Well hello there friends, it's been quite a long while since you've heard from me. I've decided to resurrect this blog because I've got stuff that I want to share about. There has been A LOT going on in my crazy life. So here goes nothing.
So most of you know I "outed" myself as a compulsive overeater who is in 12 Step recovery around my food addiction. I attend Overeaters Anonymous, and have been aware of the fellowship since February 2000. I have come to understand that anonymity is a very personal choice for people in recovery. I have an above average comfort level with people knowing I attend OA. It's not like I don't wear the ramifications of my disease on my body literally. When you meet me in person, you KNOW that I have profound issues with food. So to me it's no problem that people know I'm in OA. I personally think that OA isn't well enough known in the community abroad, especially among the bariatric surgery community where many people go looking for help regarding having too much weight on their bodies. When I went to my bariatric surgeon for a consultation, I was not surprised to discover he'd never heard of OA. We are not well known in the medical community. I brought him a newcomer packet and that was about it.
Another part of the reasoning behind anonymity is because if you are someone like me, who's relapsed back into compulsive overeating and have substantial weight gain, you are subliminally showing people that the OA program of recovery does not work. The truth of this for me is that it's not that the OA program didn't work. It's that I wasn't working the OA program AS INTENDED and therefore I was a good example of a bad example as they say. Truer words have never been spoken.
So I came into OA in February of 2000 from the rooms of Weight Watchers. I had lost 50lbs but was stuck circling the same 5 pounds for a few months, and getting increasingly frustrated by my inability to shift my weight. A girl at the WW meeting was young and energetic like myself and we went to coffee after a meeting one Saturday morning. She asked me if I had ever heard of OA. I hadn't. Despite growing up with the disease of alcoholism in my home, the 12 steps might as well have been in Sanskrit when I heard them the 1st time. But there was a 100lb emphasis meeting that happened on Saturday nights that was very popular so we went. There I found a group of people who were the antidote to my mom's favorite mantra, "I'll be happy WHEN I'm thin". Here were people of all ages and sizes who seemed genuinely happy NOW. They embraced us newcomers with zeal and welcomed us to a fellowship of people who were united not necessarily by the common problem, but by the common SOLUTION of the 12 Steps. I wanted what they had and enthusiastically committed myself to this new way of life.
The ethos at the time in OA was that most people had success sticking to a "3-0-1"plan of eating. That was 3 meals a day, nothing in between One day at a time. In OA we learn that we have a physical allergy that makes us crave some foods. And a mental obsession that guarantees that we won't be able to refrain from starting to eat our alcoholic foods. Everyone has their foods, that they cannot seem to eat moderately in any situation. For me at the time, that food was Wheat Thins. I have often joked that I think Wheat Thins are the chemical equivalent of heroin. How else do I explain how I can open a family size box and finish it in one setting; my tongue raw from the coarse salt on top of the crackers. They say, "If you want what we have, do what we do." And so that's what I did. I lost 10lbs a month for 14 months straight. I got to a weight I hand't been to in my young adult life. I received a lot of attention in the program for the weight loss. While I NOW understand that attention, as being just a external representation of the miracles of the program working in my life, I was unable to keep perspective on all the attention I was getting. For someone who felt invisible because of being morbidly obese, to get POSITIVE attention for my body size might as well have been a line of crushed up Wheat Thins, ready to be snorted in a line by yours truly. And as slowly as a thief in the night, my disease returned to snatch victory out of my hands. I relapsed around year 2, and spent the next TWENTY YEARS in a cycle of chronic relapsing and returning. I am SO GRATEFUL that I never left the rooms of OA entirely. Another popular slogan is, "Don't leave before the miracle happens!" How true that sentiment is for me.
OA bases itself on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, changing only the words, "alcohol and alcoholic" to "food and compulsive overeater". As someone who truly bought into the conventional wisdom that controlling food is a matter of "will power" and "discipline", it was a new vision to learn that we were actually powerless over food. We learn that we have a 2 fold illness; a physical allergy to certain foods. And a mental obsession that guarantees at some point that I will turn back to those alcoholic foods for ease and comfort. "If Suzie can eat X, why can't I?" It took me a long time to understand that the reason that I cannot is that I am DIFFERENT. That somewhere in my makeup are different cells when it comes to eating food. Somewhere in my past, I taught myself that food was something I could stuff into my "God shaped hole" to try and fill it. But like all GSH's, the bottom of the hole could never be reached. I could increasingly eat larger and larger quantities of food each time I would binge. By the fall of 2022, I was spending the majority of time in my bedroom alone, in the dark, eating $74 of DoorDash A DAY, eating that in the dark only to the glow of my cell phone playing YouTube videos. It was a very small life for me because I couldn't escape my disease.
I was morbidly obese, compulsively overeating, and depressed. What could happen next?
Stay Tuned...............
No comments:
Post a Comment