Finding My Life

I am a food addict—no question about it. I was born fat and was fat all of my life, until I found FA 27 years ago. My highest recorded weight was 256 pounds (116 kilos). Today I am in a right-sized body and live a charmed life, all because of Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA).

I grew up in a city where, as a Jewish family, we were definitely in the minority. I never felt like I fit in. I was Jewish, wore glasses, and I was fat. The feeling of “not a part of” followed me to college. My parents had little money; I was on financial aid and academic scholarship, further setting me apart. By the time I got to college, I desperately wanted to be an English teacher. All I would have had to do is go to school for the four years, then go back to Palm Beach County where I was living and teach for four years. With that plan, I would not have to pay anything back. I started in the top ten percent of the class and ended up on academic probation. Sugar was running rampant in my body; mentally I couldn’t retain anything. Three semesters later, I quit. Several years later, I tried to go back to the local community college; I had only one semester to go. Once again, food addiction derailed my plans; I was unable to complete the semester.

I eventually got married. When my first baby was not quite a year old, I swallowed a bottle of Valium in an effort to end my life. Years earlier, when I was 17, I’d had similar ideas about hurting myself. I had borrowed my mother’s car and was driving along a beautiful little two-lane highway. Down below there were rocks, sand and the ocean. I just wanted to let go of the wheel and let the car crash. The incidents were different, but the feelings were the same; I was unhappy and miserable because of my weight.

When my kids were growing up, they never brought their friends to the house—ever. They never knew what they might find. I was an office administrator for a medical practice with three locations. My kids were involved in several activities; I had to be available because my husband would leave at 6:00 a.m. for work and not get back until 6:00 p.m. I felt like I was raising those kids alone and I was an angry mom. (The first time I did my ninth step, I had four pages of amends to make resulting from my anger.)

We called my husband the volcano—mild during my outbursts, not saying anything, then suddenly being hysterically angry if you looked at him cross-eyed. It was an angry home.

I had gone on diets, thousands of diets. In my early 50s, I went on yet another diet so that I could get insurance. I decided I would just cut out all foods that I knew were bad for me. I watched what other people ate in restaurants because I had no clue as to what a normal-sized portion looked like. I was a quantities eater; if it was in front of me, I ate it, then went and got more. I lost 110 pounds (50 kilos) in 13 months, but a diet is a diet; it ended, and the weight started to creep back up.

I was petrified and called a friend who told me about another 12-Step program for food. I went to a meeting where there was one young lady, a year or so older than my daughter, bright-eyed and in a normal-sized body. I wanted what she had, so I asked if she would sponsor me. It was just before a holiday weekend and we were both going away. She suggested I take the Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book) with me and, if I still wanted to do this, call her at 5:45 the Tuesday after we both got back. On the plane I read the first 164 pages of the Big Book and there I found something that sounded good, like these people knew me. I called her at 5:45 on that Tuesday morning and started my journey. Eventually that sponsor was diagnosed with cancer and needed to stop sponsoring while she got treatment, so I needed a temporary sponsor. There was a woman from Boston who was moving to our area; I’d heard her speak on one of her previous visits. I fell in love with her recovery and knew that was what I wanted.

Once she was moved in and settled, she became my temporary sponsor. When my original sponsor completed her treatments and started sponsoring again, I was afraid she would be hurt if I did not return to her, even though my temporary sponsor and I had more in common. The defect of people pleasing won out. I went back to my original sponsor. I made a million mistakes during that time, breaking again and again. In my first two years, I had four pages of “Day One.”

I eventually settled down with the sponsor I’d had temporarily, and we worked together for 11 years, by the grace of God. I stayed abstinent. AWOL (A Way of Life, a study of the 12 Steps) after AWOL changed me; the miserable person that I was kept softening. I had nine years of back-to-back abstinence, although I never knew the peace of contented abstinence; I didn’t even know what it meant. I heard people talking about having neutrality around food. When I asked my sponsor what that was, she said just keep weighing and measuring your food. I did that for nine years and I still was not neutral around food; it still called to me.

At that point I had a bunch of things going on in my life. I had retired, so no one was signing a paycheck giving my any self-worth. My husband had been in the hospital and I almost lost him. I had several sponsees and service positions at all of my meetings. I was only talking with my sponsor once a week. She asked if I would like to call her more often. I said, “Oh no, I am fine,”…thinking that I should be fine.

I came home one night from visiting my husband in the hospital. I had brought home a six-pack of diet soda for him to have when he came home. I put it in the fridge in the garage, went in the house, and fixed my abstinent dinner. I put my dinner on the table, went out to the garage, brought that six-pack to the table, and lined up all six cans in front of me and proceeded to drink every single one of them on top of my abstinent meal.

That started a terrible relapse that lasted a whole year. I could not stop eating; in the first 70 days, I gained a pound a day. I never stopped going to meetings. By the grace of God, I just woke up one morning and I knew I was done; I can’t tell you anything more than that. I went to Boston to the business convention knowing I would find a sponsor there, which I did, a woman I worked with for 13 years, during which time I stayed abstinent. Because of the geographic distance between us, after those 13 years, I went back to the local sponsor I’d had before. By the grace of God, I have remained abstinent all this time.

Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous, FA, has been the gift of all gifts. I found recovery here; I found a God of my understanding here; I found my life here.