Just a quick apology that I haven’t written in a while – I will start writing again soon.  Unfortunately, I hurt my wrist and hand and it is in a brace. I am trying to rest it and let it heal. Don’t give up reading this blog, just understand that I am taking a forced break from using my hand.

I will not post about every pound I lose, but I will write short posts periodically to talk about the actual weight lost. Even though I am relieved to have lost 5 pounds, truth is I gained two of those pounds in the week prior to the diet. The best way in the world to gain weight is to “prepare” to go on a diet. So, realistically, I have lost 3 pounds toward my hundred.

Surprisingly, actually amazingly, I haven’t struggled with cravings this week – so far. I have severely reduced my carbs – not eliminated, but definitely reduced. I have eliminated sugar.

I think alcoholics (even those with long recovery) are physically extremely sensitive to sugar and starches. Just the tiniest portion of sugar has been searching for more all day long.

I am thankful that some weight is coming off.

Looking forward to readers’ comments.

I mentioned in my last blog that I started drinking alcohol and became an alcoholic in the same week – not a typical pattern, but it was my truth. When I started drinking, I used alcohol to ease the pain and fear I was experiencing based on my husband’s illness – I was unable to cope and alcohol was my coping mechanism. The funny thing about compulsive behaviors – whether drinking, overeating, or any other compulsive behavior – is that you start using them to avoid some really severe pain, but before long you begin using them to avoid all hurtful emotions.

I read once that if you started drinking (or overeating) at a certain age, that you pretty much stop maturing at that age. I started drinking because of a really severe problem. But gradually I started using alcohol to cope with lesser problems. When you use alcohol to cope with smaller problems, you are losing your ability to develop healthy coping mechanisms. Your ability to cope with problems of the smallest nature eventually fades.

By the time I went into recovery for alcoholism, I was unable to cope with a traffic jam. With a line in a restaurant. With pretty much anything even remotely unpleasant. The process of recovery for me was so very difficult since I had to learn to cope with every emotional occurrence as if I were a child just learning how to live in this world.

I entered AA somewhere around 1979. The first time “didn’t take.”  I didn’t really make friends. I didn’t accept it all. I treated it as a Chinese menu – and I took what I wanted from Column A and what I wanted from Column B. For anyone that has traveled this path, you know that the approach of cherry-picking the pieces you want to follow and the pieces you don’t want to follow is not a successful approach. Needless to say, this trip “thru” Alcoholics Anonymous was not successful.

In 1986 I reentered the doors of AA, but I entered with an approach of doing “whatever it took” to make it work. I never worked harder at something in my life.  I won’t go through all the ups and downs in this blog since that is not the main topic of this blog.

But I did go to a bazillion AA meetings, went through years of therapy, and changed almost everything that could be changed about myself.  I dealt well with my childhood issues – my mom, my dad, my life. I have been sober since that time.

So, why the heck didn’t all that internal work also succeed at making me thin???

Who knows – but it didn’t.

I think I healed so much of my childhood trauma, but I couldn’t overcome the fact that I never really learned coping skills in childhood. From age 8, I coped with everything unpleasant by using food. Junk food, specifically. So I think that my path now, if I really plan to lose this 100 pounds, is to learn how to live without stuffing my mouth with junk. To learn to feel. To learn how to deal with men. To learn how to feel my emotions thoroughly.

Wow – scary!

Let me know if you have dealt with multiple addictions and how you have coped. I appreciate your sharing. Always happy to exchange links.

When I was a kid, my dad was an active alcoholic. To say it brought trauma into my childhood would be a gross underestimate. Every day was filled with fear of the father who wasn’t acting right, or tension from living with a dry drunk. Weekends were drinking time. Weeknights were dry drunk. There was a lot of tension in that house and I was very sensitive to that tension. I didn’t cope well with tension in the house – still don’t.

My initial overeating was a reaction to that tension – to my father’s behavior and to my mother’s reaction to that behavior. I hated my childhood. I don’t remember a happy childhood.

One thing I knew “for sure” was that I would never drink like that. But life doesn’t always come out according to plan.

