And, as the wisdom traditions tell us-in one way or another-Love is God. Need replaces love, obscures it, and manipulates it.
At every turn, need is confused with love. How available could I have been to other people at the table? Did I have anything to offer my family and friends? The underlying suffering of all addiction is self-centeredness, but unlike garden-variety egocentricity, addiction guarantees an unrelieved isolation. I thought of the hundreds of times I'd sat in a restaurant so locked into a basket of bread that Jesus himself could have sat down beside me and I would not have noticed.
#FOOD ADDICTS ANONYMOUS EATING PLAN PATCH#
But slowly the clear patch expanded the view became wide, then immense, and then infinite. The only view was, basically, the tip of his nose. Initially, he cleared a small patch of the window and sat hunched over the wheel with his face pressed to the glass. Then one day a man in his mid-30s compared the process of his recovery to driving a car when the windshield was fogged up. There was one problem, however: I had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about. It did not offend me to hear that my disease couldn't be healed until I turned my will over to God or to a higher power, or to be told that prayer and meditation were instrumental to recovery. But I prided myself on being a cut above those prickly, educated atheists who would rather remain drunks and overeaters than enter a program where their disorder was identified as a spiritual crisis. Between growing up as a secular Jew and then gravitating toward Asian traditions, the word God had never entered my vocabulary. I had entered the program determined to remain open to the spiritual language of 12-step work. Over and over again, their conclusion is that only reliance on God, or our "higher power," as we individually understand that concept, "can restore us to sanity." But OA is filled with people who have hit a wall trying to reason out their eating. This is hard for my psychologically oriented mind to accept. "The reasons are unimportant," says the OA literature. Eating became my one-beat response to every feeling. I eat to numb myself, to deaden the feelings of.is it loneliness? Grief? Anger? Could those circuits have blown out by age 5? That's how old I was when I began stealing loose change to buy candy. The OA program doesn't promote any particular diet, but wheat and sugar so pervasively spark compulsive eating that many members make abstinence from them the turning point in overcoming their addiction.įood has always been my drug of choice.
A trigger goes off in my head or in my body or in my blood sugar-I don't know where it goes off, but I am rendered completely, utterly powerless.Īt those times, I am a junkie, a spasm of need and desire, wholly focused on ingesting that bowl of pasta (or doughnuts or ice cream). Left alone with enough for ten people, I'd eat it all. Yet after finishing a normal helping of pasta, I have another. I fit easily into airplane seats, and I came to OA wishing to lose just 20 pounds, not 100 or more. Weight was never an issue in my career or in my marriage. OA is patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous, and in the language of 12-step programs, I am a "high bottom" addict: My life had not become unmanageable. While the details often exceeded my own most psychotic episodes with food, yielding to the clutches of uncontrollable eating was all too familiar, along with its certain, subsequent dive into remorse, shame, and humiliation. Still, after years of denying that I suffered from compulsive eating habits, I joined Overeaters Anonymous (OA) and listened to these anecdotes with horror and empathy. I do not prowl dark country roads in search of all-night diners or steal cookies from my kid's lunchbox. I do not hide candy bars under the couch. An anonymous, self-described food junkie learns to take it one dish at a time. Her cravings, in retrospect, were out of control-there wasn't enough pasta in the world to satisfy her.
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