What I can talk about with my disease is that it started at a young age. I remember being a very young girl and I was overweight as a young girl and I battled weight my whole life with this disease of food addiction. I remember that when I was young, food was just so, so important to me in my life. I remember eating large quantities of food.
And I remember feeling different about myself, as though I didn’t quite belong, and lacking confidence. I lacked the ability to get along in the world. And those things I remember going on inside of me from a young age in fear. You know, it was always wrapped up with fear. I was afraid of people. I was afraid to try new things. I was just afraid, afraid to make friends, afraid people weren’t going to like me.
And I felt like I had these strikes against me. My first one was that I was different. My size was different. I was overweight. I was a chubby little girl. I got made fun of when I went to school. I had to have clothing made for me because it was too expensive to go into Lane and Bryant’s, which was the only store in Boston that sold the Chubbette clothes. And I had an aunt who could make clothes.
They weren’t clothes that really were for little kids. I stuck out like a sore thumb because of my size, because of the things that I had to wear to fit my body, and because I was chubby. And then I had to wear glasses from when I was in the second grade, and that was another thing. I felt like that was another strike against me. And kids made fun of someone who looked different, and I was made fun of because I wore glasses.
It was uncomfortable for me. It really was uncomfortable growing up. I have a brother, and he’s 12 years older than I am. And my family background is that my mother was someone who was a real reactor. She would yell and scream and fly off the handle at any little thing. And I felt embarrassed, embarrassed around friends that I did have because I never knew how she was going to react. You know most of the time her reaction was was crazy I felt like it was insane I didn’t understand that when I was little but when I when I grew up a little bit I looked at her in a way that I just said you know this my mother’s crazy you know there’s something really wrong here and my father was alcoholic and he was also ill in addition to being alcoholic he had suffered nervous breakdowns when he was in the service and came out of the service and, maybe just couldn’t adjust to life. And he was sick with alcoholism. You know, that took off in his life. It was kind of difficult growing up. You know, the feelings that I remember were feelings around being uncomfortable in my home, walking on eggshells, and feeling as though I caused the problem. You know, if there was an argument, if there was a problem in my home, I caused it somehow. I did something wrong. And I know that I found food at a young age to kind of comfort all that, to kind of make it all okay. And I just had this real love of food. My ethnic background is that I’m Italian, and my mother did a lot of cooking. She prided herself on cooking and cleaning, and those were two things that she did. I mean, the cleaning from floor to ceiling, and the cooking from scratch, all the time. And on a day like today, which is the holiday Thanksgiving, she would have been cooking for a couple of weeks ahead of time and preparing.
And it would probably take us about half an hour to finish it all off, which is amazing. And I was sharing that with a sponsor this morning, so it’s just really incredible. And that’s what I remember about my childhood. And I was a good student. I seemed to really kind of excel in school. I liked it when people told me that I was doing well and that I was okay, and I didn’t have that inside myself. know that I know. Looking back over it now, I just didn’t have that inside of myself, and I depended on the things around me to tell me that I was okay, to make it okay. You know, the eating just, you know, just kept getting worse. I didn’t know that I was out of control with food. I remember when I was 10, I had diet pills, and that was because my mother was getting ready for my brother’s wedding and she was at a diet doctor and she had got diet pills and they were working for her and I had pills and I never saw this doctor, never went to see him but I had the little bottle of pills, prescription medication. And I remember taking those pills and just feeling all jittery and just not knowing really what to do with myself. I just didn’t know with the energy. And then we started playing games with it.
You know, I followed the direction. My mother would say, ” Well, you know, I’m cooking this today. So, you know, if you want to be able to enjoy this, you don’t have to take one of these pills, and then you know, you can eat, but then you’ll get right back. You know, these pills will help. So I lost some weight, and it got me into normal-sized clothing. So I didn’t need to go into Boston and have all kinds of money spent on, you know, a couple of exercise outfits and I was still uncomfortable because I still did not have a normal-sized body. I wasn’t developed, and the clothing that I could fit into was clothing for teenagers. So things didn’t fit right. And I just always felt generally uncomfortable. Uncomfortable about myself, uncomfortable about my home. I felt like there was a secret there. And I kind of kept things at a distance. And my home wasn’t an open home.
