Day 16, cravings

Sorry, I got my daycount wrong in previous emails, it’s day 16 today. Thank goodness my abstinence doesn’t depend on my math skills – as long as I can figure out that 4.0 means 4.0, 8.0 means 8.0, etc. then I’m OK.

And I am abstinent today: I have weighed my 3 meals off the CGS, written them down, committed them to my sponsor, and I eat nothing uncommitted, no matter what. That’s the most important thing.

I have such a craving for cigarettes. That is so odd because I gave up smoking almost exactly 10 years ago! Why it now rears its head… I haven’t had a single cigarette in those 10 years, but in the past three or four weeks I have really, really wanted to smoke. Why?! I didn’t feel that way when I initially got abstinent, or any time during abstinence. It could be that things became so desperately bad in my addictions during the last year or so that giving up one addiction re-triggers another… who knows?

It’s difficult to look through the past months and admit what kind of insanity it was. It was nuts, but somehow I convinced myself I was learning and growing and going somewhere. I was only going up in weight, but certainly wasn’t getting better at managing my food.

Here are some things I have done after leaving Greysheet after 3 years of abstinence (one observes an increase in insanity on this list)…

• low carb
• zero carb
• hypnosis
• chewing and spitting food back out (ugh)
• doctor-supervised liquid diet (450 cals a day) – that lasted about a week
• food delivery diet (cost: £1,000 for 5 months – I didn’t even do it for one month before I saw reason and returned to GS, so now I sell off the foods on eBay)

In between those dieting attempts, binges of ever increasing frequency and size. Misery. Fat. Bigger clothes. Defeat.

With that kind of insanity, I’m not surprised any and all addictions I have ever had come back up. I want to smoke today, but I still have this healthy fear of it: quitting was the hardest thing I have ever done and I’m afraid if I pick up even one, I will have them all back and I probably won’t have the strength to quit. That’s the only thing keeping me from going out to buy a pack right now. It wouldn’t be only one pack – it would be back to a pack a day, and at the prices here that would be at least £5/day, that’s £35 a week, that’s £140 a month that I don’t have.

More importantly though, today I don’t eat, no matter what. I suspect that picking up cigarettes could seriously endanger my abstinence as well, because my default mentality is “oh well, blew that, might as well blow everything else”. Can’t go there today.

Day 6 – weekend and supermarket shopping

I’m checking in to say I am still abstinent today, the Greysheet magic is back. I am grateful beyond words… I had barely allowed myself to hope. The weekend’s as good as over and I haven’t eaten.

Over the past few months, most weekends were binge times. I could not escape the routine, however well I planned and kept busy. This weekend wasn’t even a struggle really – what a blessing.

I didn’t want to challenge myself with both major issues that had been tripping me up for months, again and again; I thought I’d face the weekend and pray for help, and if I got through that then I could tackle the other major problem: supermarket shopping.

In the past (non-abstinent) months, I would be on a well-planned diet and things were going great until I went shopping. Somehow I was unable to leave the supermarket without a “treat” – and once I had that “treat” in my shopping basket, it really didn’t matter any more and I bought all the binge foods I wanted. I’m not a one-bite, one-treat kind of person. If I’m going to have it, I’m going to have all of it and more.

Well, it didn’t work out that way this weekend, I hadn’t planned well enough. I have to relearn living abstinently, and so I ran out of raw vegetables. Meaning that I had to go shopping for veg. And I did… bought nothing but abstinent stuff… left the supermarket… and that was that. Thank you, God, for blessing me with the GS magic again. I won’t take it for granted.

Why I left (and am now back)

I’ve been giving the issue of why I left GS in November last year a lot of serious thought. Perhaps some of my thoughts can serve as a warning for anyone who’s in a similar situation.

As with everything, there’s not one single reason that made me leave. I certainly didn’t “make a mistake” – no food “accidentally” found its way into my mouth, and bang, my abstinence was gone. I made a decision after lots of thought and prayer, which I advised my sponsor of in advance, to leave Greysheet on 1st November 2009 and go my own way. I made that decision with a very heavy heart because I knew it meant severing relationships within the fellowship.

