One of the most painful experiences of my life proved to be the motivator to propel me into FA. I know that the God of my understanding uses every life situation, and most definitely, God was right there helping me. Just prior to joining FA I had a meeting with my nursing school administrators, who informed me I was not going to be able to continue studying to be a nurse. My grades were poor and my clinical performance was not up to needed standards. I was panicky in my clinical rotations and it showed. I was sweaty and red faced and not able to focus. Mentally, I was so fragile, and the culture of nursing training at that time was harsh and strict. My trips to the school’s vending machine were my only way of coping. The nursing school director’s words informing me that I could no longer continue... Continue Reading
I came into FA in January 2004 at age 58. By that time, I had made several efforts to control my crazy eating, having been overweight, underweight and bulimic throughout much of my life. One of the very distinct ways I could trace the path of my journey was by simply looking at my bookshelf. I had an array of cookbooks that ranged from the basic Good Housekeeping to Basic Macrobiotic Cooking, vegetarian cookbooks, vegan recipes and on into the final trip I took with the Raw Foods Bible, all representing the many side trips I had taken in an effort to rein in my eating. With each of these phases I embarked on, I was convinced that this one was “it.” This was the magic formula I could use for the rest of my life. Macrobiotics was healthy; it would balance my body and moods. All the books told... Continue Reading
I found Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) in Atlanta in May 2014. I would frequently arrive early to arrange chairs for my meetings. Usually, around 10 minutes before the meeting started, multiple fellows would sprinkle into the room. When I moved to the FA frontier [term previously used to describe an area far away from an established in-person FA fellowship] July 2017, however, things were very different. On my first meeting night in my new fellowship, I walked into that cold meeting room without another fellow in sight and set up chairs as normal. The meeting time came and, after 10 minutes, no one had shown up. I later learned that most of the fellows who attended this meeting were visiting family out of town. So it looked like it would just be me that evening. I became a little emotional because the large and continuously growing fellowship I... Continue Reading
Before I joined Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), I never really learned much about the word “commitment.” When I agreed to be somewhere—a party, work, a class—I would back out if something better came along, if I didn’t feel like it at the time, if I didn’t think it was that important, or if I had some kind of mild physical symptom I later heard called “the vague alcoholic illness.” The result was that I showed up for my commitments perhaps 60 percent of the time. After I came to FA and decided it was for me, my sponsor suggested I commit to the same four meetings every week. Shortly thereafter, that became three meetings and an AWOL (A Way of Life, a study of the Twelve Steps). When I balked at meetings or something else seemed more pressing, my sponsor said that there were only three reasons to... Continue Reading
I came into Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) when it was 90-Day OA (Overeaters Anonymous) for one reason only—to lose weight. At 5’2” and 200 pounds (about 91 kilos) at my heaviest, I thought if I could only lose “a little” weight, everything would be great. The rest of my life was fine, thank you very much. Denial was working! Never having been to a Twelve-Step meeting before, this program was nothing more than another diet and I had a lot of experience with diets. You name it, I tried it. From the time I was a teenager, I had been on one diet or another. Weight Watchers, Diet Workshop, Cambridge Diet, Slimfast, cabbage soup, grapefruit, Atkins, counting calories, low carbohydrate, diet pills, shots, hypnosis, acupressure, and on and on. Almost every diet worked the first time I tried it, but once I lost a little weight I went... Continue Reading
