This morning, after eating my fabulously satisfying, abstinent, and now “usual” breakfast, I found myself looking back at some of my relapses and how they happened. I wondered, almost aloud, “Why this is now so easy?”

Abstinence hasn’t always been like this? So how is it that I am feeling at peace with my relationship with food almost as though by accident? What is different this time?

I’ve long known that my four trouble foods are sugar, starch, salt, and grease…preferably in combination! I would announce this at meetings, laughing at myself, and people who could identify chuckled with me. But I knew it wasn’t funny because even after surgery those foods called my name as clearly as the voice of my mom when I was a child. Come to think of it, my Mom’s voice and my memories of her seem permanently blended into my relationship with food. I couldn’t remove them any more than I can remove the caffeine from a fresh pot of coffee. Anyone with food memories knows that they evoke feelings, seemingly out of nowhere, and they need not make sense.

With OA’s help, though, we don’t have to eat over them anymore.

Someone who knows me and at least part of my history might read this and say “but she had weight loss surgery, shouldn’t her relationship with food been changed by it?” A valid question. I had sleeve surgery where ¾ of my stomach was removed, I can no longer eat a lot of food at once. My surgery was in 2013, and I lost a great deal of weight. Yet by 2016 I had regained all but a few pounds. For me, food addiction and compulsive eating are about more, next, and else. My surgery removed the MORE component of any particular meal…and yet I found I could eat compulsively in smaller quantities. The NEXT and ELSE aspects of my lifelong relationship with food were still alive and thriving inside my mind. If I waited 20 minutes or so after eating my small meal, I was hungry again, and hungry or not, I would find myself grazing again.  And, sadly, gaining weight AGAIN.

I hated being 280 pounds. I hated being 250 pounds. Nonetheless I found myself having weight loss surgery at nearly 70 years old, going from 280 pounds to 139 then back up to 246. I suffered with daily pain in my knees, hips, and feet. I had shattered my right ankle in a fall in 2008, and still have screws and a plate in it. As I gained and gained, the pain in that ankle grew and grew. All this after bariatric surgery! Was I hopeless?

I was hopeless without OA, but I returned and found the hope I’d lost.

I’ve shed 92 pounds since the summer of 2016, this time in program. It seems impossible that I was once 279.75 pounds—that I was once bulging out of size 3X clothing but now wearing clothing in single-digit sizes. I know I don’t want to relapse again, but I didn’t want to relapse in the year 2000 either. So as I reflected after my abstinent breakfast, it seemed like a good idea to look for the common denominator, the thing that seems to block me from understanding of the concept that my choices have consequences.

It turns out that I have been the personification of the Jaywalker in the Big Book. I have repeatedly tried the same, desperate, fatal action of compulsive eating, hoping that this time it would work and solve all my problems. Now, after relapse, surgery, and a lifetime of experience with compulsive eating, I know that I must replace compulsive eating with a relationship with a Higher Power if I’m going to be happy, joyous, and free in OA.