Prior to coming to FA, my holidays were mostly about food, and my thoughts were focused on food. I would be thinking about what I was going to eat and where I was going to eat.  There were some holidays when I was so filled up with self-pity that I had thoughts of suicide or my death. (In many ways I was spiritually dead.) Many of my thoughts were negative. I thought negatively about myself and about others. I wanted to belong and be a part of something, but didn’t know how to do it. I thought that if I

My childhood was stormy, and whenever the sky looked dark, I turned to food. My parents divorced when I was four, and I lived with my mother and three older siblings. Fear was a constant in our house. My mother’s first husband was a paranoid schizophrenic, who hurt my mom on a particularly bad night. When my mom’s brother confronted him, they got into a brawl that ended in bloodshed, and my mom’s husband was institutionalized for life. He broke out of the facility more than once, and we lived in fear of his repeated threats toward my mother. My

I met someone at a workshop and asked her how she was losing weight. She invited me to meet her at an FA meeting in Encino, CA. At the meeting, I didn’t hear anything except that I would have to give up flour and sugar and weigh and measure my food. I said, “That’s not for me,” and when the meeting ended, I left.  During that week, I thought about my beloved foods and consumed them in mass quantities. Just the thought of giving them up increased my craving and desire for them. At the end of that week, I