"We admitted we were powerless over food — that our lives had become unmanageable"

A core principle behind the First Step is recognizing that we have a chronic potentially fatal eating disorder and that this illness affects our whole life, not just our waist line.

My name is Dave, and I have a serious and deadly illness called Binge Eating Disorder. I was once also morbidly obese. For years I tried to cure my binge eating disorder by dieting. Diets never worked for long. I always gained my weight back—and then some. Dieting did not empower me to recover from a long-standing pattern of compulsive overeating and binging. In fact, dieting became part of my eating disorder. I dieted my way right up to 450 pounds.

I have to admit right up front that I don't like the way this Step is worded. I think it makes a lot of sense for people in AA. An alcoholic is powerless over alcohol and can never safely drink it again, but a person with Binge Eating Disorder (BED)  …may not be so powerless. I wish it said something more to the effect "We admitted that dieting and isolation kept us powerless to recover from our eating disorder — that our lives had become unmanageable."

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The First Step is the basic groundwork that the rest of our recovery is based upon. With the First Step we begin to recognize and accept the realities of our present condition. The First Step is about breaking down the barriers of denial that thwart our success. It is designed to help people with a compulsive overeating disorder truly grasp the basic and undeniable fact that when our illness is not managed properly and kept in remission, our lives are out of our control. We may hide our food or lie about what and how we are eating. We may take laxatives, purge, or starve ourselves to compensate for our last binge. We may exercise compulsively in an attempt to control our weight. We may spend more than we can afford on junk food. We may forfeit our social life and relationships. Our health may suffer or we may live in an emotional hell. We experience great shame and guilt. We may also experience great physical discomfort, ridicule, relationship problems, disability and an early death as the result of our compulsive relationship with food. The point is that we experience a loss of control. We want to be healthy and we have tried repeatedly to act in healthy ways, yet our weight and manner of eating has never stabilized in a healthy way for long.

The First Step is also intended to illuminate the truth about the cause and effect relationships between our compulsive eating disorder and life’s problems. Many people who compulsively overeat or binge have felt that if only life had been different, or if their circumstances were different now, they wouldn’t be eating compulsively. The truth is however, that our eating disorders are causing many or our present problems. Our eating disorder is hindering the healing of past hurts. Our eating disorder is keeping us stuck.

When we face the truth about our illness, recovery begins. To solve a problem, it only makes sense that you have to admit you have a problem. Once you realize you have a problem, you can identify the cause and true nature of the problem so you don't waste a lot of energy chasing the wrong solutions while your real problem just gets worse.

I don’t think a person who has a problem with compulsive overeating will have much success with long-term recovery if they don’t understand the nature and power of their eating disorder. So this week I would like to spend our time and energies on the nature and power of binge eating disorder and compulsive overeating. The AA Big Book says “Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us.” In context they are speaking not of alcohol as it applies to normal people, but the relationship an alcoholic has with alcohol—or, the disease of alcoholism. I submit that for us, eating even healthy food compulsively is a cunning, baffling, and powerful aspect of a serious eating disorder. There is nothing inherently “bad” about alcoholic beverages and there is nothing inherently bad about most food substances including sugar, bleached flour, candy, and rattly bag treats. It is when our relationship to food gets out of whack that problems arise. It is not the food's fault.

It makes no sense to change our eating habits temporarily as is prescribed with all the popular fad diets and lose our excess weight, only to fall back into the same old eating patterns that caused our weight to spiral out of control in the first place. We may have lost weight but we still have our eating disorder. We have done nothing to change the underlying problems. We do like to hold onto the dream though and it can kill us.

When I first came to OA, I was desperate about my eating and weight. In fact I was so depressed about it and felt so hopeless I was verging on being suicidal. I weighed 422 pounds and had been on at least a dozen popular diets. I owned a literal library of diet and nutrition books. I’d lose some weight and then gain it all back plus a few extra pounds. Each time it got harder to lose, and the weight came rolling back on faster and faster. I was stuck in the yo-yo dieting trap and didn't know how to get out. I made countless promises to myself that after this last binge that I would start for real—tomorrow. I set date after date and made New Years resolutions. I’d eat rabbit food and a gallon of water all day but somehow as if in an alcoholic blackout, I’d find myself in a grocery checkout line with a big bag of corn-chips, sour cream, a frozen full-size pizza, and several different desserts. All this and knowing full well I meant to eat it all at a single sitting. I never could identify at what point I decided to binge. It just happened like taking the next breath. To top this insanity off, I have a seriously screwed up back. I had an industrial accident some years ago that left me dependant on a cane to walk. I was supposed to try and be as lean as possible to minimize chronic pain and keep the damage from getting worse.

