Written Text Qualifications

My name is [Anonymous] and I'm a compulsive overeater.  I'm honored to be able to share my story here on my favorite website.  This is my experience, strength and hope:  where I came from, what happened when I found the GreySheet fellowship, and how I work my program today.  My abstinence date is May 2, 1999.

I grew up in the same house in which my husband and I now live.  I was always a chubby kid but not obese.  I know that from the very first I was a compulsive overeater because my mother had to stop nursing me because I chewed her voraciously!  And the photos I have of myself back then had me with bags of snacks in my hand.  I think I was in a sugar fog most of my early years because I've blotted out good things and nasty comments and hurts, and I don't remember a lot.  I remember that my mother was told by the nursery school teacher (great shame) that she didn't know why "I hit the other children."  I don't remember that, but I am sure I had the personality of an addict from the start.  An only child who didn't know how to "make friends and influence people," I just went into a fairy-tale world down in the back fields with the snacks I'd get from the cupboard.  My dad was an artist and children's book author and so I got praise for imaginative activities and being smart, but not for social interactions (because my parents didn't know those skills any better than I did).

I dieted some throughout high school but no photos show that I had much success.  I probably went on a variety of silly diets that teenagers think are so "healthy."  Then in college I remember eating lots of junk food and stealing special treats from a close friend that her "auntie" had sent.  I recently made an amends because I'd never told her that I did that often.  I don't remember dieting actively in college, but I'm sure I did.  Looking good for guys was the most important thing, and I'm just grateful that I didn't discover vomiting because that's the kind of thing that would have sent me off to the races.  I weigh less today, however, than I weighed in college.  I always had that extra 10-15 lbs. on me.

My disease took off after I had kids and would try to get the weight off with all kinds of diets.  Now, every spring when the magazines in the supermarket checkout line trumpet the "Lose 20 lbs. in a Week" headlines, I thank God for GreySheet and no more hopelessness.  Grapefruit Diet.  Atkins Diet (until I realized that those ketone sticks were telling me that my body was eating itself!  And I would eat those endless snacks of xxx, just because I could "have as much as I wanted."  I also have a disease of More).  Weight Watchers, where the people at goal weight looked sickly and gaunt but I still wanted to get to goal, and could never go back after the third or fourth time because I'd learned all the cheating tricks.  Diet Center, where I spent my family's hard-earned money twice and would start gaining weight one day after reaching my goal, so I felt like an ungrateful monster who didn't have the willpower to keep the weight off.  (Oh yes, the counselors there were wonderful and giving... until I stopped paying and then they stopped helping.)  The Fructose diet, where I learned that some things in life really could be TOO sweet, because you had to eat three tablets of straight fructose (fruit sugar) before each meal, so I started drinking my coffee without sugar in it.  The Dr. Somebody diet by the guy who was killed by his jealous lover.  And a million other diets that I was sure this time would work.  I would get one good photo after a diet, and keep it on the refrig. to encourage me.  Hah!  I am not a bulimic, but I acknowledge that I definitely misused laxatives with every diet.  I would take many more Ex-Lax than necessary, and it was only so that perhaps I would weigh 7 oz. less the next morning at my weigh-in!  If I hadn't found OA, I am sure the use of laxatives would have escalated.  Also I used fasting as a way to diet, so now I am very careful for me never to fast because I believe God knows that this is an insidious, dangerous concept for me.  I honor my spiritual commitments by staying abstinent on my GreySheet food plan as it is written and try to "fast" from other things, like meanness and procrastination and being judgmental.

During these years, I hurt my relationship with my husband, because I would stay up to "read" when I really just wanted to eat my stash of food hidden away.  And I was a grazer, who would go back to the freezer a million times (probably every 3 min.) to get just one more tablespoon of something like frozen xxx.  When I came to OA in 1985, I didn't think I was a compulsive overeater because to me that meant eating two boxes of X at a sitting.  Well, if you'd taken all the food I ate "one spoon at a time" and put it in a bowl, it would have been HUGE, but I fooled myself this way.  And I stole my kids' Halloween xxx and they never knew it and blamed each other for years.

Someone 12-stepped me by telling me how much she loved OA, so then 10 years later when I was desperate -- couldn't walk upstairs without huffing and puffing, hated myself, would cry that I didn't want to die without knowing who I was, would tell my husband that I couldn't help it but food was my best friend and a comfort, would keep eating when I had promised myself that I wouldn't, would stop over and over at fast-food places, took food out of the trash can, had lots of physical ailments (which have ALL disappeared) -- I saw a teensy announcement in the newspaper that there would be an Overeaters Anonymous Beginners meeting on January 17th, 1985 in Ridgewood, NJ.  Well, I cut that out, secretly tucked it into my new datebook before Christmas and just waited for that day without telling anyone.  I made an excuse to get out of the house and went there.  As I sat in the audience reading the "Are You a Compulsive Overeater?" booklet, and said yes to 13 of the 15 questions, I realized I was home.  [This was God's way of getting me there, by the way, because there was a "beginners' meeting" every Thursday night, but with my personality if I'd known that, I would have procrastinated forever, always promising myself to go the next week.]