When I was 22 I married a sickly man.  We had to rush him to the hospital in a “paddy wagon” at least once a month. My life went insane. Over the course of a week, I went from a non-drinker to an alcoholic. Bet that is some kind of record. I remember praying that I would just go to sleep for 20 years, then wake up and everything bad was over.  And in a way, that is exactly what I did.

I am now sober for 21 years. I need to share about that experience because the things that caused the drinking are the same things that caused the eating. But solving the drinking was not enough to solve the overeating.

In my next few blogs, I will share about the drinking and about the recovery – since they are a HUGE part of who I am today.

Another day, another Pound Gained.

Today is Day 1 of my countdown. I’ve done my “eat whatever you want because the diet is starting soon” thing this past week – knew I would – just part of the diet process for me.

Today I will stick to 3 meals and 2 small snacks. No sugar. I will probably spend the next few days in sugar withdrawal – I do so love sugar, and it does so hate me.

So, when did I start my life time love affair with sugar? I was around 8 – not surprising, that was the same time I started to become a bit pudgy as a kid. We lived across the street from a penny candy store. Waiting for traffic to stop, it still only took me less than 60 seconds to get to the center of the universe – the wide selection of tasty treats. With my nickel or dime, I could sneak home (yes my eating was sneaky from the very start), my little stash packed tightly into a small brown bag, and immediately start stuffing it into my mouth.

I don’t think I ever tasted any of it – and that is true even until today. There was just no time for tasting since it wasn’t about the taste, or the satisfaction, or certainly not about hunger. It was about STUFFING – stuffing away my feelings.

My best friend found out she was moving away – a bag of candy could make that pain go away. Kids taunted me in the school playground – perhaps a few long stick pretzels would make it hurt less. My Dad came home drunk last night, stumbled up the stairs, and then made terribly scary noises in the bathroom – definitely hoping taffy would occupy me enough to hide that fear. Pull at that taffy, focus hard on that taffy – maybe I wouldn’t be so miserable. Or, maybe more likely, I would no longer know that I was so miserable.

Just how far down can we really push down those feelings? Are they still there? Will I experience them now as I go through my countdown? I need to be willing to let them surface. Maybe I can handle them now. Maybe the “big girl” can deal with things my poor little girl couldn’t handle.

Please share your experiences with me. I’d be happy to exchange links to any good weight loss websites. If you have a good online OA meeting, I would also like to hear about that.

Strange but true – a huge relationship exits between my overeating and the Spanish Flu in 1918. 

My childhood wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t all good either. In retrospect, my parents really loved me – it just wasn’t at all clear at the time.

My Dad was an active alcoholic. He worked two jobs all week ( and didn’t drink at all) and then he drank all weekend – every weekend. This led to him being a dry drunk all week long followed by two days of coming home late, drunk, and very scary to a small child. All I remember on weekends was him stumbling up the stairs and loud arguments coming out of my parent’s bedroom. During the week, he didn’t drink and was always hyper, nervous, and angry. No one was allowed to talk at the dinner table since he was rushing from one job to another. I felt powerless to change anything.

My mother’s mother died when my mother was 3 years old when the Spanish flu hit hard. My mother never felt loved again since no love could replace the only love that really mattered to her – her mother’s. In so many ways, my mom was emotionally 3 years old until the day she died at age 88. A three year old doesn’t do the best job of mothering. Her way of dealing with me when I didn’t follow orders was to call me names: when I was small – I was called lazy, miserable; when I was a teen I was called a whore. It was just the three year old dealing with life in the best way she knew how. But when you are the child and your mother is calling you names, you just shut down.

I remember thinking that a mother is supposed to love you – if my mother thinks I am so terrible, then it must be true. I must be lower than low. No good. And thus was born a young girl with no self-esteem. Raised by a drunk and a three year old. They were doing the best they could; I even understand why they did what they did – but it wasn’t what I needed.

During my childhood, I had two recurring dreams. Its only recently that I realize what they meant.

In the first dream I was in a car with no brakes, screaming to avoid crashing as the car accelerated down a hill. Now I believe that this dream was expressing my life feeling so out of control. My life was not working and I was powerless to change anything.

In the second recurring dream, I was roller skating and fell and lost my voice. Someone was pursuing me and I wanted to scream so very badly – but I had no voice. Doesn’t take a psych degree to analyze that one – I had no voice in that family.

