The First Step
Part 3 - Updated

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

My name is Dave, and I have an eating disorder. I am grateful that the only requirement for membership in O.A. is a desire to stop eating compulsively. I am also grateful today that I am no longer using food to commit the slow and certain form of suicide that I once was. I pray that someone sometime reads our shares on Step One and recognizes the progressive nature of their illness and chooses recovery early so that they might not have to go to the depths that I, and others, have. Thank you all for taking part in this Step Study.

What does unmanageable mean?

In this context it could mean that we are not living life the way we really want to. We lost control somewhere along the line. We all want to feel good about ourselves and have healthy fulfilling personal relationships. Yet most active compulsive eaters eventually find themselves feeling like they are trapped in a life with few compelling choices. They are not living as they would like to.

For a long time I didn’t realize how unmanageable my life had become due to my eating disorder. It was a long slow slide from a relatively healthy lifestyle into the depths of my illness. I sort of acclimated to and accepted the negative consequences of my disordered eating piecemeal over time. What an outsider would see as shocking, I viewed as justified, if not outright normal. My denial and self-defense mechanisms didn’t want me to connect the dots between my binge eating and my life. For instance, at the height of my illness I rarely left my house. I made constant excuses for not going out with friends. I wasn’t meeting even a minimum of normal social obligations. I often used my back pain for an excuse to bail out of going out and doing things with friends. Actually this wasn’t a total lie, my back was killing me from all the extra weight, but in truth the real reason I didn’t leave home was that my digestive system was completely out of sorts. I was very uncomfortable most of the time. This sounds awful but after binging on an almost daily basis, I would be either constipated or have diarrhea to the point I couldn’t predict when I would need to go to the bathroom. My entire digestive system was so out of whack I felt sick and tired all the time. I lived with nearly chronic headaches. Because of my binging and weight, I was sleeping so poorly day in and day out that I was suffering the mental and emotional liabilities associated with sleep deprivation. After a while my friends pretty much quit calling or stopping by. They got tired of me saying no all the time. They got tired of my attitude. They didn’t like watching my health deteriorate. Yet at the time I honestly blamed my back injury and in a couple of cases my friends for their lack of compassion and understanding.

I also had chronic financial problems. I live on a modest fixed disability income that should meet my needs. I’m single and my needs are modest. Yet, I was always running out of money well before the end of the month. I had no savings. I couldn’t/wouldn’t afford things like going to the doctor or dentist. At the same time I was spending a huge percentage of my income on food—lots of very poor quality, expensive food. I lived on junk food, frozen pizzas, and TV dinners. A couple of times a week I felt the need to “treat myself special” and I could easily spend 20 to 30 dollars or more for an evening’s binge. I would get very resentful and blame “the system” and Social Security for being so cheap. I would blame the workplace where I was injured for not having better insurance. I was angry at God. I was steeped in self-pity and felt justified in it. I never blamed my compulsive overeating for my financial problems or suspected that is was causative.

Isolation and money woes are just a couple of examples of how the obsession with food controlled a much bigger portion of my life than just my waistline. I have a closet full of clothes in every size from my healthy weight to my top weight. I hated shopping for clothes. Few stores carried anything that fit me and when they did it was humiliating to have to shop in the "Big Man's" section. I hated anyone mentioning my weight even if it was a friend expressing concern for my health. Of course I hated the teasing and nasty comments complete strangers would sometimes make. I hated feeling judged by strangers as I pushed my grocery cart to the checkout counter. I was irritable most of the time and those around me suffered. My life was on hold while I sat alone thinking of how things should have been and how things would be now—if only life treated me differently.

The point to talking about all this is that I did not see at the time how profoundly Binge Eating Disorder was affecting me. I was blaming anything and everything for my problems and misery but compulsive overeating. In effect, my eating disorder was killing me physically, torturing me emotionally, and leaving me spiritually impoverished. It was affecting all areas of my life. It was necessary for me to thoroughly understand this on the deepest level of my being before I could really start the healing process. I had to completely surrender to the idea that I had a very serious, chronic, progressive, and potentially fatal eating disorder and that it was affecting all areas of my life—not just my weight. The disease is not obesity. That is just a symptom. I was not able to solve any of my problems as long as I was binging and eating compulsively.