How did it come to this?

Not overnight, of course. I had just celebrated 3 years of abstinence (as a dear abstinent friend of mine would say, that’s about 20 minutes) but long before I hit that milestone I wasn’t in the best place any more. I had regained weight from my lowest in abstinence, about 10 lbs. up. In order to get rid of that, I began to diet on the Greysheet. Perhaps I should have seen it coming, because that was a major factor in me leaving Greysheet 3.5 years earlier… I cut out soy products. Then I cut out dairy. Then I made sure I chose the wateriest, lowest-calorie vegetables. I never touched the more sugary fruits. I cut out gum, then soda, then all artificial sweeteners. Rules drew in closer and closer around me, boundary lines kept getting tighter – as did my clothes, as I was still either maintaining or gaining!

This was a pattern that continued for over a year. In order to compensate for my lack of enjoying my food, I threw myself into Greysheet as the fellowship: I did lots of meetings (phone), sponsored people, faithfully communicated with my sponsor who shared much more than my food, did an AWOL, even wrote weekly essays on recovery topics. But my food just wasn’t good. I didn’t look forward to the next meal, and I thought that’s just for early abstinence… I should be beyond this, I should be over this need to LOVE my food, I want to be thin, I’m in recovery now and saner around food. I should be more spiritual than this.

I think this long period of sub-#10 meals was the main factor in my becoming willing, over time, to consider letting GS go. I became more and more resentful at the bountiful choices others had, not realising that I would have much wider choices if I only chose to. I felt I was fat and GS wasn’t delivering what I dieted for anyway. I’m amazed I did manage to hold on for as long as I did, with that kind of mindset.

So in the end, it all came down to vanity – I left because I wanted to get thinner. I gained 45 lbs. instead.

Topic: Getting out of isolation

Isolation. Am I an isolator? I think I didn’t have that tendency, growing up, but I became one. When I was a child, and in my teenage years, I thrived on being around people. I was open – I found it easy to speak to strangers and make friends. In fact, in my teens, as home life was going badly I relied on friends as something akin to family. They were who I wanted to be around, not my home family.

I think one part of the change that happened came when I lived at my aunt’s, whose psychological terrorising of us all was continually invading, violating any privacy we might have had. So I became more protective of it. But I didn’t overeat compulsively yet, at that time – that came later, once I had moved out and was living with my grandmother, who also (though in a different way) had a habit of attempting to violate my privacy. Her way was just more sneaky, spying and such. So again I became protective – and of course once my overeating really took off, the shame of that increased my isolationism exponentially!

The food has always been a source of shame to me, ever since I began to binge. Which wasn’t until very late in my teens, early 20′s. So because this is such an integral part of me, of my life, I isolated from people and from life. Because of the shame, mostly, but also because I genuinely did not want to be with others when the food became my best friend.

People began to look unpredictable, I became fearful (of being “found out”), I was guarding and protecting myself. So I looked at people with suspicion, and would not let anybody near. The food replaced them, my friends, my family – the food was where I found consolation, where I went when things went well and when they went wrong. It usurped more and more of what my world had been.

In Greysheet abstinence it still took me quite a while to come out of the shame and isolation. First, the shame went… slowly. For my first six months of abstinence, nobody I knew personally knew that I was doing anything different with my food. I had never eaten in front of people anyway, so what I did in private, nobody knew. But of course after six months, people began noticing that I was losing weight and as I gained confidence and read other GS’ers stories, I slowly began to “come out”. Today everybody I know knows what I do and I have no problem going anywhere with my scale and food backup, and eating out, eating with others, having others eat with me… no shame there.

But the other thing, of food being a better friend and viewing people with fear, that took much longer to go. And it’s probably still not fully gone, although I can see immense progress – especially recently, I have been connecting with people so well and I’m thriving on it. But even years into abstinence I would often feel safer around food than around people. My food was safe (abstinent) and people were not safe. They had their own minds, they were unpredictable, and I feared them. As I grow in abstinence and recovery, and maturity dare I say, I’m so encouraged by how easy it has been for me recently – I haven’t tried harder, it has simply happened. I’m so grateful for this programme and the chance it gives me at living a full life where food is in its place!

