Today I got angry because a package was delivered later than I expected, and I acted abstinently, thanks to FA. Instead of writing an impulsive and angry email, I took quiet time. Then the doorbell rang and it was the package. I thanked the people who delivered it and felt a sense of dignity. I did not act upon my angry impulse. I acted abstinently. Food is not calling to me anymore. It has nothing to offer me. I surrender upcoming resentments, self-pity, and fear to immediate prayer. My life has surely changed.

In the past, I had numerous visits to dentists, who started to look at me somewhat strangely. I experienced frequent stomach, throat, and bowel inflammations. One day I spent a hundred marks within a few hours just for food, while my bills sat unpaid. I spent desperate hours in movie theaters, where I sat alone and silently cried, holding my tortured stomach. I conducted lonely tours at convenience stores and nightly gas stations. I went to psychiatrists, whom I never told how I ate, and who shrugged and said that I would probably always need therapy.

I look back on the short-lived pleasure and excitement I felt when opening that bag of leftover flour products that I found in the dining facility that I cleaned for a company (lest they get thrown away…). I can recall the momentary pride and power I felt when eating a whole bag of flour items with lots of greasy and sugary toppings and the pain that would immediately follow. I experienced many short-lived, desperate escapades to find happiness in relationships, and broke many hearts, including my own. I did not want that kind of life. I just thought I had no choice, up to the point when I wanted to kill myself, until…

I found FA years later in Frankfurt, Germany, at age 38. There was a small and faltering group of about five members. It took me around three months of physical withdrawal, exhaustion, and mental agony to come to believe that I had truly been addicted to flour, sugar, and quantities to the degree that had become a life danger. I was reluctant to believe it because I had maintained a normal weight for most of my life.

After I came into FA, my depression got amazingly better. I began to feel that there was something better than eating relentlessly until it hurt, fasting for seven days like Jesus, and spending lonely hours in a gym, fighting against that one pound of overweight that I thought I needed to lose to gain happiness.

Even though the meetings around me fell apart and people dropped out one after another, I developed the habits of the magic three: three weighed meals, three phone calls a day, three meetings a week. I practiced all of the tools.

My body stayed the same, but my mind lost tons of negative thinking, anger, fear, and self- hatred. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened over a period of ten years in FA, even without any FA meetings, just by connecting over the phone.

There were times, though, when my focus shifted from abstinence to outside distractions. I broke my abstinence by making a mistake with my food preps and tried to ignore it.

In the beginning, I was quite afraid of the people who had long-term recovery and sounded so strict. Even though I was not lucky in finding or creating stable FA meetings around me in Germany, I have always been aware that there is an incredibly supportive fellowship all over the world, and that I do not have to be afraid of anyone in FA. When I attended my first FA convention in Boston in 2004, the ice was broken. On my fourth visit to the FA convention, I felt like 20 years of bulimia rolled off my back.

What is the content of a refrigerator or a nightly gas station against the warm welcome of hundreds of people coming together celebrating recovery and working together for the sake of helping those who still suffer? As much love as I gave to the food, the food never loved me back and never will. The fellowship of FA does love me back and I give love to them.

Today I cannot even think of having the time to indulge in food. I get up early in the morning (go figure, me!) and have quiet time before I take sponsee calls. I show up for work in a positive frame of mind and am a reliable co-worker. I do service at my local AA meetings and freely share that I am a food addict who also had developed a drinking problem.

I enjoy this kind of life, and I want to go to any length to protect my abstinence. Sometimes I cannot believe how precious it is, how lifesaving. My prayer today is: Thank you God that I am alive and for my physical and mental abstinence.