None of these things ever worked in the long run.

For me, it was not until I did The 12 Steps the way they are outlined in The Big Book that I even got close to finding out what this elusive ‘”benefit” of my binge-eating was.

I don’t really expect anyone to “get” this – – the same way I didn’t get it when well-meaning people tried to tell me the same thing – – but just in case there is the possibility that I may be able to spare just one someone the decades of pain it took for me to figure this…

Here goes nothin’…

I think it can all be boiled-down to this cliche: “the devil you know vs the devil you don’t.”  For whatever reason, it was much easier for me to focus on an obsession that, although horrible and debilitating, was comfortable and familiar to me.  In my twisted mind (the result of decades of negative thinking patterns that reinforced my fears and lead me to constantly seek “proof” of all that is bad about me and the world), the thought of having to face my real feelings or real-life situations SEEMED impossible for me to handle.  I always had this belief that real life was going to be much more difficult to deal with than it actually turned out to be.  But back then, I had nothing to compare these realities to because I had NEVER experienced them!  EVER!!  Food was ALWAYS my coping mechanism!  I knew nothing but being mentally and emotionally consumed with all things “weight,” whether that be my appearance, my clothes size, my caloric intake, obtaining my binge foods, keeping myself “hidden” (literally, behind extra layers of clothing, and figuratively, by avoiding all forms of confrontation and many, MANY social situations), eating in secret, planning my next dieting scheme, agonizing over upcoming events where people would “see” how much weight I had gained, trying to be funny, smart, overly-perfect to distract from my size,…. (not to mention the thousands of other forms of self-abuse which included lots of nasty self-talk and not taking care of myself emotionally, physically, or spiritually).  Since I had never learned any techniques for self-soothing (other than eating), I was constantly beating myself up for trying to deal with life the only way I knew how.

And yet, at the same time, all of this negativity and addictive behavior came naturally to me.  It evolved over so many years and took so long to fully develop, that by the time I recognized what it was, it had already consumed my entire identity.  It was actually to the point of being unconscious – – it was my “default” (as all you tech-savvy kids out there say today).  I didn’t even realize what I was doing, even when counselors came right out and ASKED me…that’s how far gone I was!  I really, honestly, DIDN’T GET IT!  I wasn’t lying or stubbornly avoiding the truth…I genuinely THOUGHT I was being honest, and I guess I was being as honest as I could be at that time.  I guess that’s what true denial is all about – – believing your own self-deception.  I had actually “fooled myself” into thinking that avoiding reality (feelings, confrontation, social situations) was EASIER than facing life on life’s terms!  I truly believed that it was EASIER to stay the way I was rather than try to learn something new about myself, even though I was simultaneously seeking a solution!!  In this twisted scenario-o-mine, the “old” had now become comfortable AND easy!  Who could resist?  And as I stayed there in this little world of food addiction that I had created, my life continued to get smaller and more restricted, which is the ideal breeding ground for fear, which continues the cycle of self-pity and self-hatred, which leads to all kinds of weird forms of self-sabotage,…  This is why I was trapped in a strange weird limbo-land where I was constantly convincing myself that it was useless to even attempt to conquer the very thing I was always trying so hard to fix!

Clear as mud, right?

Wanna see the short version?

- – – I ate because I was scared not to. – – –

In the past, I got involved with exercise programs as a means to lose weight.  Consequently, whenever I “went off” a diet, I stopped going to the gym.  It was all or nothing.  Black or white.  It had nothing to do with my health, but EVERYthing to do with that number on the scale.  In my sick mind, if I was not eating right (i.e., losing weight), what was the use?

Thanks to OA and the 12 Steps, things are different now.  For the first time in my entire life, I have joined a gym for the RIGHT reasons!!  For the past 6 weeks, I have been going three times a week as a means of decreasing stress and increaseing my heart health.  Period.

And guess what?

It’s already working!!

I tend to carry stress in my neck and shoulders, and since I have started some light weight-training, that “pain in the neck” is gone!  Also, I have been monitoring my blood pressure, and that is down several points as well!  Of course, I don’t mind the “side effect” of feeling my clothes getting a little looser, but that is not my motivation anymore.  Now that I feel better about myself, I can more clearly see The Big Picture: that I am worth taking care of and that excercise can help me do this.  That exercise is to be used as a tool to help improve my sense of well-being, NOT as a shortbcut to a smaller body size.  Took long enough for me to finally figure this out, but it finally happened!  HOORAY!

Thanks, again, HP!!

For years I thought this word “painstaking” meant “pain-STAKING.”  In my mind, I imagined staking-up plants, the way you do in a garden using poles.  As usual, my mental images reflect where I am at any given point in my life.  I envisioned myself as the down-trodden, sweaty gardener struggling to force stakes made of my pain (tears, hard work, time,…) into a barren patch of land that eventually,…hopefully,…MAYbe will sprout and grow and produce fruit (the promises).