Hitting bottom

I thought about my experience of hitting bottom. There’s the old saying, “Your bottom is where you stop digging the hole” – different for everyone. For me personally, I remember very well how I used to wish and pray for the ability to make myself sick, to get rid of what I had just eaten, and no matter how I tried I never could.

Today – as I live abstinently, sanely – I can only humbly thank God that I never succeeded. I suspect it would have cost me more years in the disease as I might have been able to avoid some of the weight gain… it would certainly have ruined my teeth… my oesophagus… who knows what else. Looking back I can barely believe how desperately I wanted to be bulimic! So I stopped digging before I got to that point, but I’m quite sure that eventually I may well have succeeded. And dug deeper.

Also, I never broke the 200-lb mark, not even close. The misery I had was bad enough for me; perhaps my threshold for pain is lower than that of others. I hated, loathed myself, couldn’t look in the mirror. I got out of breath too quickly. I sweated too much.

I remember one particularly humiliating episode, while living in New York. Once again I was on a diet and exercise regime, and so I went to run in Central Park. Much, much further than my fitness level allowed, I pushed myself hard. It was summer, and I was wearing long, loose training pants and a T-Shirt. My thighs rubbed together, but with the pain I was feeling all over and ignoring, I ignored the pain of that until it became fiery and very acute. So then there I was, in the middle of central park, and I felt like my inner thighs were on fire and bleeding – and I could hardly stop, bend over and check! So I had to keep going, at that point I was walking. Somehow, walking like the Michelin man or a sumo ringer, I slowly staggered back to the subway, and back home. It was a long, slow, painful, humiliating journey.

Once I got home I saw that the chafing had actually destroyed the seam, which had disintegrated and the ragged edges of fabric and stitching had produced something of a burn on the insides of my thighs. That didn’t heal completely for weeks! I don’t remember if I ate that day, but I’m sure I did (or soon after): after all, now that I couldn’t exercise for a while, what was the use anyway?

That was one of my bottom experiences. I didn’t get abstinent then. A bottom experience was never enough for me to get abstinent… I think I needed all of them, together, added up to defeat any notion of willpower or self-sufficiency I had. I had to be beaten, and I guess it took me fewer beatings than it did others – I’m a wimp really – and more beatings than still others who had the sense to recognise their patterns earlier. I hate thinking of all these humiliating episodes I went through and yet they took me to where I am now: abstinent, healthy, sane. For that I am grateful.

Don’t quit before the miracle happens

Great topic, don’t quit before the miracle. My mind went not so much to the issue of quitting before it, but to the miracle itself – and the fact that I am abstinent today is indeed a miracle, and I’m not using that word lightly. By miracle I mean that something happened to me by a power greater than myself, that there is absolutely no way I could have ever achieved it by my own devices. No amount of willpower, discipline, wishing, hoping, chastising myself… would ever have relieved my obsession continuously.

I emphasise “continuously” because I’m like the alcoholic in the Big Book who quit for a few months – on self-knowledge, on motivation, whatever, and then gets caught out and without even thinking takes that first drink… and a few hours later hits himself over the head, baffled and defeated, not understanding what had happened. I had no continuous defense against the first bite. I would start to feel better, relax my iron grip on myself – because there is no way I can keep an iron grip on anything for the rest of my life – and there I went, baffled because the condition hadn’t gone away after all, and the phenomenon of craving hit again.