But did my pink cloud last?  Sometimes, sometimes not.  Did I give service?  Did I try to work the Steps?  Did I have a sponsor?  Did I do writings?  Did I figure out for myself that wheat gave me more cravings?  Yes and no to all of these, but something in my "recovery" was missing.  I know I was dishonest with my sponsor(s) so many times.  I never really let anyone in.  The HOW food plan a few years later was better for me than regular OA, but there were lots of people there who claimed to be "HOW abstinent" for many years but kept on so much weight.  And boy did I fool around with the food as time went on.  I loved those "metabolic adjustments" (i.e., late-night snacks) and the carbs.  The food plan said I could have a certain starchy vegetable twice a week.    To me, if I could have it twice, then why couldn't I have it five times?  My weight went from 172 to 137 and then hovered around the mid-140's for a few years.  At 5'3" I'm now 122-125, so obviously all my weight didn't come off back then.

But I've never left the rooms and am grateful to regular OA for keeping me there until I could learn that I am very sensitive to carbohydrates and needed to go to the "last house on the block," GreySheeters Anonymous.  I believe that in me (who had a large-birth-weight baby and probably would have developed adult-onset diabetes) carbohydrates turn into sugar.  So all those years of trying to have just a little bit of them was like a heroin addict shooting up just on Saturday nights.

When I came out to Connecticut 10 years ago, I brought HOW's "non-addictive food plan" with me and sponsored a lot of people who felt that a sugar-and wheat-free diet was a vast improvement for them.  But I was still white-knuckling it a lot.  And one couldn't give one's length of abstinence in a meeting unless it was over a year (occasionally 1-2 people said anything) and I remember thinking that that was THE most impossible goal in the world, so I didn't try.  (In another OA meeting here, they felt it would hurt people's feelings to identify who could or couldn't sponsor, so they said that newcomers would just have to ask around until they found someone to sponsor them.  Nutty.)  And since I didn't find much support in this journey, I started to get more and more dishonest.  I would have a mound of fried carbs in a Mexican restaurant and call it my "cooked vegetable."  I would fix two plates of dinner with my husband's food s-p-r-e-a-d o-u-t on the plate to look like more than mine that was scrunched together (but I really had more).  OR sometimes I would fix an entire plate for myself of seconds, and when he would ask, "Is that okay with your sponsor?"  I'd lie and say "she said it was fine."  I was one sick lady.

In 1998 I was the executive assistant to the CFO of a large Fortune 500 company, and I felt so matronly and OLD and dumpy.  I would see my reflection in a glass doorway and would just cringe.  And a lot of my addict's personality traits (paranoia, spitefulness, self-righteousness, manipulating) came to the fore.  My weight was up to around 152 at this point after 13 years in OA, and I was dieting and dieting to no avail.

Two things finally made me want to change.  One was that I saw the old pre-OA dishonesty coming back.  Employees would put out dishes of xxx and expected others to take some.  Well, I would never go to their desks when they were there, but when they were off at lunch, I would go by their desks and take huge handfuls.  Still claiming I was on a "sugar-free food plan" if anyone ever asked me!  And then one time in church I realized that I truly believed that God had brought me into these OA rooms, but it was as if I was saying to the Spirit of the Universe, "thanks, but no thanks.  I'll get cleanly abstinent sometime, just not right now."  And it hit me: who was I to slap God in the face, as it were?  My Higher Power was offering me this chance at a way out of the gutter, and I was putting Him off.  What if He wouldn't offer me recovery when I was good & ready?

Right around that time, some friends came back to my OA meetings and they glowed.  And the things they shared weren't "Oh, my mother-in-law was in town and so of course I had to eat dessert."  They were positive examples of how they had remained abstinent even in difficult circumstances.  Wow.  So a couple of months later I decided to check out this one GreySheet meeting in Westport, but I knew one thing:  I would never, ever weigh and measure again.  Been there, done that, with HOW.  I was curious, but sure it wouldn't be something I wanted to do.

I got to the meeting early, watched a couple of GSers talking, and it was very different from any OA meetings I'd been in.  Instead of surface chat, there was genuine concern, real conversation, caring.  And someone was speaking who had been in Cambridge and NYC before bringing strong GS to Connecticut, and what I heard loud and clear that first day, August 17, 1998, was that we can do this No Matter What, No Matter What (said in a Boston accent).  I wanted what these people had, so I got a sponsor that first day.  She's still my sponsor today, even though there was one period where her life was too busy for her to sponsor, so I got to experience three other terrific sponsors.  They have all had what I love in a sponsor:  they had very strict boundaries around the food, they were compassionate, they responded to phone calls or emails, they worked their programs in a very visible way (i.e., learning new things about themselves through working the Steps, meditating and journaling), they had healthy, trim bodies, and they watched out for me so I didn't feel alone with food decisions.  Yes, I surrendered.  (A favorite phrase from AA is that when your sponsor asks you to jump, you reply, "How high?"  It works.)

