Before I joined Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), I never really learned much about the word “commitment.” When I agreed to be somewhere—a party, work, a class—I would back out if something better came along, if I didn’t feel like it at the time, if I didn’t think it was that important, or if I had some kind of mild physical symptom I later heard called “the vague alcoholic illness.” The result was that I showed up for my commitments perhaps 60 percent of the time.
After I came to FA and decided it was for me, my sponsor suggested I commit to the same four meetings every week. Shortly thereafter, that became three meetings and an AWOL (A Way of Life, a study of the Twelve Steps). When I balked at meetings or something else seemed more pressing, my sponsor said that there were only three reasons to miss a committed meeting: a funeral, a wedding, or a fever. I was told to schedule my life around my program, and not the other way around. On the rare occasion that I tried to back out of a meeting, my sponsor would say to me, “You have a serious illness. If you had kidney failure and your doctor said you needed dialysis four times a week, you would go no matter what.” I couldn’t argue with that.
When I was 280 pounds (about 127 kilos) at 22 years old, my doctors had told me the same thing in different terms. I had started to have health problems related to my weight and eating at a very young age. In my first year and a half in program, I lost 150 pounds (about 68 kilos) and my life got much better. Even when I went to my meetings reluctantly or missed something that felt important, I always left feeling hopeful, happy, and not alone.
My current sponsor, who has been sponsoring me for 25 years, never said anything as prescriptive about meetings as the “wedding, funeral or fever” statement. However, I still schedule my life around my program, and not the other way around. Sometimes that’s difficult, but I still know that remaining abstinent is the most important thing in my life. When I’m tired, or I don’t feel like it, or there’s something else going on, or someone wants me to stay home, I go to my meetings anyway.
I have to be honest and say that with a full life, a full-time job, a husband, and two very challenging pre-teen kids, going to three meetings per week “no matter what,” is not what I would choose for myself. But this week, I was reminded that if I don’t go to my committed meetings and work my program fully, I pay the price. I had missed some meetings for reasons outside of my control and I experienced the old feelings of negativity and irritability seeping into my thoughts. It is hard to identify exactly why missing meetings always has this effect, but it never fails.
If I had the same approach to commitment as I had before FA, I might not show up more than 60 percent of the time, making a variety of excuses for why I needed to miss my meetings. But I am grateful to see the gravity of my disease, now that I am in FA. It is as true today as it was when I came into FA 26 years ago. I have a serious illness, and meetings are part of the medicine that keep it at bay.
This morning, I had a committed meeting. I made sure to get there 10 minutes early and I ended up sitting next to a woman who had just eaten the day before. We talked; I was able to share with her that getting through those difficult times gets so much easier if we are just willing to put our abstinence first and not eat, one day at a time. I got to hear people share from the front of the room about things I struggled with all of my life: obesity, fear, insecurity, impatience. At the break, I spoke with a newcomer who was struggling, and after the meeting, I was approached by someone coming back to FA who needed to talk. I left the meeting, and my feelings of negativity were replaced with disbelief at the second chance of life I’ve been given.
Later in the day, my sister-in-law invited me and my husband to meet her new boyfriend and said she felt safe introducing him to us first because we are “so stable.” It’s only because of FA and the tools of this program, including the “medicine” I get at meetings, that anyone would describe me that way.