My Talk (Long)

The Saturday Overeaters Anonymous workshop went well. Although I had already heard 3 of the other 4 speakers, I heard something new from each of them. I imagine they sweated as much over their talks as I, but I believe I also heard what I needed to hear at that particular point in time. I am often pleasantly surprised by the sense of ease and relief that comes over me at OA events, because I forget how much healing and understanding there is in the fellowship of others who understand the hell we can go through over "mere food".

Here's what I finally came up with to say. It's long but it might help someone:

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A doctor who studies obesity was asked in a radio interview, 'If the government could do one thing to stop the obesity crisis, what would it be?'

The man paused, and said, 'That's the trouble. There is no one thing you can do. You have to do ... everything."

That is the task in front of us, and it sounds daunting. It should sound daunting! We will likely have to reach further than we may have ever done before to combat a disorder that requires nothing so much as a complete change in our personality. If we are successful, our true friends will tell us that we have changed beyond appearances, our whole being will be transformed in a way we could not have predicted.

I wonder what I can tell you that will make you believe this task is possible. Ok, here is my journal entry from one of the lowest points of my life 3 ½ years ago:

So, here I am. February 28, 2003 (9:28AM) And I am typing. I got a kick in the butt yesterday from Trish, who told me that a condition of her continuing to see me would be me attending OA. I don’t know how to take that. Flattered that she cares, offended that she gives me the ultimatum---- I’m paying her for that? Relieved that I may get jolted out of the self destructive rut or is it a spiral? - that I am in... It was enough to make me stop bingeing yesterday, although I don’t know how long this will last. I guess attending an OA meeting would make it more likely to last. Oh sigh... I don’t want to go back.

Trish is my therapist and she didn’t know what else to do with me. At that point I was about 8 months out of graduate school, a painter with my own version of a writer’s block. And I couldn’t get more than 3 days under my belt without a binge. I was around 270 pounds, on my way back up to over 300, it looked like. I was on blood pressure drugs and my type 2 diabetes was creeping back. 3 years before that I had been 180. 6 years before that I had been over 300, I don’t know how much over, I kept my eyes closed when my doctor’s assistant weighed me. I first realized I was fat when I started school and my first diet was sometime before age 10, and I was up and down continually for the next 30 years. In my pictures you can see when I was practically anorexic when a teenager, and I can see at times my eating patterns have followed that of classic bulimia with compulsive exercising and stringent dieting followed by binges. Ah the binges, at heart I’m a binger, that’s the stuff that I still can sniff a pull from the underworld clutching at my throat, just driving by KFC turns me into one of pavlov’s dogs.

So, I’ve got a long track record of eating and undereating here, and right now I’ve got 622 days of back to back abstinence, that’s about a year and a half after being in OA for just over 3 ½ years. My abstinence is still pretty new here, so forgive me if I don’t consider myself an expert at abstinence, I am no expert on overeating, I'm not even an expert on myself some days because I'm often the last person to be able to tell you what I am feeling. All I can give you is my story as I see it right now.

How did I get abstinence? The real turning point was when I actually put my desire to live ahead of that awful sucking gnawing craving and picked up the 500 pound phone to call Leah. It was about 5 days after that journal entry and I wanted to eat so bad! I remember it was a Sunday afternoon, I hate Sunday afternoons and I was alone in my studio and all I wanted to do was run into the house and eat something anything to relieve that awful gnawing. I called Leah. We talked, she suggested I chug a big glass of water to relieve that impulse to swallow. The water worked, but the reaching out was what really worked. I was desperate enough to try reaching out and somehow it broke the chain of self damage.

I wrote, I read all the OA literature I could get my hands on, and I shared at meetings. Just going wasn’t enough. I had to share, and it seemed the more I shared, the more my feelings sorted out. Sometimes I was just entertaining people with my stories of disease, of wanting to snatch the last morsel off my poor unsuspecting husband’s plate, of feeling like I was going to throttle her if my mother in law asked me one more friggin time if I wanted a piece of her damn pie! I had to reach out. I had to share my pain, frustration, and amazement that I could pass a week, a month, two months, oops, a day a week, two months, three months and more without a binge.

And I did the stepwork, the first three steps particularly in the beginning for the first couple of years, and many times even today — Over and over again, like a recovery waltz: steps one two three, one two three, one two three... A pessimistic agnostic praying to a higher power for the strength to see past my own self will run riot. I tried this utterly foreign concept of trusting in something beyond myself, and instead of trying to comfort myself with another foray into bulk food, I learned that I could last through the pain which really was fleeting — the disease tries to tell me that the pain will last forever if I don’t eat something NOW! But it lies. If I don’t eat something, the feeling slinks away while I am momentarily distracted.

I’ll get to my plan of eating in a minute, but I have to say that I firmly believe that right now what I specifically do and don’t eat seems no more important than my spiritual fitness and working on my emotional health, because if I am doing well in those areas, I am so much less desperate and less compelled to eat.

I am full of fear and its corresponding emotion, shame. It takes daily work for me to not succumb to those character defects, for they are so ingrained that they are already in place waiting if I don’t work to have faith. I am no expert at this and my programme ebbs and flows. I isolate, I stew, I worry, then I luckily get good and miserable which right now seems sufficient to drive me back into meetings, talking with other members and my sponsor, writing and regular prayer. I forget. I slip into old habits. I feel ashamed and then I am amused because aha, there I am believing that old lie that I must be perfect.

I can tell you that all this work is paying off. I am happier than I have ever been in my life, and I feel more real and awake than I ever have in my life, and I expect to continue seeing things to unfold in a wonderful surprise.

Here’s the definition of abstinence I have:

I don’t binge.

I get regular exercise.

I follow my plan of eating as I can, but deviations from it, within reason, I accept. I am not on a diet, and right now there are few foods I say I will not eat. There are however, foods I have not eaten for a very long time because I know from bitter experience that they just make me feel worse and crave more and it’s not worth to eat it. Cheap candy and chips are a couple of those. Donuts don’t taste any good in quantities under a half dozen and that would just be wrong, so I don’t go there any more. They just aren’t worth the grief, and none of that stuff is kept in my house.

If anyone is interested in a more specific plan of eating, I have some copies you can get from me later. It’s around 2000 calories according to a dietitian I saw a while back, and I seem to be able to maintain a healthy weight of around 150 for about 2 years with regular exercise and activity and without excessive cravings. This may change utterly if it stops working. I can only tell you what seems to work for me today.

Being gentle with myself is part of my definition of abstinence. Until OA I was always on a diet or eating uncontrollably. If I do not follow this plan of eating to the letter, I try not to beat myself up over it. It is not a diet. It is a blueprint, and part of my abstinence that seems to work right now is avoiding that self punitive, rigid diet mentality that I suffered from for many years. If I want a particular food I don’t usually eat, I often pray about it. I ask my higher power: is this food going to make me healthier (mentally or physically) or is it going to make me more obsessed and unhappy? Is it worth it?

I was sweating over this talk yesterday. I didn’t feel perfect enough to be talking to you. There goes the ego again. But however imperfect I may be, I am a stable healthy weight for the first time in my life. It feels so tenuous. Two years I’ve been at this weight, two years out of 45. It still feels odd, and why not? This has been the exception in my life, neither gaining or losing, neither bingeing nor starving. I feel like the 9 time divorcee who finds herself in a stable marriage for the first time, still not sure how I got here.

I griped to my husband last night about how odd it was to be at a stable weight. He gave me one of those even, wide eyed looks that quiet people give you sometimes and said: You’re just stable now, period.