1985, I had been controlling my weight and dieting, so I was probably around 140. In the program, I only had to lose maybe 15 pounds. Even that 15 pounds, like others have shared, was a lot for me because there was all that sickness in my head that went along with it and all that self-hatred. It didn’t have to be a hundred pounds for me to hate who I was.I grew up in Minnesota. I started life in Panama. My dad was a high school principal in the Canal Zone in Panama, and I think he just wanted some adventure. He went down there with the family, and my sisters and I were born there. He became fluent in Spanish, and after we moved back to Minnesota, where my parents were from, sometimes friends from Panama would come and visit. It kind of gave us a broader perspective on life, knowing people from another culture. I was always grateful for those early experiences of knowing that the world was bigger than my little town in Minnesota. Even though I had a very interesting and loving family, I wasn’t ever content with myself. I wasn’t ever secure. I had a brother and two sisters and my two parents, an intact family. My parents stayed married from 1942 until my dad died just this last January. They had a wonderful, healthy marriage. So I didn’t grow up in a chaotic family. But there’s no need to wonder why I have this disease. I know I have it.I believe that my siblings all have it too, and it’s hard to see that they have not found recovery, and I’m the only one who has. My mother is also a food addict, I believe. So I do come from people who had the disease, but there was still a lot of love despite the disease. I remember my mother being puzzled when I was in college and asking me, “Do you have this inferiority complex? I don’t understand,” because all the outward signs showed that I was a successful person. I was always a good student, a leader in high school, the editor of the newspaper, and the first chair clarinet in band. I did well at things, and I was outgoing, always had friends, but it was my acting ability or something that this disease gave me to survive with, because inside, I just was not secure. I think the biggest aspect of my disease was that I was a people pleaser, constantly having my radar out for how people would receive me and trying to do what they wanted me to do. There was all this show of being successful, friendly, outgoing, kind, and sweet, and really a rule follower. It was all to try to get you to love me because I was so scared inside and so convinced that there was nothing in there to love. What a terrible way to live. That’s what this disease gave me, that emptiness inside and frenzy to do and be so that maybe you’d love me then. That’s how it manifested in me, that total certainty that I wasn’t lovable just because I was me.My mother, as I say early on, was puzzled. “Why are you this way? We love you.” I couldn’t explain it. I don’t think any of us can explain our disease. It just is there. What happened with the physical part of the disease was I didn’t really get overweight until I went away to college. But I do remember in the early years of my life that eating was very important. I recently, as I was thinking about preparing to make this tape, remembered always wanting to have something in my mouth. Part of that was when I was a child, I loved horses so much that it was all I would draw. One of my games was pretending I was a horse. I’d get on my hands and knees and crawl around in the yard and actually eat some of the plants. There’s a little plant that has yellow flowers that tastes really sour. It’s not grass, it’s some other plant. I would eat that to pretend I was a horse. That’s a symptom, I think, of just loving to have stuff in my mouth. When I first started life, the thing that was in my mouth all the time was my thumb. I didn’t stop sucking my thumb until I was 11, I think. My mother tried everything. She would paint this horrible stuff on my thumb that tasted awful, and I would just suck it right off and keep sucking my thumb. I’d sit in front of the TV with my thumb in my mouth. My mother wanted the best for me, but used a lot of shame, saying, “This is ridiculous. You’re 10, you’re 11, you’re still sucking your thumb.” So I quit that, but then I went right from sucking my thumb to biting my nails. Again, that’s a pattern for me. I had to have something in my mouth. I bit my nails till they hurt. I didn’t stop that until I was 21. Maybe that’s why I didn’t gain weight as a child, because I had the thumb and that gave me the comfort I needed, but after a while, I had to give that up, so then I had to have the food. I do remember overeating as a child. It’s just that maybe my metabolism was high enough that I didn’t put on the weight. My mother was always a good cook and baker, and there’d always be desserts in the kitchen. There was this unwritten rule that desserts were for the end of a meal, not just to eat any old time. But if it was sitting on the counter, it was like an open invitation. I remember a lot of sneak eating, going into the kitchen when no one else was around, cutting a thin edge off the pan of stuff, and then another thin and another and another, hoping no one would notice because I just kept taking small bits at a time. But I felt guilty, like I know this isn’t right, but I just have to because it’s so good.When I was in high school, I was really active on the high school newspaper and in a lot of musical activities. I got a