Two miracles happened to me, personally. I know it’s not the same for everyone. But for me, there were two distinct miracles once I completely and utterly admitted defeat and was ready to do anything whatsoever to be relieved of my condition:

1. The craving was removed.
   At the end of my eating days, I was deadlocked in an absolutely rigid, inescapable pattern. I would be able to diet for two weeks, starting on a Monday. I would get through the first weekend. Sometime around the end of the second week, craving would develop. I would resist it, sometimes for days – and when I talk about craving here, I’m talking about an absolute obsession with one particular food (probably different each time) that would be on the forefront of my mind every waking minute, everywhere I went, in everything I did. I could not outrun it, and it would not go away. That particular food was there, and no matter how desperately I tried to make it go away or out-wait it… it never did go away, until I broke down. It literally wore me down.
   When I became Greysheet abstinent, I abandoned myself to the programme entirely but must admit that I didn’t hold much hope beyond two weeks. But the miracle was that this inescapable craving never happened again… there is absolutely nothing I did or could have done to make it go away, it was relieved by a power greater than myself.
2. I was given a continuous defense.
   Before I entered the two-week wheel I was on for so long, there were sometimes periods of perceived sanity: not that I ever ate like a normal person, but that I didn’t binge, either because I was on a diet or was filling up my belly with “non-caloric” vegetables until I literally could stomach nothing more. There were long periods of low-carb dieting, which meant that I avoided the physical trigger; however, my mind is not normal and so I was overeating on allowed things. I am an overeater by nature, whether or not I have sugar. But what I’m saying is, whatever diet I was on or perceived sanity I achieved for a while, there came the inevitable downfall. Sometimes even unintentional, just a bite here or there because I could handle it. Like the man with whiskey in his milk. Then a second. And another. I was exactly the same! I may have had a defense within myself for periods of time (although the more my condition progressed the less I was able to hold on), but the defense always failed. Always. I’m only human, after all.
   But a power greater than myself has been keeping me safe for 2 years and and 3 months or so now, and I trust that this will continue. There is no way I could have accomplished this in my own power for this length of time.

Now, I believe that the first miracle was one that needed to happen to me because I was in this deadlock. But I have seen people recover who have had to white-knuckle their way through early abstinence, trusting that the craving would eventually go – and it always does. Sadly, I can’t give anybody what my higher power has given me. It’s just not up to me. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t pray for it, I just received it. I was desperate. So I have no insider tips, ways to “get it”… just pray and believe that there is indeed a power greater than ourselves who could relieve our insanity, and would, if he were sought. (that’s a Big Book quote).

But I do believe that the second miracle is the one available to every single recovering compulsive overeater. After all, that’s why we are told to throw outselves onto a higher power of our own understanding – the programme doesn’t work without that, because no power of my own could relieve my condition. I have no question about that in my mind.

So, for today, I don’t eat no matter what… may the miracle continue! – and I trust it will as long as I don’t take my own will, my own power, back.

Sugar coma & weigh day

Interesting topic for the week, the sugar coma. It’s been years now since I have experienced it but I hardly want to try it again. I remember, shortly after my first “stint” at abstinence in New York – at that time I was desperately dieting and bingeing and trying to keep up appearances – a friend in a restaurant remarked about going out and eating too much and experiencing what he called a “food coma”. I said nothing, we were out in a group and this comment was in no way directed at me, but I felt such shame because not only did I know exactly what he meant (and now had acquired a word to describe it!) but I was experiencing on a regular basis. Sometimes daily, sometimes (by the grace of God) weekly… but regularly.

There seemed to be no getting out of it. I hated the sugar coma and yet some part of me wanted to get there. The numbness, perhaps? But in the end I think it wasn’t this final stage my addiction was after, it was the process of endlessly shoving more and more food into my mouth. The food, the food, the food: consequences later. Of course the consequences always came, but that knowledge could not deter me when I NEEDED a binge.

And that is what happened. I was absolutely powerless. I think looking back I actually hate the feeling of “need” and the absolute hopelessness combined with greed while I was buying food, before the binge had even started, even more than the sugar coma that followed. I was driven, and I hate being controlled. Yes, after the binge I would loathe myself, apart from feeling physically ill, but the days or weeks of holding on with white knuckles to some kind of diet I knew I would never stick to for the long term… then the one food that lodged into my mind and would not go away… the build-up of NEED… until I went and got it, along with lots of others because it didn’t matter anyway, and I somehow hoped (deep down, against hope) that this binge would now be so terrible that it would put me off forever. It always did, for the minutes right after the binge. But the next morning, the next craving, would always come.