You know, I didn’t have a lot of friends in my life, and I didn’t have a lot of people coming over. It just was not an open home because my father drank on a daily basis. My mother yelled and screamed, you know, all the time. And, you know, my brother was out of the house when I was 10, and it was just, you know, a lot of insanity, you know, a lot of insanity. When I go back to my teenage years, I have to say that’s when I really tried to make an effort myself about my weight. The first time that I went to Weight Watchers and had a little bit of hope that I could lose weight, I went with my mother. She did all the cooking, all the preparing of the food, and she paid the dues every week. So I didn’t really need to think too much about myself, about what I was doing. I just needed to show up, sit down, and eat what was prepared and what was given to me. And the first time that I did that, I was somewhere between 13 and 15, somewhere around that age bracket. And I was 176 and a half pounds. And that really scared me. That was the first time that I remember seeing a number on the scale and realizing, oh my god, I’m going to be 200 pounds. And it really scared me. So the Weight Watchers program worked for me a little bit. I lost 50 pounds there. And I started playing games with that.
And I just didn’t know, you know, I didn’t know then about food addiction. I didn’t find that out until I came into the program. But I didn’t understand that first bite and how that first bite took me, and that’s exactly what happened. You know, I got the okay, the permission to cheat on a diet, and I did that, and I had that first bite, and it was really hard to get back. You know, I had a way of eating. I knew what to eat.
It was successful. could lose weight. could maintain a weight loss on it, but somehow I could never really get back to it. And I didn’t know that I was sugar and flour addicted. I didn’t know those things had addictive qualities in my system. And that was the start of a real struggle. And I kept yo-yoing. I’d be down to 50 pounds. I was of a normal-sized body.
Always struggling with my self-esteem and my self-worth, which was never quite right. I thought that if I could get thin and be normal looking, then the inside would be okay too. I’d be normal on the inside. And that’s not how it happened to me. I maintained being in a fairly normal-sized body, keeping that 50 pounds off or 40 pounds off, somewhere around there for a while.
It was good to be able to fit into normal-sized clothing, but nothing had changed about me inside. I still had all that insecurity. And what I’ve learned since coming into this program is that this is a disease of Fiat-Doughton insecurity and addiction, and that’s where it took me. And I was there from a young age, and it just kept progressing, you know, and escalating. So I kept battling my weight through teenage years, through my young adulthood. I decided to get married when I was 20, and the situation in my life then was that I still was unhappy with being at home, and I just had this growing sense of needing to escape. I needed to get out of here. I needed to have my own life. And my father had died when I was 18, and plans were already in motion that my mother and my brother were making, what I felt like they were making for my life, that my mother was selling the home that we grew up in, the home that we owned.
And she wanted to move into an apartment; she was going to take me with her, and I was going to become my mother’s caretaker. And you know, my brother was married, he lived in Connecticut with his wife, and I think he had two children at the time, or one and one on the way. And that was nice, you know, he had a life, and I felt like I was just being really trapped and manipulated into this, you know, into this thing. And the man that I started to date ended up becoming my husband, and we eally fit together well you know he had security in his life and he had certain things going on in his life and we just kinda made a fit you know made a match made a fit and really had the best intentions and so i got married when i was twenty and i got what i wanted you know i i got my own place to to to be in charge of i felt like i couldn’t be manipulated or controlled anymore
I’d have my own life and my own freedom. And that’s really what I wanted. The only thing was that it didn’t quite work that way. I still had food, I was still eating, I was still miserable with myself, and my weight was fluctuating up and down. So the kind of happiness I thought was going to bring me ended up being short-lived. And I would find myself again, like over and over. This is the pattern that I remember around that time. of over and over getting to a place in my life where I had what I wanted, I had what I thought I needed, but somehow it wasn’t doing it, and it wasn’t giving it to me. And then in the background, it was always, you know, I have to lose weight, or I’m starting to gain weight again, and what am I going to do? So that was always going on in my life. And I started to be able to function less and less in the world. You know, I wanted to just isolate, be taken care of.
