At War With Food

When I came into FA three years ago, I weighed 189 pounds, though that was not my top weight. I was obese most of my adult life, averaging 220 to 230 pounds at 5-feet, 4-inches tall. When I first started FA, I thought I would be happy to get to 165 pounds. However, in less than six months, I have achieved a weight-loss goal that I would never have imagined possible. Now I weigh approximately 134 pounds and I finally feel like I am in a right-sized body for the first time since my adolescence. What an unbelievable feeling.

In the past, each time I tried a new or different diet, I would start off motivated and compliant but peter out within a few weeks or months. I would lose weight and then gain it back and more. I would beat myself up and ask what was wrong with me. Why can’t I stop eating? I prayed to my Higher Power for help, but heard only silence on the matter. I often felt like I was as much a disappointment to my Higher Power as I was to myself. Or I thought that maybe my issue with food was too small a matter for God to bother with. Never did I consider that my issue with food was an addiction.

One day, I found myself shoving any sugary food I could find into my mouth. Even as I told myself to stop, I discovered I could not. I knew at that moment that I had no power over food, and I realized what an obsession it was.

A friend had told me about FA a year and a half earlier. I saw what it had done for her, but I wasn’t ready to admit my addiction. But that day, when I scrounged the cupboards for one more sugary item and went out to the store for more, I knew I had hit bottom. I decided I had to go and check it out. What could it hurt?

I found a sponsor that first night and got started. I confess that my addict brain got stuck on Step One for quite a while. In that initial “honeymoon phase” of the first 90 days, when the plan was working so well, I forgot how desperate I was that first day. Although I did what I was supposed to do, I began to ask whether my life was really that unmanageable.

At day 60, I broke my abstinence, which was a very humbling experience. Then I broke again a few weeks later. Each time, my disease took me right back to where I left off, bingeing on sugar. I had begun to think I was cured, that I wasn’t really a food addict. I know now that I am.

Addiction is a war against my soul, and it is a war I will not win in this lifetime. There is no cure. But I can win a daily battle by using the tools of FA. The phrase, “just for today,” is powerful. It doesn’t let me get mired in the worry of how I do this for the rest of my life. Every day I can claim a victory in that day’s battle.

My sponsor is my lifeline. She celebrates those victories with me. She listens to my doubts and provides encouragement and advice. The fellows at my meetings and those I speak to on the phone are understanding and encouraging. The wisdom that comes from the generations of fellows in Twelve-Step recovery amazes me. It can be trusted. All I have to do is surrender and commit one hundred percent each day. One day at a time.