Sounds pretty dreary, doesn’t it?

Now my take on this wording is far more positive…

I picture a lush garden bursting with life.  Leafy plants of every size, shape, and variety, some with flowers, some with fruit yet to be ripened, some with vegetables begging to be picked, all hearty and healthy and in a constant state of rejuvenation.  I am the contented gardener (although I still am sweaty!), happy to be doing the work that needs to be done.  The word “painstaking” here means “painS-TAKING” in the way that the gardener is “taking pains” (i.e., being careful) to do everything necessary to be sure that the garden has everything it needs to thrive.

Since we are reading the promises, we need to pay close attention to the meaning of each and every word so that we can absorb the maximum benefit of all that is being said.  Here we are being “promised” freedom from our disease IF we are painstaking in the process of doing The 12 Steps – – IF we take great care, and IF we are fearless and thorough.  If you are in relapse and trying to get out, it IS enough just to show-up until you are able to re-connect to your Higher Power and get abstinent.  However, once you are “clean,” if you really want to get well and STAY well, it is NOT enough to simply go to meetings and make friends with other members.  There is hard work to be done and lots of it.  But in the end it is SO worth!

I “promise!”

“One of the many doctors who had the opportunity of reading this book in manuscript form told us that the use of sweets was often helpful, of course depending upon a doctor’s advice.  He thought that all alcoholics should constantly have chocolates available for its quick energy value at times of fatigue.  He added that occasionally in the night a vague craving arose which would be satisfied by candy.  Many of us have noticed a tendency to eat sweets and have found this practice beneficial.”

At the time it was written, I’m sure author Bill W. never imagined that this book was going to be used to help compulsive overeaters.  But isn’t it fascinating how he is recommending the replacement of alcohol with sugar because of the “positive” effects?

I have seen many people from AA who are able to give-up drinking only to find that they have a raging food addiction.  After years of seeing this over and over again, I can’t help wondering if this has to do with the suggestion of eating candy whenever they have a craving for alcohol, or if their addictive personality would have lead them to that new vice anyway.  Or maybe it is something more biological than that.  I have heard food addiction described as just another form of the body’s allergy to alcohol because both involve the way our bodies break down sugars.

Of course, I have also met many alcoholics who switch from swigs to sweets and are very successful with their programs and have excellent recovery.  So apparently this is great advice, as long as you are not pre-disposed to having an eating disorder!

Whatever the reason, many AA’s end-up in OA, and many of them have told me that giving up excess food was much more difficult than giving-up drinking.  They say that this was due to the fact that with alcohol, they never had to put it into their bodies again.  With food, they still had to “mess with it” every single day.  I don’t know how true that is, since I have never had a drinking problem, but I just thought it was interesting to see what The Big Book had to say on the topic of food.  It may not be very helpful to true compulsive overeaters, but to me, it sheds a little more light on the similarities between these two deadly diseases.

As I progressed through the required writing, I began to experience the odd sensation of feeling overwhelmed, depressed, and hopeful all at the same time.  (I had never felt that way before, but I have felt it many times since.)   I felt as if, for the first time in my life, I was getting a glimpse of this huge pile of “stuff” I should have been taking care of, but I “forgot” …or maybe I just “never knew” it was there.  I had an intuitive sense of suddenly being on the right track.  Like the road I was on had finally turned into the road I was SUPPOSED to be on all along.  It is the feeling that, despite all the work up ahead, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and now I can actually SEE It!

…So keep on going!

The good news?  This was my bottom.  This is what gave me the courage to come back to program.  I was finally desperate enough to admit defeat and ready to start over.  Well,…almost ready.

For months I sat on that horrible fence between going back to OA and staying away.  I was so mortified by the way I looked that I could not even imagine stepping through the door of my first meeting at that size.  Honestly, there was nothing I wanted to do LESS than go back – – but I was dying…spiritually, emotionally, and physically.  So what choice did I really have?

Finally one night in November of 2009, I decided to look online for a meeting in my area.  I was surprised to see that all of the meetings I used to attend were gone (or at least they were no longer meeting at the same locations), and that frightened me a bit.  But at that moment I was more concerned about keeping away from people I knew in program.  I didn’t want to “be seen.”  I decided to take my chances on a meeting I’d never been to out in the sticks, thinking that I probably wouldn’t know anyone there.