have my husband be the contact for the world he would earn the living he would be in touch with the world and I would just stay home and be in this protected environment and I could raise kids you know I could raise little kids little kids aren’t that much trouble you know this is what was going you know in my mind and you know there were bouts of depression for me isolation panic you know from the fear that I had and just a lot of manipulation and a lot of control on my part. My marriage at that time consisted more or less of my husband needing to take care of me. He had a need to take care of me. I had a need to let him take care of me and do for me. We would give to each other back and forth that way. When I was married for three years,
I decided that what I needed in my life was to have a child. This wasn’t working again. And I was finding myself in that place of now what? What next? What do you do? And then of course, too, if I got pregnant, I really didn’t have to worry about eating. I didn’t have to worry about food. I didn’t have to worry about a diet. I’d want to take care of myself and do the best I can under a doctor’s care. But to me, that meant that I didn’t have to…
care about how big I was really getting. You’re pregnant, that’s a license to eat. So that ended up happening. I did get pregnant, and I had my daughter when I was 23. And, you know, again, that place, you know, I didn’t realize, I had no concept what it was like to have a child. And I thought I would be the one, you know, to feel fulfilled and that would give me my self-worth and make it all okay. And what ended up happening was it was more of me giving, you know, that unconditional love. And you don’t know in what ways you have to give when you’re a parent until you’re in those shoes. So it was more of giving. And I’m telling you, I ended up in depression and self-pity and crying a lot and not understanding and knowing what was going on in my life. And I got to be about 210 pounds.
That was the last number that I was when I got on the scale. And I was really, really miserable. I was really, really in a desperate place in my life. And I didn’t know what to do. know, with the answer, having more children, somehow I knew it wasn’t. You know, thank you, God. I have one daughter today, and I love her a lot. And I just didn’t know where to turn and what to do. And my husband at the time didn’t know what to do for me. You know, he was the one who could always pull me out, always make it better, and make it okay.
I was just so needy and so dependent. And I was still trying the diets. I was joining an exercise program. I went to Weight Watchers. I don’t know how many times I went back to that program, and I kept joining it and rejoining. And we didn’t have money for things like that. And back then, it was an expensive program to do. And they started having their own products. And the products were expensive to get.
And I really wanted that to work for me. I tried desperately for that to work for me. And it just didn’t. It just did not. Because I was food addicted. By then, I had lost all control. And I became addicted to food. And there was nothing that I could do with food for a long period of time to make any difference in my life. Because of my father’s background, I started thinking along the lines that maybe there’s going to be some mental illness.
With me, you know, maybe I need some help that way. Because I knew mentally, there were things about how I was, how I thought, how I behaved that scared me and made me nervous. And I wanted help. I wanted something to be done about that. And it’s really interesting, but you know, that lack of self-worth and just self-esteem that I had. I didn’t at that time want to get better for myself. I wanted to get better because now I had a child to take care of. And I remember that so specifically, thinking like that in my mind. If it were me, and I had to go through life being 250 or 300 pounds and just being one of those people who was just never going to get thin, was never going to have the joy of being thin in their life.
Then so be it, you know, and I was going to live through mental pain and anguish, then so be it. That’s my lot in life. That’s what I felt like. This, you know, I was being punished for some reason. But I had the responsibility of a child in my life, and I did not want to pass that on because I felt like that was being passed on to me, and maybe I could do something about it. And it’s just, it’s so interesting for me to realize that, that.