boyfriend that I started going with. That history with relationships also shows me that I’m an addict because nothing was enough. As soon as I got a friend, I just had to own that friend. I had to staple them to my side, or I wouldn’t feel secure. As soon as I got this boyfriend, I left all my girlfriends, and it was like Kevin and me, and that’s it. I look back and think, what a shame. I had this really nice friend, Mary, and I just kind of dumped her as soon as I got Kevin in my life. I thought Kevin and I would get married. We stayed together for about three years, and then halfway through sophomore year of college, I was at one school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he was at another school in Minneapolis. We were in neighboring cities, but we didn’t see each other too much. We got home for Christmas that year, and he told me he wanted to break up, and my world fell apart. I thought, but I thought you loved me, and my whole family loved him, and his family loved me, and I thought it was all taken care of, here’s my mate. I’m sure it was my disease that drove him away because I was so needy. I just couldn’t be a separate person. I had to be stapled to someone. I’m sure he just needed some breathing room. In fact, he told me at the time, “Don’t take this so hard, I think I just need some time. I do care about you, but I just need some time away.” But he quickly found someone else and married her. That was a time in my life where I really fell apart, and I think the food really took on significance then because I didn’t have this safe person who was going to take care of my need to be loved. I thought, well if he doesn’t even want to be with me then I’m hopeless.That first month after he broke up with me was a January term at my college, where you take one intensive course, and I couldn’t even do that. I just dropped that, and all I did was eat and go to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, I don’t remember which, and just mope around and feel horrible. I was able to pick up my life but one thing I picked up beside the food was other relationships with men that were very surface-y but I would quickly move into physical intimacy with them even though it had no real basis because again I was just searching and wanting to be needed and loved and thinking that that would suffice if I had physical intimacy that would show me that I was a worthwhile person. Again, I always came away feeling empty, just like I did after the food binges. They never filled that need inside, but I always kept thinking that it would. That’s the sickness of this disease that I know is that I keep going back to the food, even though all it gives me is pain. I remember as a college student delighting in the fact that I could be in the cafeteria and go back for seconds or thirds, and there were no parents around watching me, no mother saying you’re putting on weight and trying all these new foods, it was so wonderful. I remember feeling like one time I was in the music department practicing piano, and I missed the whole dinner hour because I was so intent on my music. I remember thinking, ” This was so wonderful. Wow, I didn’t eat, and I didn’t even think about it. It was like a victory for me that I was able to skip a meal because I was so busy with my music, and I thought, ” That’s the answer. Just distract yourself, and then you won’t eat. It never worked because then I just had to make up for it later. I missed dinner, I’m going to starve, so I’d better go to the vending machines three times tonight rather than once. Another memory from college was I was an English major and I had lots of papers to write and I would always wait till the night before it was due. I thought that was good because I’d get this great inspiratio,n and I’d just write the first draft and turn that i,n and it was perfect. Unfortunately, I would sort of get away with it because sometimes it was pretty good. I’d write on this sugar high and caffeine high, and for some reason, I guess that’s part of what we read about in the big book, too, that lots of addicts are really capable people and that it’s amazing to see what they can accomplish despite their disease. So yeah, I could still write these great papers, but I wonder what they could have been like if I’d been abstinent. Instead, I would stay up all night with coffee beside me and always something, usually flour and sugar, both in the product. That was what I liked the best, something that had both in it. I didn’t get any sleep and then turned in this paper and then got an A on it. So I thought, well, this works, obviously. I got involved in the anti-war movement and started skipping classes and turning things in late. Someone earlier was sharing about balance. I never knew how to balance things. I thought, well, I’ve got to give my all to these protest marches and everything. I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t be concerned about a political issue and still be a college student responsibly, and I just never could handle multiple things in my life. I would just get out of kilter and do one thing to an extreme, and then everything else would fall apart, and that’s kind of what happened in my one year during my college years. Though my grades didn’t suffer too badly, I just had to take some incompletes, and that was stressful. But I would just turn to the food to get through the stress.When I was a junior, I went to England for a semester, and