I got to the meeting strategically early so I could watch everyone go in.  See if I recognized anyone.  Then I would decide if I should go in.  I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  No one ever came.  I suddenly realized that the meeting was not going to happen at all.  I felt panicky.  I hadn’t thought of that!  No matter how badly I didn’t WANT to go to a meeting, the idea that I COULDN’T go to one was far worse!  What if there were NO meetings to go to?!  What would I do?!  I knew that the program would work if I could just get myself into the routine of attending regular meetings, but without those, I knew there was no hope for me!  I went home, discouraged and scared.  I spent the next few days doing some heavy-duty soul-searching.  I came to the conclusion that I really DID want to go to a meeting and that I was going to try again (but not until the same meeting came-up again, of course).

The following week I parked my car and went inside the building, determined to at least find out once and for all if this meeting actually existed.  Low and behold, two people showed-up.  Then another person.  And another.  I didn’t know any of them.  I breathed a silent sigh of relief and immediately felt at home.

For the next 2 months, I attended this weekly discussion meeting and would share on the topic of the day and on the miserable state I was in.  Every day I would binge, and every night I would wonder how I could have done it again!  Then I would show-up at the meeting and say that I REFUSED to stop overeating even though I KNEW that I HAD to!  It was such a torturous place to be.  And week after week, the caring people there just listened and then talked with me afterwards.  There was no judgement, except for the voices in my own mind that kept telling me what a loser I was for not even making an attempt at getting abstinent.  The only thing that I actually DID start to do was to get on my knees every morning and every night and ask my Higher Power for “the willingness to be willing” to stop overeating.  Over the years I had acquired enough program to know that this was my problem – – until I was willing to at least TRY to be abstinent, I was lost.  I was “beyond human aid,” as The Big Book says.  Only God could save me at that point, and I knew it.

One night, after returning home from one of these meetings, the thought came to me that I should try writing-out a food plan for myself.  I was not going to follow it, of course, but if I could pick any way to eat healthy – – any way at all – – what would that be?  I kept this rough draft out on the kitchen table all week and tweaked it between binges.  It was just there, and I worked on it as if it were a school homework assignment.  I felt like I was doing it more out of curiosity to see what I could come-up-with more than anything else.  Best of all, for some strange reason, I felt no emotional attachment to it at all.

By spending so much time looking objectively at my food behaviors over the past 20+ years, I was fianlly able to see that the my biggest problem I’d had with sticking to my food plans of the past always came down to the feeling of deprivation, whether in the amounts of foods or in the elimination of foods.  So my new food plan tried to solve that problem by increasing portion sizes, by giving myself a little leeway within the elimination categories, and by adding snacks.  I knew that, for myself, I needed something that would be easy to adapt to any situation.  If I had learned nothing else, I had at the very least learned that if I was going to lose weight and successfully KEEP it off (which I had never done before), I had to have a plan that I would be willing to follow FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!  Not just when I was losing weight, or when I was trying to impress people, or when things were going my way, or when the weather was nice,…but ALL the time!  I guess it was just my time to finally face this reality…for the first time in my life.

And yet,…

ANOTHER week went by and I did the same thing – made some notes, moved some things around, took out some stuff, added some stuff…but I STILL refused to even TRY to follow it!  I did mention at one meeting what I was doing, but I said it as if it were a joke and that I had no desire whatsoever to even consider trying it out.

Then, out of the blue, at the end of a meeting in the beginning of February 2010, I raised my hand and committed to my group that I was going to start following the food plan I had created, and guess what?  I have been abstinent ever since!  I can tell you that when that happened, it was NOT ME raising my arm!  The thought had not even crossed my mind until that moment.  In fact, I barely knew why my hand went up at all!  You know how sometimes at a meeting you will be wondering if you should raise your hand and say what you are thinking out loud, but you keep stalling?  Well this was NOTHING like that.  This was supernatural.  I wasn’t thinking about trying to follow my food plan AT ALL!  I really believe that it was God answering my prayers.

He knew that I wasn’t going to do it on my own, so He had to do it for me!

He compared it to what we would do with a pile of garbage.  We have two choices:

The first is to put all our “garbage ” (emotional baggage, dirty secrets, grudges, and resentments) into a big trashcan in our mind, hide it in a deep dark corner, put the cover on it, and try to forget about it.  But some day, something will come along and turn our inside world upside-down.  Then that big trashcan will re-surface, the cover will come off, and all that garbage will be exposed.  But this time it will stink much more than it did when it was first put into hiding.

The alternative is to “take out the trash.”  To actually remove it completely.  Then, no matter what happens, it will never bother us again.

When we do the 4th step, rather than hiding our “garbage,” we actually get rid of it.  This gives us the confidence to move forward in our lives, comforted by the knowledge that there is no longer any darkness from our past to hinder us from the bright future we are promised through working the steps.

The following week, I was relieved to see that that person was not at the meeting.  But when it got to be time for sharing, many people spoke about him and the positive impact he’d had on them.

I was floored.

