A Story of Recovery:

Edging God Out (EGO)

Another diet stopped working

It never occurred to me that I ate for any other reason aside from loving food. I loved the taste, the texture, the look, the smell, and especially the quantities.

I was a skinny kid, but I started using food as a drug after I was molested at age 16. I went to my first Weight Watcher’s meeting at age 17, with ten pounds to lose. After 30 years of yo-yo dieting, I was 60 pounds overweight when I found my way into Overeaters Anonymous (OA).

I joined 90-Day OA (the precursor to FA). I felt right at home the first time I heard someone share about what flour and sugar did to them. I identified with all the feelings they were describing. Prior to this, I never was able to express what I was feeling. All I could do was to either react, or check out by numbing myself. Who knew that you could actually fully feel something painful, process the feelings, and live to tell the story?

Even during my first AWOL, I still couldn’t relate to many of the character defects I heard people sharing about. I continued to identify with the feelings they described, but certainly it had nothing to do with my being self-centered or dishonest! After all, I was a very nice person. Just ask anyone (except my own family of course, because they suffered the brunt of my personality changes every time I started crashing from my food highs).

I did so well in OA, that in two and a half years, I felt I was ready to go “solo.” I had maintained my weight loss without difficulty by not eating flour and sugar. I thought I knew what to do, and that I would go out into the world and live an abstinent life.

The relapse started shortly after I left, and I was into the flour and sugar full force within a year. I did try going back to meetings here and there, but I couldn’t get my abstinence back. I thought that OA, like all the other diets, had stopped working for me. What I eventually came to realize was that I had not been working the Twelve Steps. I had been treating the program, for the most part, like a diet.

I came to understand that I had failed to enlarge my spiritual life—an integral part of the personality change, as described in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was doing the physical work, but I hadn’t understood that this is a threefold disease—mental, physical, and spiritual.  I had heard people talk of all three components, but I thought I only needed to lose weight. I wasn’t like those other people. I just loved food too much for my own good.

Denial is a very powerful force in the life of an active addict; I have been taught this a few times over, even in my abstinence. However, the longer I stayed in relapse, the more I longed for the sanity I had once experienced without my drug. I was finally becoming a true believer in the power of flour and sugar. More importantly, I was beginning to understand the power of addiction.

FA my way

I found my way to FA through a co-worker. Although she’d lost very little weight and had plenty to go, it was her change in personality that intrigued me. I was just looking for relief from this constant obsession with feeling fat—every single day of my adult life. So I was very surprised when, at my very first meeting, I heard people share about turning to food in times of stress.

I joined FA and surrendered. For the next four years, I was willing to do whatever I was told to do. I entrusted my life to a Higher Power, in hopes that God could and would help me make the changes needed to live a contented, abstinent life.

Somehow, slowly and insidiously, my EGO (Edging God Out) and this disease started to infiltrate my recovery. I was doing a lot of service. I thought it was the proof of my recovery. In fact, I must have thought I was fully recovered, although I never would have said it that way. Once again, I thought I had this figured out. It started with not writing my food down, and tweaking my food plan while always staying within the boundaries of no flour, no sugar, nothing in between, and still weighing and measuring…at least most of the time. Everyone, even those with 25 years of abstinence, didn’t weigh and measure every meal, or so I thought. I was eating abstinent foods and going to my meetings, but my life and my Program had become less and less disciplined.

Then somewhere along the way, I tweaked it one time too many. I took a road trip, and to make life a little easier, I started eating a protein that is really a snack food. Someone told me they did it, so I did it. The lesson for me was to keep my eyes on my own plate. Three years later, that snack food led me to becoming increasingly dishonest with my food, then to an 18-pound weight gain, and then back to the daily self-loathing.

Getting to the root of the matter

I used to say I was over the traumas of my youth, and that I had pulled myself up by my bootstraps and moved on. In actuality, I had not moved on, I had just self-medicated with food. It eventually became apparent to me that I had continued to self-medicate, even in recovery, because I hadn’t put my past experiences of abuse and the feelings associated with them into perspective. I needed to get to the bottom of my fear, doubt, and insecurity to get to the barrier I had between me and my recovery. So, I spent six months looking at and feeling the emotions that I had suppressed with food for so many years. My Higher Power was truly at work in this process. Getting honest about my past helped me see how getting honest with the food was critical to my full recovery.

I realized that I needed the assistance of a sponsor to help me with my honesty around food. I needed to be held accountable every day, in every way. When I was dishonest with the food, there was distrust in every aspect of my life. That was because I wasn’t trustworthy. Some days I made calls, but not every day. I took quiet time, but often not the full amount. I went to meetings, but I seldom wrote. My gratitude list was a thing of the past. I obsessed over food, my appearance, and what other people thought. I was totally self-centered.

Now I give my food over to my sponsor and my “self” over to a Higher Power. I can trust people, including myself, once again. I am honest even to the last detail. As a result, for the past year and a half, I have not felt the need to sabotage my wellbeing with food, even when feelings of being “less than” wash over me. More importantly, those feelings don’t linger.

My relationships with my family and friends have improved. In my business, I show up and can be counted on. With my employees, I am learning that to be respected, consistent, and straightforward is even more important than being liked. My food may be perfect, but I am not perfect, and I no longer want to be perfect. I love who I am becoming, and I love my life today. None of this would be happening without the willingness to surrender my life and my drug to that Higher Power. Now I know something I didn’t know: I can’t do it alone, but I can do it with my Higher Power by my side.