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Vibha: My Story

My story is about a love-hate relationship with food. I adored it for the way it made me feel, and I hated it when it betrayed me and enslaved me. First it was my friend. Then it was my only friend and, finally, for many years it was my abuser and owner. My story is about the progression of the disease of compulsive overeating, including the behavior around eating and my powerlessness to control that behavior, despite the worsening consequences. This disease is 3-fold: physical, emotional and spiritual. On all 3 levels it progressed and I deteriorated.

Physically, the progression of the behavior around eating went something like this: loving food, overeating, sneaking food and then stealing food. By the end, I had lost all control of what food, how much of it, when and how often I would eat. My tolerance for volume-eating junk food—food of almost no nutritional value (refined flour, sugar and fat)—increased to the point where one bite of any food would trigger a binge lasting 4 hours or until I passed out. Some examples follow:

1. As a child I loved food. My mom was a good cook and, for her, food was love. Much like a normal eater, eating made me feel loved and I sought that feeling from the food for years and still do. But I was not a normal eater. By age 4, I was already an overeater: in a supermarket when my mother handed me a wedge of dairy to put in the wagon, much to her surprise I ate the whole thing.
2. As an older child, I began to sneak food, esp. carbohydrates. My father was in the sweets business and our garage was full of his samples. I remember sneaking them often. I also remember stealing change from my mother's purse and going to the corner store to buy a certain sweet. My interest in sweets increased over time. I went to a local movie theater every week and still remember the sweets there but not a single movie.
3. As a pre-teen the compulsive overeating was more frequent. Daily after school and often after dinner, too, I would "snack" on carbohydrates from a special kitchen drawer.

My pre-teen years marked the beginning of trying to control my intake of food and my powerlessness to do so, despite the worsening consequences. From my pre-teens to adulthood, my main attempts centered around dieting and fasting. As the disease progressed, I added other more bizarre methods which I will mention later. Some examples follow:

1. Like most pre-teens, I was concerned with peer-group acceptance and body image, so when I gained weight from all the snacking, I began to feel inferior to my peers. This is when I also began to use food as a drug in order to medicate these painful feelings. The effect the food had on my mood was good initially but bad eventually, creating more weight-gain and shame.
2. In the fourth grade, my mom had to be hospitalized for a week or so, and we had a neighbor lady stay with us and cook. She was large; her whole family was obese. She cooked differently from my mom: lots more carbs. I believe my disease progressed during that week because, after she left, I noticed that the compulsion to overeat carbs was stronger.
3. As a teenager, dieting became a way of life and so did the binging and the shame among peers. I would have no breakfast and only a small dairy item for lunch. But nearly every night I binged on frozen carb, and every morning woke up sick and hung over. I began to isolate both in school and out, and gradually became depressed, angry and hopeless. Lonely at school and hating my parents, I turned to the food more desperately, and of course it tightened its chains.
4. In my freshman year of college, dieting shifted from eating minimal low-calorie foods to not eating anything all day, followed by nightly bingeing on food left on trays by students. I got sick and paranoid. I had a boyfriend, to whom I gave all my dorm food, but had no other friends and could do little or no school work.
5. As a sophomore, my boyfriend and I got an apartment off-campus where the starve-binge mode swung back to compulsive overeating. I became still less able to socialize or study. Too paranoid even to attend class, I dropped out of college in the middle of the second semester.
6. Returning home to live with my parents who were ashamed of my academic failure and embarrassed about what the neighbors were undoubtedly saying, I sank deeper into compulsive overeating and hopelessness. In those days there was no information available about the connection between depression and food addiction, and so my parents arranged to have me committed to a mental institution. But I ran away from home.

As a young adult, the attempt to control my intake of food by dieting took many forms: eating only a quarter-pound of ground beef at midnight, eating huge potfuls of low-calorie soup, eating only raw foods, eating macrobiotically, eating only "healthy" food from the co-op. In between these "meals," I was always fighting off the urge to eat, and after eating these meals I always wanted more. I usually found that, instead of satisfying the urge to eat, eating made the urge irresistibly stronger. And the binges got worse.

Years later, I tried other more extreme measures to eat less. I paid doctors well for supplements and vitamin B-12 shots to curb my appetite. Whenever craving arose, I stood on line to get a painful shot. I moved my family to a motel which had no kitchen, believing that I would be safe from the food, but I bought a hotplate and binged anyway. I left my family to go to India to get help from a guru but learned to eat bulimically there and got sicker. At English-speaking AA and NA meetings there, the underfed locals looked at me incredulously when I reported that I couldn't stop eating. I tried having no food in the house, giving my money to a friend, but whenever craving arose, I would always eat and eat and eat.

In addition to the physical progression of the disease, there was emotional and spiritual progression as well. Emotionally, the progression was from low self-esteem to shame and self-loathing. I acted out by isolating and harboring fear, resentment and jealousy. When I did interact with people I was indirect and dishonest, people-pleasing and passive-aggressive. Most of my thoughts, feelings and actions were fear-based, and I felt sad and angry all the time for believing that I wasn't good enough and didn't belong. The blood-sugar swings created mood swings and I was volatile and unpredictable: manic, depressed, overly trusting, paranoid. I over-controlled and abandoned my children and felt guilty about that, medicating the guilt with food and other addictions. By the end, I had estranged myself from family and friends; I was on welfare as a terrible single mother caught in the daily loop of craving, overeating, remorse and terror.