that was exciting and wonderful because, of course, there were new foods to try. I had to try all the brands that I couldn’t get back in Minnesota, and how wonderful that was. I found a boyfriend ther,e and I remember him being disappointed in me because it seemed like all I cared about was the physical part of the relationship. I didn’t really love him enough to travel by train up to his town as many times as he wanted me to, and that sort of thing. I look back and think, ” That’s so strange. Think of me being the one who was the sex fiend and not wanting a substantive relationship. Usually, it’s the women who want the substance , and the men only want the sex. But I was in that role of, you know, I didn’t really like him that much, but it was just exciting having the physical closeness, and that’s all I wanted. He called me on it, and it was really kind of embarrassing because that wasn’t who I thought I was. I was this nice little preacher’s kid from Minnesota, but here I was off in another continent and trying sex and alcohol for the first time. One thing I thought about in sharing my story was that, you know, to show the contrast of where I was in the disease versus where I am now by looking at certain key birthdays in my life. So my 21st birthday I was in London and the big thing to do was, you know, we went out to a couple of pubs and drank a lot. And that’s what you’re supposed to do when you turn 21, isn’t it? And you know, I felt lousy the next day. But I had to do the grown-up thing. You’ve got to drink if you’re 21. And then I look at my 30th birthday. I was still in the disease. I was back living in Minnesota, and when I turned 30, I was in my last year of law school because I had decided that I should go to law school so that I could save the world. I was going to work for legal services and help people who couldn’t afford to, you know, help people who usually don’t have a voice in the justice system. Again, a lot of the things I’ve been involved in in my life are wonderful things, good ideals that I had, but I never could find balance. And I think I was doing them for the wrong reason. It was always, what are other people going to think of me? You know, now I’ll go out, and I’ll be a legal services attorney, and that will show that I’m an important citizen in the world and that I’m really doing something useful. You know, I couldn’t just trust that I’m useful and I’m worthwhile as I am. I had to go to great lengths to try to prove this. So I was going to be an attorney, and anyway, I was 30 at that time, and I remember about my 30th birthday that I was so sad that I was still single, and my younger sister was having her first baby, and I had no mate on the horizon or anything and I began thinking about, well, maybe I should adopt.I am a single parent and adopted a baby because otherwise I may never get a chance to have a baby, you know, and I was just getting desperate, and I went out dancing on my 30th birthday with two women friends, and they got asked to dance, and I didn’t, and I just thought, this is just horrible. I just hate myself, and no one’s ever going to care for me. I was just so desperate. I thought I was going to just be an old maid and, you know, as though being single is a terrible fate, you know, and there’s no life unless you’re married. I just had a narrow vision of what life was supposed to be. So then I don’t want to go to my 40th birthday yet because a lot happened between 30 and 40, because what happened was I found this program when I was 34. I was 30, as I say, and single and living in Minnesota, and then what happened was I met the man I’m now married to, and for once, you know, it wasn’t just a physical thing, it was like, ” Wow, I really like this person’s mind and ideas and abilities. He’s a musician, and I love music, and so we had a lot to identify with in each other, and our first date was just hours of talking and talking, and it was just wonderful. So we ended up getting married in 1983 and then moving to Boston because he was going to go to graduate school at New England Conservatory, and I’m so grateful that that’s where he ended up getting into school, because then I was living here where the program is so strong at the time when I became willing to find a solution to my problem.So I was married at age 32, moved to Boston, and was still overweight. My husband was as thin as a rail. I was just so grateful that he didn’t mind that I was a little pudgy. And he was this person who just kind of could forget to eat. He didn’t care about food one way or the other. And so I was really ashamed around him of my binges. So I would just eat at work mostly. Early in our marriage, I would have this stash in my desk drawer at work and then I’d come home after eating all this junk all afternoon and at that point I was the worker and he was the student and so he’d be home before me and he would have cooked a nice dinner for us and I’d come home and he’d say, well, are you hungry? I’ve got a nice meal here for us, and I would just have to lie because I was not hungry at all. Yeah, good, I’m hungry, yeah, and I’d eat this nice meal he made, of course, I had to eat it, but I didn’t appreciate it because I was so full of this junk I’d already had. That just felt so dishonest. I think that’s what finally helped me to find the doors of this program, the rooms of this program, because I couldn’t stand that dishonesty. I just hated it. Here with my own