Almost everyone who shared that week said that seeing that man in the throws of his disease strengthened their gratitude for the gift of sobriety that they had been given.  Some of the old-timers even went so far as to say that God was using that man to speak to all of us about how horrible addiction is and that they were praying for him every night, hoping that he would come back so they could help him the way that he had already helped them.

Powerful.

I felt like such a jerk after that meeting.  As I drove home, I took a hard look at the way I had completely taken that situation and made it all about me – – that guy was disrupting MY meeting.  He was making ME uncomfortable.  He was taking all the time away from the people I wanted to hear.  But since when are the 12 Steps about SELF?!  Then I started thinking about this whole thing in relation to food, and I realized something very…disturbing.

I went to OA meetings “drunk” all the time!

This last time coming back to program, if I hadn’t been “allowed” to show-up at meetings feeling bloated and sick from the binge I just had in my car on the way there, I would probably be dead right now.  How DARE I be so judgemental of a fellow suffering addict who, even in his drunken state, knows that AA is the only place on earth that will welcome him with open arms!

This was a hard lesson for me to learn, but it is one that I will never forget.

For years, this was the extent of my relationship with my Higher Power.  I would ask for help with my food (only when I was in OA, of course) and He always gave it to me.  Then I would “forget” that it was Him keeping me abstinent, I would leave program, thinking I could do it all on my own, and I would be out of control again.  But how could this be, if every time I came back to OA I “took” Step 2?

The problem was that my belief was still tied-in to what I wanted from OA, and what I wanted from OA was to be thin.  Period.  I didn’t want to make it my way of life.  I didn’t want to make friends there.  I didn’t even really want a relationship with Higher Power, except as it could be exploited to get me to my goal weight.  I wasn’t consciously thinking that, but looking back, that was the cold, hard reality of it.  And to be completely honest, I don’t think this time around would have been any different, except that I did the steps the way they are written in The Big Book, and that process lead me to WANT to make The 12 Steps my way of life SO THAT I can have a close relationship with a Higher Power.

I don’t think I (or anyone else) can fully explain the ambiguity here.  On the one hand, in order to get through the steps that will lead you to a deeper relationship with a Higher Power, you have to take Step 2 (to get to Step 3, Step 4,…).  On the other hand, you will not feel the full impact of taking Step 2 until AFTER you have done the OTHER steps.  The best way I can describe it is that we take Step 2 based upon whatever belief we have at that time, and then we “trust the process” to strengthen that belief as we move forward in our recovery (by continuing to do the rest of the steps).

In many ways, the first part of Step 2 is similar to making the decision to join OA.  In order to do that, you have to at least have a tiny amount of hope that it will work for you, or else why would you even bother showing-up?  The same goes for seeking belief in a God of your understanding.  All it takes to begin this relationship is a tiny amount of hope that there may be something to this whole Higher Power thing.  This doesn’t mean that you have to be completely open-minded.  You just can’t be completely close-minded.

Since the above description was the sad state of my many short-lived runs of abstinence prior to this time-around (when I did the steps the way they are intended to be done), it is no wonder that it never lasted.  It is obvious to me now that for years I was just “white-knuckling it,” but at the time, I thought that because I had drastically changed my old ways of eating that I was “better.”  Somehow, even though I was going to meetings, I didn’t even notice that I was missing the biggest message of all – – that I would not be able to keep this up alone.  I needed to be constantly improving my personal relationship with my Higher Power, which I never did back then.  I got to the point of believing in a Higher Power and asking for His help in keeping me abstinent, but I stopped there.  That’s why I would always start getting back into the “perfectionism” and the “obsession” that are symptoms of the soul-sickness I never addressed.  I had stopped bingeing, but I hadn’t stopped hating myself.

Things are so different now.  After having been through the steps, I no longer feel the need to be “perfectly” abstinent or to try all the the different types of abstinence out there that work for others.  I am unique and I need to find out what works for me, whether or not it works for others.  I eat fruits (even sweet dried ones!), I chew gum (minus the jaw pain!), I use artificial sweeteners (a little more than I probably should) , and I occasionally use breath mints (like a sane person – – only to freshen my breath when there is no gum around.  I can even keep them in my car now without fear of gobbling packs at a time!)  However, for me, I have given-up caffeine (to help with my anxiety issues), I don’t eat sugar or flour (to keep cravings to a minimum), I don’t eat anything chocolate-flavored or any salty snacks (it’s a a control thing!), and I use a limited amount of Agave per day as a natural sweetener (in the hopes of one day not using any artificial sweeteners at all).  But none of this is ME doing it – – it is my Higher Power restoring sanity to my life.  And it is this newly-found sanity that gives me the strength to be kinder to myself, to like myself, and to take care of myself.  On my own, I self-destruct.