Conquering Food Addiction
Yesterday I started the day with a healthy breakfast, a light lunch, and then a bit of smoked brisket for an early dinner around 4:00 pm. I was feeling satisfied with myself…happy even. Then, I settled in to watch TV with my husband when the food demon started clawing at me. I was really enjoying a cup of Rhubarb Rooibos tea that a friend had gifted me when I started rummaging for something to go with it. Just a biscotti or a little something crunchy…texture is a big thing with me and food. I love crunchy, silky, sweet and salty foods together…you know, tea and biscuits like the Queen. It would be hard to imagine the Queen, Elizabeth, not Camilla, going on an after-tea binge of corn chips, salsa, guacamole, crackers, pimento cheese, and diet soda. Diet soda of course…less calories. I passed out in a food coma at half time when the Chiefs were trouncing the Jaguars in spite of Mahome’s ankle injury.
Upon awakening the next day, my very first thought was that my problem with food is not food. Like alcohol, the problem is not what I drank or when I drank, or even how much I drank. The problem is my fear of getting sick and dying. It is existential angst. We all get overwhelmed with life and want to go screaming into the night but instead, we find coping mechanisms like picking the skin off our nails until they bleed, or stroking our hair, or having indiscriminate sex, or shopping, or shooting up, or eating. Addiction is like Medusa with a head full of vipers that turn our self-will into stone. Life would be unbearable if we were to carry death in our conscious minds, so we conveniently tuck it away in our subconscious where it whispers from the other side, “We will meet someday.” Meanwhile, we are numb and blind to it and left to deal with the addictive, self-soothing responses to it. Only when the pain of continuing the behavior overtakes the fear of letting it go do we become willing to do something about it. I admit I am powerless. Once my self-soothing seeking becomes desire, self-will is useless. My ability to make a healthy, reasonable food choice evaporates like dry ice. There are times I need to lash myself to the mast or succumb to the siren’s call of a cookie; who am I kidding; all the cookies. I will eat every last one of them, regret it, and vow to do better tomorrow. This is the cycle of addiction.
Fortunately, there is a solution. What I have learned in my recovery from alcoholism is that I must surrender to win. Oh, I can put myself on a diet, count calories, exercise, and successfully tame the tiger for a few days, weeks, even months but ultimately, self-will fails me. If you do not have addictive tendencies; or if you haven’t yet admitted them, you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking what a spineless excuse of a human being I am. So be it. Your opinion of me…friend or foe…is irrelevant and any recovering addict will tell you that complete surrender is the way of strength.
Step 1: I become aware that I have a problematic relationship with food. I admit I have a problem with food. Finally, I realize that I am powerless over food and that this aspect of my life is unmanageable. Check.
Step 2: My own resources are insufficient to deal with this problem. I need help from something outside myself to be free from the insanity of addiction. Check.
Step 3: I decide to give up trying to control my food addiction on my own and ask Big Love (my higher power) to tackle the problem for me. Check.
Step 3 is where most of us stop short and go back to the opium den. Surrender…completely…to something or someone we can’t see or perhaps don’t believe in or have been taught to call a higher power God who is just an old man looking for an excuse to send me to hell…it’s not THAT bad. Once we can admit it IS that bad, we move on or we stay stuck on the hamster wheel and die trying to outrun our boogeymen.
Step 4: I’m going to poke around in the poop and write down all the things about my life that make me want to run away from it. Fear, shame, resentments, harms I’ve done to other people and myself, and let’s not forget looking at my sex life. How’s that for getting out of your comfort zone! DO NOT GO THERE ALONE.
Step 5: After I’ve written down all that shit, now I have to speak the truth of it to a trusted person and to Big Love. Although Big Love already knows my foibles, she wants to hear them from me.
So now I need to ask a mentor to walk with me through the rest of the process. I mean it’s helpful if you get one at the beginning…after Step 1…but it is essential to get one if you get this far on your own. I have in mind to ask a friend who knows me well, who I trust without exception, and who is on her own journey of recovery from food issues.
Lest you think I am being trite and trivializing the steps of recovery, I have nothing but the highest respect and deepest gratitude for them as they literally saved my life. However, I have reached a place in my recovery journey where the language of recovery literature is a bit heavy-handed and masculine for me so I am finding my own language and creating the spiritual community I crave. We are all recovering…or want to be recovering…or should be recovering…from some form of addiction.
If you are a woman whose life feels unmanageable, in any way, with anything, I invite you to join our sacred circle of sisters seeking spiritual solutions. Stay tuned for the next chapter of my journey on the road of happy destiny.
~ Janice