husband, I couldn’t even be upfront about what I was doing and what I was feeling. He remembers from those early days of our marriage that I would get up in the morning and I’d take off my pajamas and then just stand in front of the closet naked looking for like 10 minutes to think what on earth can I wear today that’s going to make me feel alright, and I just couldn’t decide what to wear. He just thought it was so weird that I would just stand there for ages and not pick anything and now you know the night before I’m gonna get up and go somewhere I just pick my clothes quickly put them in the bathroom because I get up much earlier than my husband so I dress in the bathroom so as not to disturb him so I picked my clothes in about 30 seconds, it’s so nice. But anyway, I happened to meet someone in the program, as, because I was in a graduate program myself, I decided to go back to school because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an attorney anymore. I had finished law school, you know, in Minnesota, and I had practiced law for about two years, and then met my husband, and we moved to Boston. And I actually did take the bar exam in Boston in ’83, and I didn’t pass.Of course, I had to do it on my own. I couldn’t take the study course because I was too proud. You know, I’ve already been through one bar in Minnesota, so I don’t need that. I’ll just study the materials on my own. And everybody I talked to who was an attorney in Massachusetts said, come on, give yourself a break. Take it again and take the course that everybody takes. No, I was too proud for that, you know. So I didn’t quite pass. So, well. So I worked as a paralegal at a big law firm downtown and always felt less than because I was in this in-between situation where I had a law degree, but I wasn’t an attorney in Massachusetts, so I didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit in with the paralegals quite, and I didn’t fit in with the attorneys. And that was just like the story of my life, just feeling like I never fit in. Anyway, so there we were in Boston, and I didn’t think I wanted to be an attorney anymore, so I went to this graduate program, which was a one-year program in feminist theology. Because I thought, maybe I want to… I don’t know what I want to be, so I’ll just go to school some more and have time to just be exploring things. And luckily, then I met someone in this program through that graduate program I was in because I had to do an internship at a community center in East Boston, and that’s where I met her. And she was also a Divinity School student at that time. And we had to share these little reflection papers on our spiritual paths, and this person was sharing that she was in this group, this 12-step group that helped her with her food problems. And I looked at her, and she was very slender and very lively and spiritually centered, and I thought, why would she need to do that? What’s going on here? She’s not fat. What is she doing in this group that has to do with food problems? So I kind of filed that information away in my head like, okay, here’s this person doing this thing that sounds kind of intriguing, and I sure like what she has now. And what happened was I had my last binge in early December 1985.And I called her up, and I said, could you please tell me what your diet is? Because I’m really sick of eating the way I’m eating and all the lying that goes with it. She said, ” Well, yeah, I’ll tell you what our weight loss food plan is, but please come to a meeting with me. That’s the key. You can’t do this by yourself. Sure, sure, I said. And I hung up, and I followed the weight loss food plan that she gave me for three days on my own. And then I thought, I can’t do this. This is too hard.So I called her, and I went to a meeting with her. So my first meeting was, I think, a Tuesday night meeting at the Chelsea Library. And there I met some of the people who have since founded FA. So I was just lucky. I fell in with the right crowd, so to speak. I got a sponsor that first night. And she’s still my sponsor today, just about 17 years later. And I didn’t really like what I saw.At that first meeting, but I didn’t like what I heard. I thought, ” What does all this talk about God? What does that have to do with losing the weight? I just wanted to lose the weight. I thought that my sole problem was that I was fat. Yet I was willing to give it a try because everybody was so happy and so peaceful and so with it. And they just had what I wanted. So even though I thought it was weird that they were talking about spiritual things, and I was skeptical and thought, well, what do they know? I’m in graduate school studying theology. I know more than they do. I don’t know if I can trust their take on things. But I thought, well, my friend is here, and she’s a graduate student in Divinity School. It’s okay for her, so maybe it’ll be okay for me too. So I tried it. Thank goodness I did. And I talked to people about my skepticism. I said, I don’t like the big book, it’s so sexist. And they’d say, you know…Try to look beyond that because there’s so much help in there for us, and people were gentle with me. They didn’t say, ” You’re so judgmental, stop it, this is what saves us. They were very kind to me, and they said, yeah, sure, you see that stuff in there you don’t like. Or you hear people sharing. I remember some of my early meetings, maybe someone would give a joke as part of their sharing that was racist or something, and I think, I don’t want to be a part of this organization. I don’t go for this stuff that’s racist, and so I’d call someone. Fortunately, I would call someone, and I’d talk about it. And they’d say, yeah, you don’t have to like everything you hear. You know, we’re all just human beings in here. