When I came into the rooms of FA I was angry, hopeless, and cynical. I had experienced a five-year abstinence in another food program before taking back my will and falling back into a relapse that lasted about five years. My top weight was two hundred pounds (my height is 5’6”). I had begun to have a relationship with my Higher Power, and my faith was growing slowly.
By the time I found FA, however, the faith that I had begun to experience began to disappear, to be replaced by a huge dose of cynicism and disbelief. The negative thinking that returned slowly took me down a dark and hopeless path that I could not seem to leave.
It was very hard for me to believe that God would take care of me and help me with my food addiction. I thought that all the young people that stood up at the front of the room and talked about how grateful they were and how God was working in their lives, were ridiculous and were just speaking the “party line.”
As I followed my sponsor’s guidance and worked my programme one day at a time, I started to think that maybe there was hope for me after all. She pointed out to me that the very first miracle, with which God had blessed me, was the gift of abstinence. It was true that on my own I had never been able to stop eating addictively, and yet the day after I came into the FA, when I surrendered my will and my addiction to the care of God, the Program started to work, and I was abstinent. This was the first evidence of something tangible that was doing for me what I could not do for myself.
My recovery has been a process of learning to trust that if I let go of my own will and turn it over to my Higher Power, my life improves. In this programme, I have learned to ask God for help in every way possible.
When I decided to become a realtor for the first time, I was convinced that I would never pass the exam. The last time that I actually had taken an exam, which I managed to fail, was over forty years ago. In the past, I would have been eating and staying up until all hours to study. But although it took me about a year to get my license, (owing to family crisis), with the help of the Twelve Steps, God, and my fellows, I was able to be prepare by studying in a very structured way, every day, going over and over examples of the tests until I felt confident.
Each day before beginning my tests, I would get on my knees and ask God for the willingness, clarity, and discipline to follow through. The result was amazing. I sat for one three-hour test and finished in one-and-a-half hours. In fact, I was sure that I had omitted a huge portion of the test, but found, when checking it, that I had not. I left the room before anyone else! I know that God did for me what I could not do for myself.
Since then I have come to practice leaning on my Higher Power for strength for many things. When I was anxious about one of my daughters, who is a law enforcement officer, about her having and using a gun, I was guided to give the gun to God every single day for safe-keeping. The first thing I did every morning was to visualize taking the gun out of it’s box, laying it on the floor, and asking God to take care of it for me and keep my daughter safe. I repeated this for about nine months. Now I have no concerns about my daughter and her gun. I know that God can do a much better job of taking care of her than I can. In fact, He placed her in a job in the local county jail, where no weapons are allowed.
So I have learned that it is really better to give it up to God and let go, and every time I do, I have so much more peace and serenity. After thirteen years in this programme, and now 128 pounds, which I have maintained for many years, I have developed a wonderful, trusting, intimate relationship with the God of my understanding. I have become more and more willing to leave things to that power that is greater than myself.