I found FA just before my 30th birthday. My top weight was in the high 180s, which I thought I carried fairly well on my 5’ 6” body. But, I definitely prefer my current weight of 125. My story is not one of immediate willingness or of continuous abstinence. I feel truly grateful for my recovery today because I know I could have been one of the many people who picked up that first bite and never made it back.
For as long as I can remember, food has been very important to me. I felt ashamed about how I ate, so I would try to hide it from other people as much as I could. I stole money from my parents to buy sugary treats. I hid in my closet, eating my Halloween and Easter goodies, as well as my sister’s, if I could get away with it. Sugar and flour were my favorites but the compulsion to eat made me quite open-minded about my food choices. I loved helping my mother cook dinner so that I could pick at food as it was being prepared and cooked.
I don’t really think I understood much about weight per se, but I was very aware of my body being different from those of my peers. I was a little overweight as a kid, and I was always taller than other girls (and boys) my age. I had some experiences when kids were mean to me, which isn’t all that unusual. But I associated any negative attention I received with the fact that I had a big belly. Eventually I associated my own negative feelings about myself with my big belly.
By the time I was 11 I had made the food-body-weight connection and started dieting with my mother. I lost a few pounds through moderate eating but gained it back quickly. I did exercise tapes and, yes, I too owned the rope pulley thing you attach to a doorknob. I was totally obsessed with my weight, and would write in my diary about whether the day was good or bad, depending on what I did or didn’t eat, or what my weight was.
When I heard FA members talk about the progression of the disease, it made total sense to me, and I realized that I had started using food as a drug very early on. The desire to diet was won over by my need to eat. After school, I ate sugar, flour, and fat concoctions until dinner, then ate a whole meal with the family. At 12, I was stealing diet pills and trying to starve myself, and by 13 I had started purging— at first just my meals, but then I started throwing up everything I ate, which is when the binge eating took off. After my mom caught me throwing up at home, I did it at school; when I got caught there, I did it at my neighbor’s house. Once I started working and then driving, I had the freedom to eat and purge all I wanted. This continued for the next 17 years, with a few brief periods of not purging.
Some of the low points in that 17 years included an arrest for shoplifting food, other shoplifting for which I was never caught, a suicide attempt, several relationships with “losers,” being the loser in several relationships, dropping out of college (twice), being fired (twice), a stint in a Florida rehab, a stint in a psych hospital (twice), lots of debt, and many more experiences I’m sure I’m forgetting now.
Looking back, it’s obvious to me that my life was quite unmanageable from my early teens, but I wasn’t ready for the solution FA offers…until I was ready. I had been in 90-day OA in Boston for a few years, but never quite “got it.” I got food plans from nutritionists, though I didn’t follow their food plans any more than I had followed those given by my OA sponsors. I ate sugar-free things, rather than not eating sugar. I started dating in the first year…actually, in the first two months. I did make lots of phone calls, but I would eat while I was on the call, thinking the other person would have no idea.
I left OA for a few weeks and came back to what we know as FA. I don’t know exactly what changed for me, but I think I finally got truly desperate. I had always been desperate, but it was more of a “flailing” desperation—the kind where I would call people after I ate, crying, and asking what was I going to do, and saying how much I hated myself. I had wanted escape from the consequences I’d created by my eating, not a solution to my real problem of food addiction. True desperation means calling before eating, getting on my knees to ask God for help, pulling out literature, racking through my brain for slogans I’ve heard and conversations I’ve had in the past, and not eating addictively…no matter what.
I haven’t followed that perfectly, and I did have several breaks in the early years, each of which was about one day of eating. It doesn’t change the fact that they were breaks, and I don’t qualify them as being small or less serious than longer periods of eating. I’m just grateful they weren’t longer. Just grateful.
I’ve been abstinent now since son turned two. God willing, he won’t ever have to see his mom in active food addiction. Life in recovery is full, to say the least, and my program is my number one priority. Working the tools makes abstinence possible for me, but it has also helped me to show up for family, friends, my job, and myself.
FA is where I truly learned to take care of myself on a daily basis. Of course I learned to weigh and measure my food, but there are so many other (sometimes small) ways we take care of ourselves that I was either oblivious to or couldn’t be bothered with, like flossing my teeth, for one. Even in disease, I went to the dentist every six months, but I’d lie when asked about daily flossing, thinking they wouldn’t really know. In recovery, I was really proud to say “yes, I floss,” and mean it. They no longer ask me. I’m guessing they don’t ask because they can tell and, after a decade, I have credibility. I no longer need their approving smiles, because I know the praise I’m seeking comes from God and doing the right thing, because it’s the right thing to do.