I didn’t care about myself as much as I cared about another person. It just didn’t matter to me. So I went. I had some counseling before I came into the program. And that was really basically along the lines of the counselor didn’t even look at the size of my body. She didn’t even know that I was over 200 pounds. It just didn’t register in her mind. And she was trying to help me find myself in the family.
And we were working on a family tree, and we were talking about my thoughts, now, my husband’s thoughts, and I was talking a lot about blaming. You know, I was blaming my brother, I was blaming my mother, I was blaming my father. There was a lot of talk, you know, about things like that going on. And I wasn’t all that honest with her because I had a lot of fear. I was afraid that if I ever told anybody exactly what was going on inside of me that I could be put away, someone would call me crazy, and God forbid, and God knew what would happen to me. So I couldn’t really be honest with her. Back around that time, there was a woman whom I had met when I was in the hospital having my daughter, and we were roommates, and we had kept in touch with each other off and on. And as I started to have my bouts of depression, and being isolated and pulling back. We would just talk on the telephone but then from time to time we’d get together and see each other and it was always around food we’d get together and it would be over my house, her house lunch, who’d bring dessert and it was eating you know that’s really what it was about you know with eating I wanted to go to her house all the time because I didn’t want her coming to my house because she had other little kids and I just didn’t want these little kids running around all over my house you know that’s
That’s just how I felt about it. So I would pack my stuff up and go there with my daughter. was just fussy, picky, choosy, self-centered. You name it, that’s the place that I was in. And, you know, in her life, she, her husband was an AA, and he gave her an ultimatum and said to her, because what was happening for him in his life was he was getting well. Things were happening for him in his program, and his wife was staying in a pretty desperate, sick place. And he just gave her an ultimatum about their marriage, that she needed to do something. And he heard about the OA program through his AA meeting. And when this friend of mine got involved and got into her program, she eventually started talking to me about it. And I saw changes in her. First of all, she was a big woman too. We both had a weight problem. And I saw her losing weight. And I also saw something different, which was that she started to feel better about herself. She started to matter to herself. And that’s something that I really wanted. I didn’t know that’s what that was, but that’s what it was. And I wanted that.
But I also hated her for it, and I kinda had this love-hate relationship with her. I didn’t want to see her, but I wanted to see her, and I wanted to know what was going on in her life. I was really, really curious. And I had lost all hope in my own life. It was too painful at that point to even really try anything. I could not bring myself to go back to Weight Watchers again. I didn’t have the money to do it. I had cut out an article.
for liquid protein and left it on the chair in the kitchen. And once I had the money put aside, I said, well, I’ll send away for it. But I had to put the money aside for it. But in the back of my mind, I just knew. I didn’t have that hope anymore of, well, let me try. Maybe this will work. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was just too painful, really just too painful.
That was probably, I’d say, in October that I first heard from my friend what she was doing and saw some changes happening in her life. And when January rolled around, I’ve been in programs since January of 1982, and when January of 1982 rolled around, I decided to try one last attempt at a New Year’s resolution. And I went out, and I got some products, and I wasn’t going to deprive myself and have all those awful fruits and vegetables you know because I was a junk food eater I did a lot of binge eating and junk food eating I wasn’t eating normal healthy foods just the flour you know the flour was you know was what I consider a fairly normal food for me so I went and I got bags and boxes and half gallons of the pretend stuff you know not the real stuff but the pretend stuff.
And I decided to try like a semi weight watch my own way. And within a week or so, it was crazy. I was eating boxes of things, sleeves of things, but it wasn’t the real sugar item. So it was a little different, and I thought that it was gonna be okay. But the quantities that I was eating were absolutely crazy, absolutely crazy. And…
My husband at the time said to me, ” Why don’t you give your friend a call and go to this thing? It’s free. It’s not going to cost you any money. And that was like, jeez, this thing is free. I don’t have to make any kind of commitment to money here. And that was a big problem for us back then. So I gave her a call, and I went. My first meeting that I was going to go to ended up not being there because
Somebody didn’t have a key, and we couldn’t get in. And I don’t think that it was a meeting that was a very strong meeting at the time, or a meeting that I would have heard what I really needed to hear. So when I look back over that, I just know that God really had a plan for me, you know, and God was really directing where I needed to be, when I needed to be there, and how. It amazes me when I think about it. And the first meeting that I went to ended up being a very strong meeting in Chelsea.