Since I had been working the Twelve Steps for years, the only issue or problem I saw was my extra weight. My weight was making me depressed. My weight was causing my chronic pain. My weight was keeping me from doing things. And I “knew” that a diet was the way to fix it. I used my injury to justify my weight and I used my weight to justify my pain levels and inactivity and I used my inactivity to justify my weight and so on and so forth while I just got heavier.

With each new diet book that came along or each new resolution I made, my hopes would rise again. Believe me, I had really good intentions and gobs of will power to start out with. I would go so far as to throw out all my fattening foods. Right in the garbage they went as I planned the next diet—bags and boxes full of perfectly good food destroyed. Often, I'd replace them item for item within hours or by the next day. this type of irrational behavior went on for years.

It’s interesting to me now how powerful this disorder is and how powerful the element of denial is with it. Here I was, a person with years of experience in 12 Step groups such as AA., NA, DRA, and ACOA. I love the Big Book and the Steps and Traditions like life itself. But I never once made the connection that I was using food much in the same way that I use to use alcohol and drugs. I even played the same stupid “I’ll quit tomorrow games” with overeating as I did with booze. It never crossed my mind to apply the Steps to my eating problem. In part I suppose because I hadn't yet admitted to myself that it was anything more than a serious weight problem. I didn't see obesity as a symptom. I saw it as the primary cause of all my misery.

One day while I was online searching for AA recovery type groups I ran across an online OA group and decided to check it out. I lurked for a couple weeks and heard a lot of new things including that the OA people used the Big Book of AA by changing the wording to reflect their particular problems. Hmmm — I thought, maybe I could try that. So I began re-reading the AA Big Book with my eating behavior in mind and it seemed to fit me to a tee. I was astounded and dumbfounded.

This is from page 24 of the Big Book of AA [edited to fit our eating disorders]: "At a certain point in the life of every person with a compulsive overeating disorder, they pass into a state where the most powerful desire to eat only in a healthy manner is of absolutely no avail.
The fact is that most people who compulsively overeat, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in eating. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first compulsive bite.”

Reprinted from Alcoholics Anonymous, with permission of A.A. World Services, Inc.

I don’t think any nutritionist, doctor, or person who actually has an eating disorder could have described my feelings of powerlessness over my eating any better. Re-reading the Second and Third Chapters of the Big Book this way destroyed a lot of my denial. I really urge everyone to do it. There are free online versions of the Big Book if you don’t have one and I’m sure if you do a search or ask, someone on the list can share a URL to one of these sites.

Feel free to explore these questions in their entirety, in part, or selectively, with the group, but please understand it is not required. My only wish is that you will find them useful.

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Questions for journaling and contemplation:

(Some of these may not be worded exactly right to fit your particular style of disordered eating. Feel free to modify them as needed and share your answers. It may be just exactly what someone else needs to hear to help their recovery.)

1.	What function did or does overeating serve in your life? (Even undesirable behaviors serve a function. It might be maladaptive but it “feels” like it helps. For instance, we may drink to much alcohol to numb painful memories or calm anxiety.)
2.	What happens when you try to control your eating?
3.	How many kinds of diets have you been on in your life?
4.	Describe what happened when you tried to “diet”?
5.	How much more will power would it take to control your eating or diet successfully?
6.	Have you ever considered “desperate or extreme measures” to control your eating and weight?
7.	What brought you to OA and these online support groups?
8.	Why does Overeaters Anonymous consider compulsive opvereating a disease?

This information on the 12 Steps and the following articles designed to help explain the Steps,  was a project I started in 2001 for an online  e-mail support list. This page was updated 12/22/2004 to better reflect my current recovery and understanding of Binge Eating Disorder. It is still a work in progress.