Thank you for taking me back into remembering this hopelessness. I live with so much hope now, the food is in many ways routine (although I love it and look forward to every meal) and it has lost that terrible grip on me. I love my food but it no longer controls me. Only someone trapped hopelessly can understand the meaning of freedom after that.

And against that background, a weigh-in of 1 lb. up is but a small thing. I am grateful.

GreyNet in my recovery

As several people have shared about their gratitude to Greynet, it got me thinking. Looking back through my recovery the Greynet has been absolutely, totally central to it.

When I first found Greysheet, in 2004 while living in NYC, I went to live meetings with live Greysheeters, and signed up to Greynet for the first time. Sadly, after 18 days of abstinence I concluded I wasn’t as bad as these people and that was that. I went back into the food and lived through another year of hell.

By the time I was ready to truly surrender, I lived in Maryland and there were no other Greysheeters around. All I had was the Greysheet itself (which I’d stuck into my diary the year before as a kind of “souvenir”) and a memory of the Greynet. I signed back up, asked for a sponsor, and grabbed the first person who replied. This sponsor asked me to write to Greynet every single day for the first 90 days, given that I had no Greysheet meetings in my area. I followed her instructions. Because I wrote to Greynet every day, people got to know me and what was happening in my life, and I became part of the community. Without the Greynet, I would have had no contact with other Greysheeters except for my sponsor on the phone! But Greynet became my meeting. I replied to people individually… I posted… I picked up the computer before I picked up the food, so to speak.

Then I moved to the UK, again to an area with no Greysheeters around. By that time I had over a year’s back-to-back abstinence, but over a few months there, my commitment to Greysheet began to be chipped away. I had lost my sponsor when we couldn’t make our schedules match because of the time difference… I went through different sponsors in the UK and for various reasons it just didn’t work out… and eventually I found a sponsor in the US. I kept on reading the Greynet but didn’t participate like I used to. I no longer replied to many people individually. My loved ones put massive pressure on me to let go of abstinence. Eventually I did – and I don’t blame them. I descended into a summer of eating hell.

Finally, on 15 October 2006, I was on week’s trip in Germany and this was my opportunity: away from my loved ones, I got abstinent again, having signed up to Greynet right before I left and gotten a temporary sponsor. With a week’s abstinence under my belt I returned to the UK, to my loved ones, and simply put the facts before them. Today, I am still happy to discuss abstinence and what it is and all that, but I do not discuss whether or not I should do it. That’s just not open for negotiation. I made that very clear then and it has been respected ever since (although I let them keep their hopes up because that makes life easier/discussion free: I say I’m abstinent only for today and that’s not open for discussion. Maybe I’ll not need to be abstinent at some later date – only today. Who can argue with that?)

I have essentially been an outpost for pretty much all of my abstinence, except for the first 18 days. I haven’t had a Greysheet community around me. I have of course met other Greysheeters, at retreats and various meetings when I was in towns where there are meetings, but in general I have been on my own. On my own? No! Greynet has been my meeting place, my daily dose of Greysheet connection, along with my sponsor. I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t be abstinent without Greynet, but I strongly suspect I wouldn’t have been able to be. This is a vital lifeline for me, as it is for many others. I can’t even begin to thank Grainne for starting it, and every moderator who ever served for maintaining it as a safe and helpful place focused on Greysheet abstinence.

I’ve been on moderation many times, by the way. I’m on moderation right now. All I have to say about that is that while there are many things I worry about, this isn’t one of them. I’m sorry I broke the rules, unintentionally of course, and I’ll try not to do it again but moderation as such I couldn’t care less about. Whatever…

I’m grateful that there are so many people on this Greynet who have been supporting my abstinence by just being there, and some of them have become friends. Greynet is a wonderful place. I don’t eat, NMW!

Topic: the answers are not in the food

Thank you for this week’s topic. How very simple, yet profound, the fact is that the answers truly are not in the food… and I never knew! I looked to food for absolutely everything.

