Comfort Zone

I have been in FA for over six years and have gone from my highest weight of 243 pounds to a right-sized body. With the help of my sponsor's suggestions and my Higher Power, I have kept off over 100 pounds for many years, which is a miracle. Sometimes it is easy to forget where I came from and I worry about getting complacent.

This summer I had a challenging experience. I live overseas from my home country. For various reasons, both personal and work related, my family spent the majority of the summer traveling. I have never traveled for such a long period of time. In six weeks, I took 12 flights, mostly international ones.

I pride myself on being able to travel in Program. I have all my literature on my iPad Kindle app so I could do my readings, and I brought my new FA Book with me. I also have Skype installed on my iPad to make my outreach calls. I brought pre-measured baggies of breakfast grain. After several years living overseas, I know what to do, but it was almost not enough this time. In some places, breakfast was included as part of the hotel and it was easy to get what I needed. Some places we stayed had a small kitchen, so I could weigh my lunch or dinner. But there were many times when I had to eat out.

I am an addict and my mind likes to play tricks on me. I have heard it said that while we are in our meetings our disease of fear, doubt, and insecurity—that drives us to seek comfort in food—is out in the parking lot doing pushups and getting stronger. Our disease is always waiting to get us in its clutches again, and every day I'm abstinent, I'm putting a deposit in my "abstinence bank" that helps me to stay strong against my waiting disease.

Before I came into Program, I had a dialogue going inside my head all the time. It was usually one-sided and very abusive, telling me I was fat, that people would laugh at me, and that I couldn’t do anything right. ­It has been many years since I heard this voice. Working the FA program, taking the advice of my sponsor, and working my tools, has put this voice to sleep. But while I was traveling for a month and a half, I was not able to work the program in my usual way. I could not attend my committed meetings, although while in the US, I was able to go to face-to-face meetings and qualify, which was a blessing. In some places, there was no internet, making it difficult to make computer-based calls to my international community. I also found it hard to take quiet time, since I was sharing a small hotel room with my family.

In Europe, close to the end of my travels, an incident happened that made the voice come back with a vengeance. A few hours after my subway card expired, a subway policeman asked to check my ticket while I was on the train. I was alone with my school-aged daughters. He was very aggressive and treated me like a criminal. The voice came back and told me I was a horrible and irresponsible mother. Even though it all worked out, I had a strong emotional reaction to this incident, what we call in Program an "emotional binge." I kept replaying it in my mind and I couldn’t sleep.

I asked God for help. I asked my Higher Power to remove the thoughts from my mind, as they were not helping me to be of service or do God’s will. I became very agitated by fear and I noticed that I began to get jealous of the different desserts my family was eating. Usually I am happy to be in my right-sized body and content accepting that those foods are not mine. I have learned in FA to say, “Thank you God, that is not my food” when faced with sweets, because I understand I have exceeded my lifetime supply of those foods. However, toward the end of the trip, I found myself having resentment at the end of each dinner when my family members would order that country’s famous sweet dish.

I hadn’t had this type of self-doubt or mental misery in a long time. What was different? My program was different. For six weeks I had been out of my comfort zone. I was not working my program as I normally would. I knew I was not in my right mind, and knew that if I didn’t keep my Higher Power very near me, I would get closer to taking the bite. I have heard in meetings that the food is the last thing to go. I believed this was what was happening to me.

When we got home, I was happy to be back in my own kitchen. I went straight to the grocery store and got the things I needed. It felt so reassuring and safe to measure all of my meals again. I welcomed being back at my normal meetings and connecting with people in my own time zone once again.

It is a privilege to travel the world and see different cultures. I am enormously blessed, but I am also an addict and do best with the routine and structure that FA provides for me. The AA Big Book tells us that addicts have sensitive nervous systems. For now, I am grateful I did not take the bite, and am happy to be back in my own home, full of structure and routine. I pray that by doing my tools daily and following the guidelines of my program, the voice will once again be put to sleep for a very long time.