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, please. Don’t give up on this thing just because somebody’s a human and says something you don’t agree with. And I’m so grateful that I made those calls and I got that message that, you know, this is an organization made of human beings, but we have something here that is going to change your life.Please stick with it. And I did. I stuck with it. I kept coming back. I got in an AWOL, which stands for A Way of Life. And my sponsor said, ” Get in one as soon as you can. It’s really going to help you learn what the steps are all about and really integrate them into your life on a day-to-day basis, rather than just reading them in the big book and wondering how to do them. And I’m so grateful. I got in an AWOL. I started the program in early December. I got in an AWOL in January. And unfortunately, we left.Boston area, so my husband could move on to his next degree program when we were on step 10. So I wasn’t able to quite finish with people, but after I’d moved to Indiana, I finished it on the phone with my sponsor. And that began a progression of years where I was living in outlying areas where I’d move into this place, and I’d be the only person who was weighing and measuring and not eating flour and sugar. The only person who had known personally the value of 90-day meetings.Where you just wait until you have something to offer before you get up and share. So I break new ground everywhere I lived. I lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for four years. Then we moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for one year. Then back to Minnesota for one year, Moorhead, Minnesota. And then finally to New York State. So everywhere I moved, I took the program that I’d gotten in Boston with me. Usually, I’d get one or two sponsors who were willing to do what I did. And we’d just…Start doing an AWOL, you know, ourselves, the little group of two or three. And so I kept doing what I had learned here in Boston. And so I just, I never can think of Boston without just having this wonderful warm feeling like I’m so grateful that I was living here and first saw that strong recovery that I was able to take with me. Now I have to say, it’s part of my story that when I was away from Boston, I did get influenced by people who were trying to work this program in an easier, softer way, and I had some trouble. I broke my abstinence. I would talk to my sponsor about it, and we would look at all the tools and look at how I was working the tools or not working the tools. I’m here to tell you that we have these tools for a reason. I think our addiction is just different from other addictions because we have to consume the thing that is our drug.So we need frequent reminders, frequent context with each other, more so maybe than an alcoholic or a drug addict, cocaine addict, or something would need because we have to eat food. And what I did was when I was living in these outlying areas like Minnesota, people around me were like, you know, it wasn’t that big a thing. If they’d break their abstinence, they would just kind of like really downplay that and not take it seriously.So when I would try to be really honest about my absence, they would try to say, it doesn’t matter. So what if you’ve sworn off Diet Coke or diet sodas and now you’ve picked them up again, or whatever it might be. And I started getting influenced by that a little bit. And what I did was I didn’t keep up my phone contacts with people whose recovery I really respected. I kind of let that slide. And my sponsor helped me to see that. And I remember at one point, I wasn’t working yet. And I said to her, ” Well, I’m a little concerned about the cost of phone calls.And she said, ” Why don’t you try writing postcards as an adjunct to your phone calls? And I started doing that, and it was so wonderful because people wrote me back. And I just loved going to the mailbox every day,y and I’d get these postcards back from people in the Boston area. I felt connected again, and I needed that. This whole disease is one of making me feel disconnected, making me feel different somehow, not as good as.And also the other extreme of better than, but in either way, not connected with people. So I learned that I really did have to stay connected to the people who had the recovery that I wanted, not to these new people I was meeting who were trying to get by with the least effort. And then what happened was we moved to New York State, Geneva, where I live now, in 92. And that was a really great thing for me because now, instead of living way out in Minnesota, I could get to my sponsor within a day’s drive, instead of three days. And I could come to Boston a couple of times a year. So I’ve been doing that for the last ten years. I’ve been able to start meetings in my hometown. We have two meetings in my town now. They’re small, but we’ve got a dedicated core of people. And many of them came to the convention last May, and it really gave them a boost in the arm to know that there are so many people doing this around the world.Not just our little group of six or seven, I