Eating in Recovery

When trying to view food through the lens of a 12 step program, I have found that some pretty profound realizations can be made quickly. If you are ready. Until you are ready to admit powerlessness over reckless behavior with food - then you can 12 step other aspects of your life and leave the elephant in the room alone. Eventually you can't squeeze your largeness around the elephant in the room like you may have once done. So you then see the need to figure out this food thing.

As I was doing the first few steps of recovery work, I noticed an inclination to add "emotional eating" to every question I answered as part of my step work. After several months of this, it finally dawned on me. Huh. I seem to keep wanting to do some work around my relationship with food. Interesting. A few more months passed and I took the leap to address food in a 12 step program centered around recovery from compulsive overeating. It was the third step and looking at the concept of God Hunger that I realized that literally I was hungry for God. Feeding my hunger for God with FOOD, however, was simply not working for me.

As a connoisseur of all varieties of dysfunctional eating, including but not limited to past experience with anorexia, I easily leaped into a losing weight mode. I went to 12 step meetings for overeaters weekly and counted Weight Watcher's Points Plus as the basis of my new "food plan". My mind was freer. I felt less trapped inside an eating machine and more inside the body of a person. I started to see weight coming off. Slow and steady but it was definitely going down. Then as I neared what I believed to be that pesky thing called a goal weight, I wondered how I would be able to stay in the point counting mode forever. Since I was so into it, it seemed hard to imagine that I would ever go a day and not count nutritional information of one variety or another ... but I think subconsciously I knew it wasn't really going to last forever.

Point Counting. Does it work? Yeah it works. It helps to have an easy way ("there's an app for that") to keep track of what you are eating and see that you are done for the day. I also liked keeping track of how awesome I was doing in the realm of eating copious amounts of fruits and vegetables and drinking more water regularly than I had been known to do. I definitely was making better choices while on a weight loss path than ever before. If you track your points well and stick to them, guess what? You loose weight! Isn't that the point (pun intended)?

Sure I guess losing weight was the point as I was starting out about 20 pounds too heavy. However what really took me down this path via my step work was something more in tune with an overindulgent relationship with food. What ever happened to that venture? Well, as I found out, about 5 minutes after initial panic over eventually having to maintain my weight ... I found it hard to continue to loose. Its like the cues of deprivation kick in and the mind goes overboard that it needs to not be deprived.

So over the past months of going back and forth between deprivation and binge cycles, I find myself more or less right back where I started. Albeit, I am actually still down those 20 excessive pounds. And I should be happy about that. However the anorexic in me says that I need to loose more. The compulsive overeater in me is all about finding reasons to not be accountable. And the soul in recovery in me knows that the path to serenity with food does not involve counting and numbers, which seem to further perpetuate the obsession.