I sat on the sofa in my hotel room this morning, my stomach churning. Sinus colds have a way of interrupting my sleeping pattern, and I had been up since 4 a.m. Unable to fall back to sleep, I decided to start my day as I always do, thanking my Higher Power for rest, abstinence, and for the life I have today. Then I sat still for 30 minutes. My mind was filled with phrases from the Twenty-Four Hour a Day book. I was reminded of how different things are in my life today than they were three years ago. As I sat, I pressed my hand to my stomach and it vibrated. The clock reminded me that I still had two hours until breakfast, so I closed my eyes and returned to my quiet time of meditation. As my stomach continued to grumble, I was reminded that in recovery I don’t turn to the food, no matter what.
Not eating—no matter what—has been a new and odd concept for me. Before FA, eating was one of the few solutions I had to get through life. I ate when I was happy, sad, bored, angry, indifferent, or had a paper cut.
As a child, I was delighted with a treat after I finished my homework, but in my forties my need advanced. From the time I was a young adult, I was so uncomfortable that I immersed myself in escaping my discomfort by eating. As time went on, I needed more and more food. In the end of my disease, just before I entered recovery in FA, I was sitting at home surrounded by 7,000 calories of junk and I had to eat it all. I ate myself all the way up to 340 pounds and a size 28.
The year before I came into FA, I had a very stressful job. All day long I met with clients and then walked back and forth to the vending machine. At the end of most days, I got into my car and headed straight for the nearest convenience store to stock up on packages and boxes of food to get me home. Once at home, I would often have food delivered and then spend the evening in front of the television with my food until 3 a.m. I would also frequently leave my house at midnight or 1 a.m. to get more food if I could not find ingredients to make some raw concoction. There was one period when I went out to a neighborhood Indian restaurant every night for a month. The waiter had the same table ready for me each night and he called back my order to the cook without my ever opening my mouth.
No matter how much food I ate, it never seemed to be enough. The nightly restaurant treks, the convenience store runs, the deliveries, the concoctions, and the vending machine runs were not enough. No matter what I had eaten during the day, I still needed more food.
So today, as I sat up at 4 a.m., hungry, I smiled. I knew I wouldn’t eat. I would talk about it, pray about it, make phone calls to ask for support, call newcomers to offer encouragement, read my FA literature, and gratefully put on my size 4 jeans.