As I continued in my journey in recovery, life began grow in size and complexity. I began to live with a zest that I had not known before. Where I had previously enjoyed being around my friends because I could focus on their lives to the exclusion of my own real issues; I now was able to be open and honest about my life and enjoy receiving genuine friendship and support from people who I shared my life with. In addition to being more emotionally connected, I also was finding that life was getting progressively easier as I began to lose weight. I had made the decision that I would work on finding a scale the would accommodate me and weigh in once a month. This allowed me the accountability I needed while not making me a slave to the number on that scale. I was consistently losing 10 pounds a month while using a plan of eating that involved eating three meals a day, nothing in between and no sugar and certainly no Wheat Thins. As I'd mentioned previously, living in my own apartment allowed me the freedom to have autonomy to pick and choose what foods were in my house. It made things a lot easier.
Other things that began to get easier as well. My second year in OA, the annual convention was in Southern California and I decided that I wanted to attend and was going to fly down to Los Angeles for the first time in over a decade. I was nervous about the judgement that I anticipated I would receive from fellow air travelers as well as the general anxiety about being so exposed. The good news was that I was traveling with fellow "trudger's on the road to happy destiny" which made the experience easier to some extent. I could be as honest as I was able about my feelings and what support I needed to make this journey successful. I think about the myriad of things that I hadn't been able to do because of my size, and it takes someone who has either been there, or been close to someone who has, to understand what it's like to be able to get on a plane after that long.
As I made friends with member's of the fellowship from lots of other areas around the state, I had an opportunity to go to OA events in the Bay Area and South Bay. There is a great comfort in going to a meeting where there is a level of understanding and genuine love that seems to be so readily available in the rooms of any recovery meeting. I met a wide variety of people from every walk of life that shared the common problem but more importantly the common solution.
I also realized that although I was not in a work place that I would necessarily make a career, having freedom from constant food obsession made me a better employee and I found that I genuinely enjoyed being of service to the customers that I spoke with on the phones. I found that my skills and experience led me to be able to apply for promotions and become party of a working team.
During the weekends I found that I was packing in as much social activity as possible. I would go to the Bay Area and visit 4-6 friends in a weekend and while it was enjoyable, I think in retrospect I might have been trying to avoid sitting still and having down time. This would lead me to be exhausted and overwhelmed by the end of those weekends. As with many other areas in my life, program was teaching me about balance in food, work and play. At the suggestion of my sponsor at the time I had to institute a one day a weekend rest policy where I could do whatever I wanted to on one day of the weekend, but on the other day, I needed to be having a down day, at home just hanging out. I was not always easy to have a down day but I was learning the important lesson that rest was as important as work.
Clothes shopping also became an enjoyable hobby as I was losing weight. I was able to pick clothes not simply for utilitarian purposes of fit, but for how they looked and their style. When I reached the point where I'd lost 100 pounds I decided with my sponsor that I would light one of my "fat girl" dresses on fire. Before OA I was forced to wear loose fitting tent like dresses only available from catalogs because I was at the largest size available. When I asked my friends about possible dresses to burn, they all had strong opinions about which dress I was suppose to torch. I torched this turquoise plaid dress one day in a large metal kettle with 103 matches representing each pound of weight that I had lost. It felt like an amazing gift.
Emotionally as my life began to get larger and fuller, I'm not sure in retrospect if my heart was catching up with my brain and the size of my body. I began to feel like there was a Grand Canyon size gap between my brain where everything was logical and things made sense, and my heart where I was still a 400+lb woman who was getting treated differently and getting more attention because of the ever shrinking size of my body. After feeling invisible because of the size of my body, I was suddenly in a position where I wasn't sure if I was entirely comfortable getting attention because of my smaller body size.
As I think about that level of discomfort now, I realize that the real challenge was realizing that my whole identity and internal compass had become focused on my body size. I was either good or bad, worthy or not, happy or unhappy based on how my body weight made me feel on any given day. And As I've continued this journey, that hasn't changed for me. As I have approached my weight from a truly multi-disciplinary approach of Recovery, a Medical Weight Loss program, personal training and therapy, it's become even more apparent to me how much my weight and body size has been the thing that I have allowed to become the ONLY defining characteristic that I use for myself. Changing that is the an ongoing challenge that keeps me on my current path as much as getting to a normal body weight does. Getting to a place where I don't use my weight as the first thing to describe myself either in a positive or negative fashion is proving to be quite a journey.
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