I have been heavy from a very young age and began dieting at the age of 15. I have been on every kind of diet. I used to win T-shirts and prizes because I had ordered so many diet books off the TV shopping channel. I guess I thought that having the book, even if I didn’t read it, might help me lose weight by osmosis or something.

I got married when I was 17. I was fat, but my husband was with me through the thick and thin of all my dieting years. When my daughter, my youngest child, was three, I decided to solve my problem once and for all. I got my stomach stapled. Actually, I got it stapled twice. This solution worked really well for me until the day I discovered that my new stomach could handle junk food much better than “real” food, because junk food is highly processed and easier to swallow and digest. I was able to eat lots of it, and eat it all the time. After this discovery, I was sunk. The weight came on once again and another diet solution had failed.

I didn’t give up. I kept on trying different diets. One diet I tried was the expensive kind of diet where you pay by the month and get all your food pre-made. I loved this diet, because I hated my own cooking, and I loved all the desserts. I would drive five hours round trip just to get my food every few weeks. On that program, I lost all my weight for the first time. Then, I was so happy to go back to my previous way of living and eating. But I soon found out that if you do what you did, you get what you got, and I got all my weight back again. The only good news at this point was the money I no longer paid to the diet program, which was enough to make monthly payments on a new car!

I decided that I would no longer diet—it was not worth it to diet anymore. A friend and I made an agreement about this together: we would be fat, and that was that.

At this time, my husband and I had built a new house. I knew my health was not good, mainly because of my weight. We planned it out so that I didn’t have to do the stairs every day. We made the rail for the stairs very strong and just so, to fit my hand, so that I could pull myself up and down the stairs if I had to. I thought that this was the house I would die in, and I would die of being overweight, just like my Grandma, who was so overweight that she had to be carried out the window because her coffin was too large for the door.

Not long after we built the house, I was at a retreat and saw a pamphlet about FA. I picked it up, but because I had committed to not dieting, I promptly threw it out when I got home. A curious friend wanted to see it, so I dug it out of the garbage and read it to her. Not long after that, I met up with the person from the retreat who had left the pamphlet. I asked him question after question about the program and figured out it meant lots of salad and weighing out my food. But I joined.

I have been doing the FA program now for 13 years. When I came into FA, I thought I was perfect—that weight was my only problem. As I worked the Twelve Steps, I realized that there were things I needed to change in order to stay abstinent. I came to see that I always needed to be in control, especially of my four children. I learned that because I had no higher power in my life, I needed to take everything on myself and couldn’t trust that things would work out. I knew I had to change, so now I keep my mouth shut and try not to take everything on.

I also didn’t take care of myself. I refused to give up working, even after I had cancer and couldn’t even hold a coffee cup after work. With the help of Program, I was guided to trust that I would be taken care of, even if I stopped working. I have been retired for over 12 years now, and have, indeed, been taken care of.

One thing I learned from my dieting years is never to promise that I won’t gain my weight back again. I made that promise so many times and never kept it. Now I just live each abstinent day, one at a time, and promise to be in the program just for that day.

I presently weigh less now than I did when I was 11 years old. My husband, not a food addict, has joined me in our FA way of eating, and has managed to lose 50 pounds. I was teasing and telling him that I finally had the man back who I had married. He looked at me and said, “I have half the woman I married!” Whoever would have imagined?