Somewhere around age 8 I started overeating. I just never stopped.

There was no sound coming out of my mouth – no voice. But my mouth could chew.

I couldn’t control my mom’s wrath or her words; I couldn’t stop my dad from drinking – but I could control what I ate. I could buy junk, focus on it, think about it, eat it, and keep so darn busy doing those things that I didn’t have to focus on everything I couldn’t control.

So my addiction was born somewhere around age 8. I ate to cope. I ate to control. I ate to silence. I ate to speak. And then I stopped learning other ways of coping. I didn’t learn to be physical – since I couldn’t. I didn’t learn to talk things out – since I couldn’t be heard. I just didn’t learn the things I needed to learn.

I’m hoping its not too late to learn those things. I am committed to follow the path of OA. Committed to not eat compulsively. But to do that, I must learn new tools for coping.

I appreciate your comment. I appreciate links to my blog and I would love to link to your site if it relates to any of the topics I cover. Thanks for reading.

This is the countdown – I start my “Great Diet” on Friday. I have been in Prep Mode for the past week. Reading about weight loss, thinking about diet approaches, reflecting on what fat has meant in my life.

This week I was reading an article that reminded me of something really important – I can’t “think” my way through a diet. I can’t prepare for every possibility. Just knowing what caused the overeating will not necessarily stop the overeating.

A deep, profound commitment to “not eat compulsively” comes before everything else. Only when I am eating to live, eating a well balanced food plan – only then will I confront the real feelings that I have managed to eat away.

I’ve been thinking about all the ways I manage to make the “bad feelings” go away – and I must admit that I have recently accelerated my use of all of these techniques. I am avoiding some very real feeling by not allowing myself any quiet time. I have the TV on obsessively when I am home – I need non-stop company. I live alone and I am constantly listening to TV – no matter how mindless it is.

What else? – avoiding real discussions with friends. Keeping things on the surface. I find that I am even having trouble writing in a journal – I am not allowing myself to be in touch with my feelings right now. And fixating on food helps that. I fixate on what to eat, when to eat, why I shouldn’t eat, why I’m going to eat anyway – and I could go on and on.

Whatever am I going to do when I stop overeating on Friday. I don’t know. I will blog. I will blog some more. I will attend some online OA meetings during my eating times – well that would be all the time.

I will be present. I will feel those feelings. I will feel scared and angry and frustrated – and it will all look like food cravings – but I will stick with this confused mass of cravings until I can identify the real feeling. I am scared of this. I am so in my head that I am scared to death to get into my heart. My heart is needy. My heart is scared. My head can deal with all the crap around me, but  – how will my heart survive?

Watched a nutritionist on TV this week who said that all I really needed to do to lose weight was to eat open faced sandwiches instead of complete sandwiches and the weight would just fall off of me.

Oh, Pa-leez!

That assumes I eat normally – every day I eat exactly the same amount of food. So I can fool myself into losing tons of weight by just leaving off that one slice of bread a day. Clearly, this nutritionist has never had a binge. Has never put ten pounds on in a week. Certainly does not have an issue with weight.

I am going to start on some diet program on the day after Thanksgiving, and it will involve a lot more than leaving out one slice of bread. I need to change my entire life. I need to change the way I eat, I need to change the reasons I eat, I need to change my brain, I need to change my emotions, and, well – I don’t even eat sandwiches.

You’ll quickly notice that this blog isn’t “chronological.” I am trying to find the root of my eating. Or, more truthfully, the roots. I’ve already expressed my associations of thin with misery. But my overeating didn’t start with my love life – it started in my childhood and I will talk about that in my next few blogs.

My childhood is where I started overeating – and I have some clues. Hopefully, as I blog, my own history will become clearer to me, I know the “facts” but the real issues start to come up from my soul as I write. Thanks, readers, for joining me and supporting me in this voyage.

I mentioned that I had gotten thin two times – and on both occasions, I had my heart broken. In my last post, I talked about my college love. When that love went away, I started my pattern of gaining weight – gaining from disappointment of what happened and gaining from fear of falling in love again.