Spiritually, there was the progression from sneaking to stealing, from shame to degradation, from depression to despair. There was a wider gap between my values and my actions. By the end I was eating only "garbage," unable to feed my son, lying to food banks to get free food. Eating so much food so fast—even food I didn't like (burnt, frozen, rotten)—I had sunk to a place where food was no longer food and what I was doing was no longer eating. It was some kind of fiendish frenzy of ingesting that resembled its opposite: regurgitating. The confusion and sorrow over this moral bankruptcy compounded by a feeling of separation from G-d was the dark before the dawn.

Before I found the solution in Greysheet Anonymous, a friend took me to some meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and my attempts at control shifted from dieting to fasting. What I heard at the meetings is that for an alcoholic to stay sober, he needs to stay away from the first drink. I decided that if I stayed away from the first bite of food, I would be safe from the deadly binges, and so for the next few years, I spent every day trying hard to postpone the first bite. And by every night the craving exploded into full-scale bingeing.

Then I discovered fasting. By postponing the first bite for days and weeks, I was able thru fasting to get temporary relief from craving and to lose weight as well. I would learn in Greysheet about an easier softer way to accomplish these things over the long-term.

Typically, by the third day of a fast, most of the craving would be gone. But to keep it away, I did a dangerous thing every day: I swam out into the cold ocean far beyond the waves. If I got cold enough and scared enough, I wouldn't want to eat for the rest of the day. Every one of my fasts was longer than the previous one, and every one was broken compulsively, and followed by an increase in the compulsion to eat foods of worse quality in greater quantities. In this phase, what was added was outright stealing of food from supermarkets and also eating food out of dumpsters.

By now, I could no longer diet. It was hard not to overeat once I started eating anything - even something dietetic. Fasting was the only way. What I did several times to enable me to fast was to let a homeless, usually drug-addicted person move in with me and my family in exchange for cooking for my family. That way I would not be exposed to the temptation of the food.

Putting my family at risk shows the desperate, insane and self-centered nature of my thinking, but my family was already at risk with me there! Whenever the compulsion sabotaged the fast, I made the homeless person leave. And I would binge. The urge to eat compulsively was stronger than my maternal urge to feed my children. When my son got to be about 9 years old, I gave him money to eat out. I gave him his own cupboard with a combination padlock on it, but would somehow manage to get his food.

After a 28-day fast I ate a bagful of large citrus fruit and had my first seizure. For the next 15 years I took an anti-seizure medication that made me nearly comatose. I was already a zombie from the food; now I was barely here in spirit. I felt like a member of the walking dead, an exile from humanity. But all that has changed.

During this phase of alternating long fasts with longer periods of bingeing, my brain was affected. Social phobia increased and my cognitive abilities declined. There was difficulty thinking and reading. I couldn't understand what people were saying to me, so I waited until they stopped talking and then nodded my head. There was the rise of magical thinking: believing that my Higher Power was guiding me through signs.

How I Found GreySheet:

After the seizure I thought I was cured, but found myself bingeing again worse than ever. So, I left my parents' home and moved for some reason to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to resume fasting while taking the anti-seizure medication. On the eleventh day, when I ate compulsively, I went into the ice-cold ocean and felt my heart stop beating for a second. That sobered me and I realized that I could no longer fast and I also could not eat safely.

This was my "bottom," my giving up, and the very next day I was Twelve-Stepped: a member of the Greysheet community appeared out of nowhere and told me about the Greysheet solution to food addiction. I went to my first meeting and—miracle of miracles—got abstinent. I was able to plan 3 meals, commit them to my sponsor, and not eat in between those meals. There was no more struggle, only surrender. I was defeated. The craving was removed instantly and I knew an amazing freedom from food.

Years later, after relapsing for 9 years and coming back, I can report that relief from this merciless compulsion is possible over the long-term. Like so many others who have gone before me, I am experiencing the ongoing recovery on all 3 levels: physical, emotional and spiritual, one day at a time.

How Greysheet Helps Me:

Thanks to the Greysheet program, I learned that I have a physical and mental problem with a spiritual solution. My main problem wasn't weight or emotional issues. Like thousands of others, I have an allergy to carbohydrate - to the foods that alcohol is made of - grain, sugar and yeast. This allergy is physical and mental. Just as a sip triggers the craving in an alcoholic, so does one bite trigger the craving in me. This craving manifests as a mental obsession (always thinking about it, wanting it, regretting having eaten it) and a physical compulsion (being unable to resist the desire to eat, and having begun eating, being unable to stop).

Unlike most weight-loss programs, the Greysheet program addresses the craving. It gives me a long list of foods that are not likely to trigger me, and it tells me the amounts to eat so that I can feel full and nourished and lose weight at a safe rate. It teaches me the difference between control and surrender, wherein lies the spiritual solution.

I learned that my whole life's failure at controlling the food is not a moral issue, does not mean I'm a bad person. I have a disease whereby carbohydrate and unmeasured food trigger the craving "beyond human aid."

It is the power greater than myself in the Greysheet program that empowers me to abstain from my trigger foods, to weigh and measure 3 meals a day off the Greysheet with nothing in between but coffee, tea, or diet soda. By myself I am still powerless over food today, but thanks to the power of recovery that comes through this program (my sponsor, meetings, phone calls, on-line support, our literature and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous), I don't have to eat compulsively no matter what, one day at a time.

There is great medicine in our meetings, and we welcome anyone who wants to stop eating compulsively.