I heard things, and I heard things that made me scared, heard things that made me want to run out the door, but I also saw things, and the things that I saw, you know, I saw people’s pitches, and that to me was so, that did it for me. You know, that gave me hope because I wanted to be thin. You know, in the worst way, I wanted to be thin. If I could be in a thin-sized body, my whole life would be going better. How? I don’t know. I didn’t have a clue, but that’s what was in my mind, and that gave me hope. I saw people stand up and tell me how much they weighed, and then showed me a picture of what they looked like, and then they would tell me a little bit about themselves. And that was it. That was the clincher for me. I didn’t care how crazy things sounded to me from that point on. It’s like I would have done anything, really anything. I did get a sponsor. It took me a little while to get one, and when I did, that’s when things really started to happen. You know, I got clear direction with food.
I was told that I could not eat flour and sugar, and the reason I couldn’t eat them was that I was addicted to flour and sugar. Those things set up an uncontrollable craving in my body, in my system, and I would fight, and I would struggle with that. And I needed to go through withdrawal, and that it would be okay. You know, it was possible, and it was okay. And there were people who could help me. There were meetings to go to. But this is just what I needed to do. I needed to write my food down, weigh, and measure it.
report my food to my sponsor, commit it to her, tell her what I was going to eat, and then just stick to that way. And that’s it. And I needed to ask God for help. That was the most important thing. And as far as God went, I had religion in my life. I had the dogma. That’s what I did, the religious practices. But I didn’t have anything inside of myself that gave me any kind of fulfillment. I did need to find a God in my understanding of this program. And I did. I did.
through relying on a sponsor. My sponsor would say things to me like, ” Well, if you don’t really believe it or agree with it, do you believe that this is how I believe? And do you believe that this is what I do? And I said, yeah. She said, ” Well, that’s all you need to know. Just do it. That’s enough for you right now. That’s OK. And that really was enough for me. And eventually, I did get a go out of my understanding in my life. And that came from putting food on a scale because I would see myself in my home.
With my baby asleep in the crib with food, putting it on a scale and not putting it in my mouth, you know, or not going to the freezer to take something that I really shouldn’t be taking. And that to me was amazing. I couldn’t do that when I tried to diet before. I just couldn’t. If the thought came to my mind that there was something in the freezer, there was a half-gallon of something in the freezer, and I was supposed to be on a diet, it didn’t matter. I might be able to push that off for a little while, but eventually…
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you know I would attack it and then it would be gone and then I would hate myself afterwards and that’s really what it was like it was like a food attack when you know when I got that thought and then that urge and I just went for it it was really out of control I could not stop eating so I thought things changing I thought things happening and and I’m just so so grateful eventually 85 pounds came off my body and now I’ve been maintaining that weight loss for about 16 years and that to me is amazing
Really, really amazing. And that’s why I came here. I came in here because I was a huge size and I wanted help with that. And what I found out for myself is that I got help in so many other ways, in so many other areas in my life. You know, this program has touched every single area of my life. All those ways that I thought that I needed help, know, going for counseling, struggling with being depressed and being in self-pity, crying, and being so needy, all that.