I did not like admitting that I had such a self centered view of life. Particularly since I had been a member of AA so many years and “should” have known better. But that’s just how subtly powerful, cunning, and baffling, Binge Eating Disorder is. Without taking the First Step in regards to my eating disorder, I was absolutely stuck. My inability to see the reality of the situation was a remarkable display of the power of denial. For our purpose, denial is a defense mechanism that includes a range of psychological maneuvers designed to reduce awareness of the fact that compulsive overeating is the cause of an individual's problems rather than a solution to those problems. Denial becomes an integral part of the disease process of compulsive overeating, a major obstacle to recovery, and a precipitous factor in relapse events. Though denial is a form of self-deception, it is not necessarily a conscious process or a series of purposeful lies. Denial is the cunning, baffling, and powerful part of an eating disorder that tells a person with an eating disorder that they do not have a problem or that distorts the reality surrounding those problems. If a person with Binge Eating Disorder or a compulsive overeating disorder is "in denial" about their disease, they cannot become engaged in a recovery process. One cannot work on a problem unless they accept that it exists.

It says in “The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous” that “Only an honest admission to ourselves of the reality of our condition can save us from our destructive eating.” "The same principle applies to our unmanageable lives. As long as we believe that we already know what is best for us, we cling to our habitual ways of thinking and acting.”  It goes on to explain that it was just these habitual ways of thinking and acting that got us into our unhealthy, unhappy condition in the first place. This is the insanity of the illness. One definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over again but expecting a different result. We need to let go of our old ideas and for most of us, it demands a level of self-honesty and willingness we were up till now, incapable of grasping. It is not a result of moral weakness or stupidity. It is the element of denial at work—our eating disorder had us in its grip. Because it is a disorder subject to relapse, I find it really helps me to take a sort of short form First Step every morning. I remind myself that it was my very best ideas, my very best thinking, and all my self-knowledge, intelligence, self-reliance and self-will that dug the hole I was in. I have to remind myself I am still prone to relapse and I always will be. As soon as I buy back into my old ideas, I will be binging again—living in painful isolation again, and probably broke most of the time.

Feelings and unmanageability

One of the main things I used food for was to stuff or shut off unwanted painful emotions. I think a lot of us do that. If I binged I could drown out my feelings, or at the very least, shift my focus from the painful feelings to what I was eating. I could just— “not feel.” This is of course one of the things I hope everyone will get in touch with while working their First Step. The exact emotions and reasons are different for each of us and often highly personal. This use (abuse) of food is a very powerful trap. Remember that recovery is about a lot more than shedding extra weight and physical health. We must be willing to go to any lengths for recovery. This includes finally deciding to deal with those painful or difficult feelings. Once you stop abusing food and binging, your emotions can begin to feel even more intense. Actually, it’s not our feelings that change. Our ability to feel them authentically improves when the fog of compulsive eating begins to lift. We must be willing to learn new healthy and constructive ways to cope with these feelings, emotions, and memories, or we will have no defense against them when they come up again.

In some cases the Steps, Program, and Fellowship are sufficient at dealing with these feelings but in others it may take professional counseling or other active measures. Recovery is about changing our lives and actually dealing with the issues that trigger our obsession. Feelings are a heck of a trigger for a lot of us. Actually, it’s not the feelings that cause us problems but our refusal to accept them or feel them and move on. Often, we simply don’t yet possess the coping skills to deal with these feelings in a constructive way. When we continue eating over these emotions we are stuck. We rarely can glimpse the truth of this while we are busy killing our pain by overeating. Refraining from binging and overeating allows us the opportunity to heal once and for all. If we are willing to grow, we can finally get the help we need to build a new life.

A note of caution: Though it’s not often mentioned, there are many ways to stuff feelings and we need to watch out that we don’t give up one unhealthy coping mechanism (compulsive overeating) just to replace it with another (drinking, drugs, shopping, compulsive sex, compulsive exercise, gambling, etc.).

One tool that is valuable when taking the First Step for the first time is to sit and write a history or timeline of your problems with food. This can help you gain perspective and define related issues that may require a new way of thinking and perhaps an outside source of help to deal with.

Questions for journaling and contemplation.

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. (Some of the questions are meant to stimulate thought and may not apply to everyone.)