Written Text Qualifications

My name is [Anonymous] and I am a compulsive overeater.  I gratefully weigh and measure 3 meals a day from the Grey Sheet, write them down and call them in to my sponsor.  I don't eat in between NO MATTER WHAT!  I only drink legal beverages like coffee, tea or diet soda, and abstinence is the most important thing in my life after God, for without it I have no life.

I'm a Finnish woman, born and raised in that small Northern European country.  I'm the oldest child in a big farm family of 13 children.  5 boys and 8 girls!  Early on in life I learned not to trust anybody.  Surely I could not trust my alcoholic, severely abusive father nor my compulsive, overeater mother.

This past summer I have gone thru very, hard emotional incest issues.  The flashbacks have been very revealing and a lot of stuff has become clear and comprehensible to me.  More and more pictures are making sense inside my head and the ready and willing acceptance of my history has been a monumental gift to me from God, and that I have been given a compassionate heart toward those long-ago-dead relatives and loved ones, who were very sick people.  They had no 12-step program to release them from the grip of our enemy, the insatiable beast of addiction.

The gift of forgiveness from my loving eternal Father, Creator of us all, has been the sustaining force in my life ever since I received the grace gift of repentance July 9th 1977!  Oh how beautiful was that day!!  That is the day my alcohol dependency was taken away from me.  God Almighty, who was and is and forever shall be, has looked upon me favorably, one of His least and such a wayward, stumbling child!

Overeating for me started early.  My recollection of myself as a toddler of maybe 2 years is going from my mother's table to grandmother's side and eating, eating everything that was ever given me.  I'm not surprised, because I know I'm severely allergic to all grain products and sugar.  All the liquor in this world is made from grain!!  So I got free from the liquor but my addiction really "bloomed" in the arena of FOOD!!!!!  Nothing else ever really mattered except how I could get more food!

Now, I was born in 1945 right after the war, and food was not as plentiful as it is in our society today.  I was merely the big girl and strong and powerful since all I knew was hard physical labor on the farm with no conveniences of modern day.  We lived in a house that was heated by firewood that was hauled with the help of our horse, or we kids had to collect and carry dried tree stumps from the fields that were being made to arable farmland.  All the water also needed to be carried manually into our house and after use the same way out.  So my early life experiences are rather different from the majority of people in our rooms, and yet in the fundamental area of food addiction I'm just like you.

I left Finland in 1968 when I was 23 years old, and I came to New York City area to work for Finland's ambassador to UN.  Two months later I met my future husband in NYC.  We were married the next spring and the rest is history!  We have 6 daughters and 3 grandkids now.

With every pregnancy I kept getting bigger.  My top weight after our youngest daughter, who is now 17, was recorded in Weight Watchers as 384 pounds, but I suspect I was way over 400 pounds because my habit was always before joining WW again to go on a quick crash diet.  I was quite capable of losing 24 lbs. a week which was indeed recorded in WW.  Yes indeed!  I was a star in WW over the 30 years that I kept doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results every time!!!!

The insanity of that life style of mine was horrendous.  I got up, really just waddled into my kitchen and started my eating orgy that put me into oblivion every day.  That's all there was for me to do!  Eat myself to death because life was scary and totally baffled me!  I had no clue how to deal with anything in my life but STUFF ALL DOWN WITHOUT MERCY, with ever increasing amounts of food.

How my poor body suffered!!  Total hip replacement surgery in 1997 which brought about permanent and disabling nerve damage that gave me a foot drop.  In 1991 surgery to repair torn stomach lining and removal on 12 in. of my large intestine that was knotted up in that horrendous lining tear.  My doctor told me it (the breakage) had been there a long time.  It was SO BAD!!!!!  Complications followed, and I was a very sick girl.  I went down to near 200 lbs.  Once I was on the mend again it was only a matter of weeks when I was over 300 lbs. again.  There was another hernia surgery to repair a bad tear in my navel area 22 years ago.

These are but a few highlights of a life of gluttony, life gone awry too early on, life wasted as a courtesan in the courts of King Food.  That love affair overrode all areas of my life and I looked forever pregnant.  My devotion took me to gates of my personal HELL and my constant nightmares towards the end were always the same.  I was underground, all alone, on a platform for a train that never arrived.  I could not get out.  I wanted my family, but nobody was there for me.  So hopelessly doomed in that darkness!  Unpenetratable rock all around me.  What a lonely, sorrowful and woeful life!

The summer of 2001 I did not want to go on any more.  I asked God to take me away from this suffering.  We went to a vacation to Vermont and while there I picked up a women's magazine that had a story about a woman losing over 100 lbs. in OA.  I went online and found local meetings.  The very first contact person directed me to a meeting.  I remember saying to her exasperated when she inquired about me, that I'm sick about my life and there's got to be more to life than only food and eating!!!!!