eventually changed, but really, really gradually, you know, over time, over the years. And those changes came about through being in AWOL. And I got into my first AWOL when I was about three months abstinent, and there was just one AWOL meeting; that was it. And, you know, fortunate enough for me, again, you know, I thank God just guiding the timing of everything in my life, that that one and only AWOL was going to open that
of my first year in program and my sponsor said to me, I want you here and I went and I had no clue, absolutely no clue, you know, why I was there. I didn’t understand. That’s all I knew was every time I got on the scale I was getting thin and I was feeling better and I don’t know what they’re talking about with character defects and needing to look at myself and how to take responsibility, you know, for my life and getting better. I thought getting better was just the weight. If you came in fat…
and you were getting thin, meant you were getting better. I just, I didn’t understand, you know, about the mental and the spiritual. But I did have it, you know. I had the mental and the spiritual with this disease, that’s for sure. So those changes started happening for me. And, you know, again, my sponsor kept saying to me, by then I had my second sponsor in program. My first sponsor decided to leave. And I’m grateful for the help that she gave me, you know. The kind of help I got from her was…
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was through my weight loss and starting out in my first AWOL. And the sponsor that I’ve had now, I’ve had for almost that 16 years, about 15 and a half years. And I’m very, very grateful for her. She’s been there for me over the years and continues to have everything that I want. She’s someone that’s gone ahead of me. You know, started happening for me and it’s like that cloud of denial and that, you know, that lack of clarity, it’s like all that started to lift and as I continued to stay abstinent, things started to make sense to me and I could relate to what people were saying and I could understand and one of the first awarenesses I had in program was sitting in my living room on a Sunday afternoon with the TV on.
Nothing much was on TV. I didn’t want to read a book, I didn’t want to pick up a craft project, and all of a sudden, I was starving. I just like, ugh, I wanted to eat, and I realized that I was bored. Boredom. And I was amazed, and I remember running around my house saying to my husband, I’m bored, I’m bored. And he’s looking at me like, yeah, so what? But it was amazing to me. I didn’t know that I ate over things. I just didn’t know. I didn’t have that sense that I ate when I was uncomfortable, that I ate when I was happy, or if I was comfortable; that was my way of life, that I just ate. The food was always there. And I had to learn a new way. And that’s what the AWOLs were about for me, learning to live a new way of life without having my drug. I didn’t have a clue that food became a drug to me in my life. I kept going around the diets. I kept being told the same things that people were told for diets.
And that’s fine for somebody who needs a diet. But I just didn’t need the diet. I needed more than that. So I’m just really, really grateful. And I also want to share as part of my story, too, that after I was in the program for about six years, and I had back-to-back abstinence at the time, I got into trouble with my program. And I did pick up food again. And I had to get honest about that and also honest about my program and the things that I wasn’t doing that I needed to do. And a really important thing for me was that quiet time, that relationship with God in my understanding, and other substances that I was putting in my body. I was chewing gum like a maniac. I was drinking diet soda to fill up. All these things, breath mints, sugarless breath mints, and these things just kind of kept me going. But then it turned around, and it did that damage.
It just didn’t work anymore because it was easier to be able to get a glass of soda or pop a mint in my mouth or chew a piece of gum than to sit quietly and ask God for help and maybe be uncomfortable and learn something, walk through. That didn’t last for me. It just didn’t last for me when I had binged. There was a lot of dishonesty when I look back now for a period of time over food choices, things that I wouldn’t really say were abstinent, that I’d taken my will back over, but I didn’t want to talk about. And when I got honest with that, as I said, it was because it came right down to that line where I had binged, and I saw myself going into the freezer and eating things that I just knew clearly. You can’t say that you are abstinent and that everything is okay here. And that’s what made me stop and take a look. And then there were a lot of other things that I had to back up and get honest about, you know, in hindsight. And, you know, my sponsor and other people worked with me through that. And I’m so, so grateful because that fear that came up, you know, and that panic when, you know, when I put that food in my mouth was unbelievable. And I started to have this fear that I was going to be a periodic eater. This thing was just going to happen to me and I was going to find myself out of control and it wasn’t going to matter whether I had gone through another AWOL and had about a year and a half again of abstinence or whether I had a week or six months or whatever, but just that this thing was going to come and get me out of thin air and that was that sense of panic and fear. And I really had to believe then, at that time, my sponsor’s words, and she said to me, I don’t really believe that of you.