The journey since then has been wonderful.  I had one experience of taking my will back and going back to Day One, and I lost so much -- being able to give service, having to stop sponsoring -- that right away I gained a newfound respect for this precious gift of abstinence.  It is my most priceless possession and I pray every day to keep it!  I'm one of those people who knows how good I have it.  I truly believe that once I surrendered, this IS the "easier, softer way" that OAers scoffed at, but only because the boundaries give me more freedom than I've ever had in my life with the food.  I am grateful to be abstinent:  I know from watching the old-timers that this pathway just gets more interesting and the Promises come true, as long as I don't eat no matter what.  I'm grateful when I have opportunities (even though they are tough at the time) to surrender the little things.  I loved a 15-month AWOL [A Way of Life method of working the 12 Steps thoroughly with a group] that finished a year ago, and I hope to get into another one in the future.  Working the Steps is essential to my recovery.

How do I work my program?  I weigh and measure exactly, because I can never judge what 4 oz. looks like.  Some days it looks like a huge mound and sometimes like "not quite enough," but another meal is coming and I absolutely adore every meal.  My daughter gets tired of my talking about how delicious my food is, but it is!  If you get bored with your food, reread the GreySheet and you'll find a plethora of wonderful choices to try.  Before GreySheet, I would wake up in the morning asking myself, "How abstinent was I yesterday?"  Who was I kidding?  It's like saying I'm a little bit pregnant!  Either I am abstinent or I'm not -- it's not on a sliding scale.  And I take my scale into a restaurant because then I can enjoy a meal and still know it's exactly what I've turned over.  I bring back-up for the protein, salad and cooked vegetables so that I know I will have what I need.  I make phone calls when I have a problem (like someone grabbing some of my raw veggies because she thought the bowl was for everyone at a potluck dinner!).  I commit my food exactly each day because then I know what I am having for lunch and dinner and can look forward to it.  I have awful memories from before GreySheet when I would stand at the refrigerator after work at 5:30 pm and ask, "What do we feel like eating?" and there was never anything delicious in there to choose.  I use a knife to scrape off the tablespoon so my fat is measured correctly.  I eat a varied and fun menu, and I know when I'm trying to get away with something so I usually don't nuke something to death to get "more."  I can feel what is real and honest for me today.  I often pack my meals because then when I open it up, it will be some favorite foods.  One time on a plane (and I always take meals for at least one extra meal in case there is a delay, as there was one time with a snowstorm in Cleveland) I was enjoying my delicious meal and the nice guy next to me was waiting and waiting for his meal to come.  It finally did, and the inside of his was frozen!  He said, "Gee, I should have brought my lunch like you did."

GreySheet is the best assertiveness program in the world because when we take out our scale (on a date, with friends, with family) we find out who truly loves us and who is just trying to control us.  Good friends support us when we weigh and measure, so it's a great barometer of who cares.  I hated weighing and measuring in front of bosses or friends at first, but it sure gets easier the longer we do it.  And it's like a badge of honor to me now.  I am taking care of myself!  And on the times I feel uncomfortable, like a trip to California that is coming up next week, I do it anyway!  My mother had dementia and lived with us for three years, but thanks to this program I could be aware of her during her last years and I could let her have her treats because I knew that they weren't mine, no matter what.  So her last years were happy because I was in recovery.

Life is good today.  Relationships are being restored (our daughter and husband have moved back to NJ, just an hour from here, with our 2-year-old grandson and a little sister due to be born this month).  My husband has cancer but now Johns Hopkins says that there is no evidence of a tumor.  God is doing incredible work on me from the inside out, things that no self-help books ever achieved.  As one example, I had to accept a posthumous award given to my dad last fall, and I didn't know a video had been made of my extemporaneous speech.  Well, when a copy was sent to me, no way would I look at it.  Old messages of how ditzy I am came to mind, and I couldn't watch this 59-year-old glumpy woman with the frown lines who says "you know" and gets words mixed up when talking.  Finally, no one was around and I put it in the VCR.  I watched myself.  And it was like a lightning bolt:  I thought, "If I met this woman in a store or a meeting, I'd really like her.  She has a lot of warmth and radiant enthusiasm."  Can you imagine that?  THAT is what GreySheet is giving me -- love, self-acceptance -- and it has come from my Higher Power because the other "god" or idol I had between me and God -- food -- has been taken away and replaced with a spiritual awakening and an open channel to my HP.

Just a few nights ago I had a great time dancing with my husband to "Try to Remember" (sung by the original Brothers Four on PBS), "our song."  I can be sexy and warm today because I have a body I only dreamed of all my life.  I really don't care if it isn't taut and toned.  I just turned 60 and it still looks just fine, thank you.  Exercise is great, but no longer is it a requirement to keep weight off.  I am so blessed with my GreySheet friends, and I thank each and every one of you who is reading my qualification and who is joining me on this journey.

I'm a compulsive overeater who thanks to the grace of God and this GreySheet fellowship is in recovery today because I weigh and measure three meals off the GreySheet, turn them over to my sponsor, don't eat in between No Matter What (there is always a solution if I pick up the phone), and abstinence is the most important thing in my life today because it has given me a life.  My gratitude knows no bounds.

Anonymous
Westport, Connecticut

March 8, 2003