I truly believed – deep down, although not necessarily on thought-level:

• eating the right things would make me thin (NOT eating was never an option for this COE!)
• eating would give me something to do when bored
• eating would take my mind off a nagging problem so I didn’t have to face it
• eating was immediate, right here, taking my mind off the future and my fears for it
• eating would cheer me up if I was unhappy
• eating was my way to celebrate if I was happy
• devising, tweaking, and analysing the perfect diet gave me a sense of purpose for my life
• eating was a problem I thought I could tackle, so I didn’t have to look at the big issues in my life

Of course, as a compulsive overeater, I have an excessive focus on food and that has carried into abstinence. How often have I been amazed at my sponsor’s, or another qualified GSer’s, suggestion that my present problem may not have any relation to food! This is especially true when there’s a physical problem, like I have a flu or the stomach pain I’ve been experiencing: I immediately blame the food. No matter that it could be a virus – I look to the food first. I always thought food would fix me; even before I got abstinent, food was never just “the enemy”. It was also the comforter, the thing that would fix it all, the good guy. I just had to get it right! Thank God today I don’t have to tweak anything, get it right, or wonder if I got it wrong. I eat what the Greysheet tells me to eat, that’s all.

I had a laugh with a GS friend the other day, who shared about her fear of not being able to date while abstinent. I pointed out that a date doesn’t have to involve food – perfectly obvious to me, but a novel idea to her and she burst out laughing. Duh! But that’s the way I am, too. Often others will see something perfectly obvious that I have related to food for no good reason at all. That’s why this community is so great!

My mother’s 67th

Today would be my mother’s 67th birthday (she died at age 54).  I can’t imagine her at that age at all!
 
As it’s her birthday, I’ve been thinking about her.  Sometimes I wonder if my food issue is inherited from her.  I don’t think I learned it from her, as such… I never consciously watched her.  She ate her food and I ate mine (as a child, I ate incredible amounts of food – and exactly the same food every single day for years – and nobody ever minded: I grew up with no boundaries).  But as I look back I do see certain traits… how she would lose and gain the same 50 lbs. periodically.  If on a diet, she’d eat lots of soup (I hope that’s a generic enough term to be allowable on Greynet?) and vegetables.   If not on a diet, I don’t remember what she ate.
 
My mother was a very emancipated woman.  She was married (only because she was forced into it by her mother, because she was pregnant with me), but she went back to work the moment she could walk again after my C-section – I was looked after by my aunt and cousins.  Later, from primary school onwards, I was in all-day schools and returned home about an hour before she did, and my father returned after that.  My mother never cooked, cleaned, or did any household chores.  I have no memory of it, but she told me that my father used to do much of that until he once burned his hand while cooking and never did it again after that.  That’s why I grew up on microwave frozen food.
 
And that’s probably why I remember my mother’s diets, because that was the only time she would actually cook herself some food.  Not that it was edible.  I remember she made a very watery soup one day, unseasoned, inedible, and a family friend coming to visit – she took the occasion to get rid of the soup and the poor friend was too polite to refuse.
 
So my mother would go up and down the scale, yo-yoing her way through life, unhappy when she was fat and happy (but not for long) when she was thinner.  Never thin, just thinner.  She did share with me how she couldn’t stand her appearance, her hair wasn’t blonde or curly (both of which she wanted it to be), her body wasn’t made to be thin, her eyes were too small, her lips too thin… I thought she was beautiful.
 
Looking back, I think the way she would berate her appearance actually helped me, because I looked at her and saw beauty – so I have always remembered to take my own perceptions of myself with a grain of salt.  Just because I don’t like certain things I see in the mirror doesn’t mean I’m not beautiful.
 
I don’t think my mother was in need of the Greysheet, she wasn’t a compulsive, out-of-control eater like I am.  But her life makes me intensely, incredibly grateful for the Greysheet and for the fact that I have worn the same size clothes for years now, I have no double-wardrobe (fat clothes and thin clothes) but just one, all the same size, and the only reason I ever throw clothes away is that they are worn out!
 
Thank God for leading me to Greysheet.  I do it NMW!