She said, I know, I knew you in recovery, and I knew what you had in recovery, and I don’t believe that. If you don’t want that, it doesn’t have to be that way. And I really didn’t want that. I wanted the recovery, and I really didn’t want the fear. And God really worked through her in my life, and I could trust her words, and slowly but surely, I started to get back my footing in that sense of, I have respect for this disease.
and what food can do, but I don’t have to live in that fear of day to day, I don’t know what’s going to happen, or from meal to meal, that I can’t trust myself. That’s what food brought me up, and that’s what food does, and it’s really, really amazing. So I’m so grateful, and since that time, by the grace of God, I’ve been abstinent back to back, and I love being in a thin body. I’m about 128, 130 pounds. It fluctuates like that.
And it’s amazing to me. can wear anything in my closet, anything in my drawers. I don’t have to think twice, and that was a big production for me. I started to not go out and do things and be part of, invitations to weddings or anniversaries or birthdays or a dance or whatever, because I didn’t have anything to fit and it was really painful to have to go out and face that reality that I’d gotten bigger, nothing was fitting, and I had to go out and get something in another size, and I did a lot of stuff around that. I cut sizes out, and then I would go into this pretending that I was a size 16 for the day, and if I pretended that, then I could make you believe it, which there’s a lot of mental insanity with that.
So mentally, I was just not in a good state. That’s what was going on in my mind. It was just really incredible. And then there’d always be that moment of reality when I’d catch a glimpse in the mirror or walk by a glass door and just catch that glimpse. And I was not expecting to see myself because I had this image of what I looked like in my mind, and it was all mental. But you can’t be a size 16 when your body’s fitting in a 22 and a half. It just doesn’t work that way. You can’t hide that much. And that’s where I was mentally. I don’t come into my home today, thank you God, and I haven’t come into my home for a long time this way, where I’d have to run through the kitchen, grab something in the cabinet, open the freezer, and then run to use the bathroom, because I’d have to use the bathroom. But I couldn’t.
You know, I couldn’t go by those places without, you know, putting something in my mouth. So I’m so grateful, you know, so grateful. I’m not obsessed with food today, and I haven’t been, you know, for a long, long time. Thank you, God. I can eat three-way measured meals today. Sugar and flour don’t call to me. You know, those are not things that I crave. There are things around the holidays that people are starting to do and bring in, and it’s just not my food. You know, I don’t have to…
I don’t want it, it’s not mine, it doesn’t call to me. Thank you, God. You know, today, my daughter and I are home, this is Thanksgiving. I’m cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. We have not been in the best of places. There’s been a lot of stuff going on between us, and for her, and I’m coming to the realization that I believe my daughter is developing mental illness because of her disease, which is food addiction, and she needs some help with that. She really needs some help.
But for me, it can be an abstinent day, you know, and I can be that power of example and pray for her. And I hope that she’ll want recovery in her life. I really do pray for her. But for myself, you know, I have what I need. Thank you, God. I’m in the right place, and I’m just so grateful. I’m really grateful to have God in my life, so that I can take quiet time with Him. When life feels like it’s too hard, I can turn to and ask God for help and a fellowship to reach out and make phone calls to and ask for help and say what’s going on. And I’m just so grateful for all of that. And the person today, when I look in the mirror, I see someone who takes care of themselves very well and has the ability to take care of themselves very well. And I’m not coming from that kind of place. I’m coming from a lot of fear and panic. I’m coming from neediness, needing to be taken care of.
You do it for me, I cannot do it myself, I can’t function without you, like that kind of hostage, I need a hostage to do it for me. And I’m just not there, just not there. God’s taken me through a lot of life situations and experiences, and I’ve always come through growing on the other side. And I’m really, really grateful because I know that there’s no end, and I just know that God’s got better things in store.
And as long as I don’t eat, I’ll be the same size that I am. Life will be OK. It will be manageable. And my life was totally, totally unmanageable. And I just could not stop eating when I came here. Thank you.