The First Step
Part 2 - Updated

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

  There’s an old saying around Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that goes something like this, “Quitting drinking wasn’t my problem, staying quit was.” Another version goes, “I know how to stop drinking, I just don’t know how to stay stopped.” I’ve been a member of AA for years and have probably heard some version of that saying over a thousand times. It is in one of the personal stories in the back of the Big Book but a lot of recovering alkies use it as part of their own story because it speaks volumes about the nature of the disease of alcoholism. In terms of the First Step and our feelings of  being powerless over our eating behavior, I think it is worthy of further exploration.

Earlier in the progression of my compulsive eating disorder, whenever I’d notice I was getting a bit of a paunch I could knock off the 10 or 20 pounds pretty easily anytime I wished. I would diet for a short time and increase my activity level and it was no big deal. Diets seemed to work just fine. Over the years though, maintaining my weight got progressively more difficult. Diets got harder to stay on and gaining weight seemed to get easier and easier. After awhile, I started justifying having a little potbelly by thinking it was a natural consequence of getting older. I just had to diet a little harder and accept some extra weight. Eventually, I told myself that it was my stocky Norwegian build and that I carried my weight pretty well for a heavy guy. Then I started using my physical disability for a justification for my ever-expanding girth. Sometimes I would diet for a while and when I got frustrated I’d go out and buy new cloths in the next larger size. Seeing as how the new clothes fit more comfortably, I would use that to tell myself everything was fine and I could go back to eating any way I wanted to. Eventually of course compulsive eating and dieting, my eating disorder, took over my life. I hated myself and at 422 pounds my disability on a physical, emotional, and spiritual level was overwhelming.

Though I won’t bore you with the gory details of my drinking and drugging career, looking back now, I see a strong analogy between my compulsive overeating and my chemical dependency. Both illnesses are progressive. Justification, rationalization, and denial are part of the insidious nature of their progression. When I tried to control or reduce my drinking on my own it was always a dismal failure. Each instance a progressively more humiliating defeat. When I tried to control my eating on my own, it also was a series of ever increasing disappointments coupled with self-loathing and shame.

It’s clear to me now, that there is just as much difference between stopping and staying stopped for a drunk, as there is between compulsive overeating/dieting/over-exercising/binging—and healthy eating, for a person with an eating disorder. Sorry for the convoluted and difficult grammar. Basically, I didn’t know how to stay stopped either. As long as I kept thinking in terms of eating in two different modes, i.e. weight loss mode and regular mode, I was doomed to obsession. In reality this meant that I was either gaining or losing weight most all the time. I was either binging or starving. As long as I was trying to diet my way out of my eating disorder I was  “living in the problem instead of the solution.”

In the book called “The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous” it says on page 2, “Clearly, if we are to live free of the bondage of compulsive overeating, we must abstain from all eating behaviors which cause us problems.” I submit that dieting is one of those eating behaviors we are to abstain from. Please stop and read that quote again slowly. The significance is easy to miss. We cannot “diet” our way to our goal weight and expect that somehow after we are thin our compulsive relationship with food will have changed. The journey is not between our present weight and our goal weight. Our journey is between now and the rest of our life. We certainly need physical recovery but key to that physical recovery, is the need to be free of the bondage of the obsession. We can’t afford to live in the fear that exists between the extremes of dieting and compulsive overeating and binging. There is no stability or serenity there.

When an alcoholic ‘honestly’ and effectively takes the First Step, it is with the understanding that an important part of the solution is that they can never drink alcohol again. They finally give up that secret little bit of consciousness that says they can beat the system—that secret thinking that they are somehow too gifted or too smart to really need to take all the same steps other recovering alcoholics took. They finally become willing to let go of that stubborn bit of ego that makes them feel unique in their disease. They decide they do not want to die of “terminal uniqueness.” Until they unconditionally surrender to the full reality of their illness, they rarely if ever maintain sobriety for long.

On page 30 of the Big Book of AA it says (edited for our eating disorder), “We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we had an eating disorder. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed. We people with disordered eating are men and women who have lost the ability to control our eating. We know that no real compulsive overeater* ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals - usually brief—were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that compulsive overeaters* of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.”

*Note: I recommend not labeling ourselves by our eating disorder. Instead of calling yourself a compulsive overeater or a COE, consider saying that you "have a compulsive eating disorder". We are, in fact, not our illness.

When we begin to honestly look at our eating and dieting patterns it starts to become clear that there is a lot more going on with us than just a sweet tooth or a slow metabolism. It takes no great leap of super human self-honesty to see that weight loss does not cure us. A simple look at our history tells that story each time we regain our weight. Some of us have continued to starve, purge, exercise compulsively, or abuse laxatives just to avoid the possibility of obesity. We still don’t like the way we look. Desire and will power have proved to be little use to us in controlling our compulsive relationship with food.

Admitting powerlessness (the lack of control) is hard for most of us to do. We may associate it with weakness and defeat. It may just rub us the wrong way particularly when we see other people who can eat like a horse and never gain weight. But maybe our bodies don’t work just like theirs do. None of us has control over how our brain chemistry reacts to various foods or what genes we are born with. We can no more control these things with will power than we can use will power to grow ourselves taller or heal a virus. Perhaps admitting powerlessness over our eating behavior is the only sane and logical thing to do at this point. Our best thinking and efforts haven't worked very well. Admitting powerlessness is the first move in acknowledging the reality that we indeed do have a serious illness—an eating disorder.

Questions for journaling and contemplation:

In the next part we’ll start looking at the second part of Step One. “…that our lives had become unmanageable"