I fell in love again about seven years ago – a deep, true love. A love I thought would last forever. As I learned to trust this love, as I came to believe that he was a really good person, I gradually allowed myself to fall deeply in love and I allowed myself to lose weight. I never got “skinny” again, but I did get quite pretty. This time I was a little more aware of how I really looked – not totally, but a little more. I had some photos taken at a photographer and I did take the pictures to a friend and ask, “Is that what I really look like?” The picture was really pretty, and I was just hoping that I really did look like that.

The love affair lasted a few years.  After staying with me for quite some time, one day he had to go back to his home to take care of some medical problems and his coverage was only good in a different state. I expected him to be back in 2 weeks – he never came back. After he returned home, he realized that he needed to stay there since his son was young and it wasn’t really good for him to be so far away. He was right. I understood. But someone jerked the heart right out of my body. I also had a son and I couldn’t move across the country, so we were stuck – two lovers with a continent between us.

One more time – I get thin, my heart gets broken.  Did I learn that I could have a great love? No – what I really learned was that when I get thin, I risk having my heart jerked out of my body.

So these are my thin lessons – can they be overcome? Can I get past these associations of love and loss? These are issues I must confront and deal with if I am ever to allow myself to lose weight.

Please post your comments, share your stories, and subscribe to this blog by email, if you like. Thank you.

- Hidden Away

In the past, I have foolishly decided to start a food plan right before a Holiday – a perfect set-up for failure. This time I am using the week before Thanksgiving to think about my life, to feel emotions, to better understand myself and then start a new food plan on the day after Thanksgiving.

I am taking this week before Thanksgiving to reflect on my life – to start to think about what purpose the weight serves in my life. It must be doing something positive for me or I wouldn’t be so attached to it.

When I think back on my life, I was thin ( or thin for me) at two times in my life. When I went to college, I lost a lot of weight, but I was still heavy. Then a handsome young man came into my life. I was so thrilled to be with this guy that I was able to shed the last 30 pounds – the 30 pounds that made the difference between being chunky and being thin. And I was able to stay that way for 5 years. During those 5 very happy years, I was with this handsome man and I was absolutely head-over-heels in love. But two things were brewing under the surface that eventually put an end to this beautiful body.

The first thing problem brewing was self image. My great love had three beautiful sisters – no surprise since he was so handsome. And every time I was with his family, I felt fat and ugly. I felt huge compared to them. I felt dumpy. I felt fat. It really didn’t matter that I was truthfully not fat at all, because fat is what you think you are, not what others see. It is much easier to diet to keep yourself beautiful than it is to diet to keep yourself “less fat” – in my eyes, I was not beautiful – I was only less fat than I used to be. In my mind, I was still huge compared to the lovely sisters. But what was realty? Now, years later, I look at my college pictures and see a beautiful woman – usually in the arms of a handsome young man. Who was she? I still find it hard to believe that the gorgeous woman in those pictures was me. Why, oh why, did I have no idea that I was beautiful? Why didn’t I see her? Why did I think she was so fat when she was really so very beautiful? Self-image was destroying me.

But then the second thing was even more significant. In my senior year I got engaged to the love of my life. But meddling parents – both his and mine – destroyed the engagement. And my Mom convinced me that if he wouldn’t marry me, then he surely didn’t love me. Add that mantra to my own inner mind chatter of how I looked, and I was destroyed. Idiot that I was, I listened to my Mom and I came to believe that he didn’t LOVE ME ENOUGH. This was a theme earlier in my life – never loved enough. Even though this man was the great love of my life, I broke off our relationship. I ended something beautiful and I destroyed something deep inside of me. And, truthfully, I never got over it.

So here I was at my thinnest – in a picture I was clearly thin and beautiful. But I was more miserable than I have ever been in my life. The love of my life was taken from me – or I threw it away. But I learned something that has followed me – I learned that being thin brought severe pain into my life. It brought pain so deep that I suffered from it for years. Being fat never brought pain this deep into my life. Being fat was a slow throbbing pain – being thin and losing my love was a sharp pain with no cure.

I need to remember these early associations of fat and pain if I am to work my way past them. I need to struggle with the confused self-image I had when I was thin. I need to work my way through these early “truths” if I am to find my motivation to shed the weight now.

Please leave comments with your truths. Sharing helps us find our own way.