So a couple of years in regular OA started my recovery.  I immersed myself in the Big Book, answering over 300 questions, and went about my Step work with such a fiendish fullblastedness as only a very dedicated, obsessive, compulsive food addict can do.  My food nevertheless was never quite right for me.  Yes sure I lost a lot of weight.  I followed a modified WW plan as best as I could.  But something was never right for me.  Some fundamental piece was always missing!

Well, eventually the meetings became impossible for me to get anything out of and after Easter 2003 in one week I gained 12lbs.  I got very scared!  For a year I had been getting calls from a lovely lady whom I had gotten to know in regular OA.  She never had the massive body weight, but she knew the hopeless existence of a food addict.  (Not all of us are world-record heavyweights).  So now I heeded her invitations and April 23, 2003 went to my first Grey Sheet meeting.  I was 212 lbs. on an upswing of weight gain that I did not want to happen any more.  Dec. 20, 2003 I was down to 146 lbs.  (That's a loss of about 270 lbs. from my top weight, and I've kept it off for the past year.)  That was the day when our second daughter got married.  I had purchased a lovely classic champagne color suit a month or so earlier, size 12.  Now it was too big.  I had to go get it fitted and made smaller!   Are there mere words, in any language, to describe to you all my feelings that day?!!!!  A friend who had not seen me in a while was stupefied!  She said the only familiar thing in me was my eyes and naturally my voice.

So how can one compare the abundant gifts of rigorous honesty that manifests itself in total obedience to Grey Sheet recovery, weighing and measuring 3 meals a day without exception?  Being a student with hearing ears in the very powerful group of recovering GreySheeters is an experience that has given me life and liberty beyond my wildest dreams!!  The life that God gave me to experience in my twilight years far surpasses what I ever knew.  May the Almighty bless all of us to continue one day at a time, one step at a time.  For without God we are nothing but a vanishing shadow.

None of us can do it for each other, nor for our children.  I can only stay abstinent because I have come to believe that I am really, really worth this beautiful gift of abstinence that God has given me.  Every day I rejoice in my new freedom from food obsession and am really becoming less and less willing to give that much of my precious days to cooking and baking for my family.  Only my husband is free of the curse of food addiction.  Our daughters, all six of them, have my disease.

I struggle with letting go and letting God.  I might be able to be quiet but my muttering can be very obsessive over "Why can't you all just give up the darn poison?"  So really, when the challenge of food addiction is right at my face daily and I can't escape having to see my own behaviors repeated daily, it can get very hard indeed to remain noncommittal.  Believe me, I do a 10th Step a lot and I mean it every time.  By constant practice, I hope to see some improvement!

I am lucky to have face-to-face meetings in Westport and Bethel, Connecticut, which are such wellsprings of strength and unyielding commitment to stay abstinent NO MATTER WHAT that their power has actually carried me through many tough days.  It feels so good in that atmosphere of rigorous personal honesty and cleanliness and health of body, mind and spirit!  And I am glad there are GS phone meetings where people around the world can share the same message.

What a blessed family of recovering, strongly-dedicated-to-abstinence and "one day at a time" fellowship God allowed me to find.  What indeed are the sick crumbs of poison that my ENEMY, the food devil monster, whose slave I was for over 56 years of my life, offers me as "comfort"?

Yes indeed, how comfortable was I in my size 34W or 5X men's clothing, if I found anything?

How comfortable was I, when I could not walk but a few steps and I was a stinking, sweaty mass of ugly fat?

How comfortable was I when unable to put my socks and shoes on and had to have my girls or my husband to do it?

How comfortable was it to know that people openly ridiculed me, made fun of me, the "fat slob" they called me?

How comfortable was it to be willing to become a halfwit, a fat clown, who constantly made fun of herself SO OTHERS DIDN'T have to?

How comfortable was the bleeding heart and soul of the girl who had no life outside of the hell-hole of gluttony?

How comfortable was it to have all clothing ruined by permanent food stains on that huge front?

I have no end to this list, only the knowledge of a miracle taken place in my life!  How great is the God of my understanding, the eternal Father of us all!  How powerful and majestic is His might!  And who am I, that the Lord of Hosts should hear my cry?  One of His least and most undeserving and yet thus has it come to be in my life that the frozen tundra has melted and where there were but cold, desolate winds, oblivion and doom, now a sprouting garden is growing and verdant meadows and fruit trees and singing birds and busy bees.

And so it has come to pass that on occasion my cup runneth over and I know that the Lord is my shepherd.  I shall fear no person, place or thing.

TODAY I CHOOSE TO WEIGH and MEASURE 3 MEALS A DAY FROM THE GREY SHEET AND CHOOSE NOT TO EAT ANYTHING IN BETWEEN BUT LEGAL BEVERAGES.  This I choose to write down daily, call it in to my sponsor or qualified GS person.  ABSTINENCE is the most important thing after God in my life.  Without it I have no life.

By Anonymous, Bethel, Connecticut