Yeah, I'm just grumpy today. I was this way yesterday too. But it happens. I think I need to get back to work. The week off was nice, but I need to be working in order to feel I have some purpose. Does that make me a workaholic? Maybe. I'm certainly married to one, but mine takes a more subtle form. I don't work a lot, but I worry about it a great deal. Sounds like my perfectionism acting up. Again. Ah, the hindsight benefits of years of therapy and just over 5 years of being in Overeaters Anonymous. Oh rats! That's right, I forgot: I've been coming to the rooms 5 years the first of this month! It's been kind of like my marriage: I was never sure I'd be around this long and then I look back and marvel how it doesn't seem possible that it's been that long. It feels simultaneously as if I've been going to OA meetings forever and just a few weeks.
It was at a meeting yesterday that I remembered why OA works for me when all other things hadn't. It answered the question a sponsee posed earlier in the week. And that answer is... drumroll... spirituality. And the Group.
You were expecting bright lights, wahoo, yipee diet secrets, a burning bush, maybe? Yeah, well, that's what I was hoping for too, but no bushes are burning when I open the fridge door. I have to admit I'll still pick up the latest diet book trumpeting life changing secrets at the book store too, but usually I'll do it gingerly, read it for about half a minute and put it back with the rest, because I'm no different than most people. I'd love a quick fix that works. None has. Just look at all them books...
I am one of the last persons who wanted a spiritual program. I'm a fairly virulently lapsed Catholic, and the last thing I wanted to hear was anything resembling church talk. I am still close to agnostic, but here's what happened: I was desperate. I couldn't go three days without a binge, and I was so full of fear and angst, I could barely work. When my therapist sent me back to OA (her other choices were inpatient treatment and bariatric surgery was a very distant third in my books), I was desperate enough to think maybe, just maybe I didn't have the faintest idea what was good for me, and just trying a little faith in a higher power, might help, well, what did I have to lose? Other than the obvious 150 I so desperately wanted to lose...
I was also assured that OA was not a religion. But they do talk about God a lot. Yup. No arguments from me on that point. But it's a fairly ecumenical God, using the word as shorthand for a higher power. Twelve-step programs, originating with AA, came into being in the early part of the twentieth century between the world wars, when most Americans identified as believing in God. So, the book Alcoholics Anonymous, which still is the basic text for most 12 step groups, does mention God a lot. But after initial discomfort with it, I accepted it as a shorthand for a nebulous higher power I can feel in those moments when I plug into the universe, detaching my idea of a God/ higher power from the one I was raised with. To steal a phrase I heard in a meeting, I was able to stop thinking of God as the stereotypical old guy in a nightie, sitting on a cloud and shooting lightning bolts at me.
I just let myself give the whole God question the benefit of the doubt. Look, I'd fucked my life up pretty good here, what did I really have to lose by that? It didn't seem like a cult, because they didn't want much money, just some coins in the basket at the end of the meeting. I didn't even have to buy any of the books, I could just use the group copies or borrow someone else's to read during the meeting.
I don't think I can explain it here, at least not today. I'll take another crack at it tomorrow. I just know that even on a day, today, when I've been fairly grumpy (yeah, that again) I haven't overeaten. This afternoon Fuzz and I braved the treacherous slushy sidewalks of downtown for an afternoon walk --- the sun was wonderful --- and had coffee and split one of the world's yummiest brownies at our local young commie veggie joint.
On the way home I told Fuzz I was a bit grumpy at the thought of having what's usually an evening treat in the afternoon, kind of making me feel like there wasn't much to look forward to for the rest of the day. Then I said, well, if I really wanted, I could have some dark chocolate this evening in place of my yogurt and fruit snack. A rare exception to my rule of getting 3 fruit and 2 dairy every day. But tonight, I didn't eat the chocolate. I went for the yogurt and a banana. And it was ok. It was the healthy choice. And I don't really have a clue why I can do this now and not before. Except when I was in the meeting yesterday, I felt great. That keeps me going.
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