Tag Archives: disease of the mind

Step of the Month: Obstinance or Abstinence?

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2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Are we going to be happy or are we going to be right? Perhaps there’s no situation where this question comes into sharper focus than in Step Two. On the happy hand, we are desperate to relieve the misery of compulsive eating. On the “right” hand…there’s all the rest of our thinking.

On the happy side of things, we see others in OA whose lives do not revolve around food, who seem well-adjusted to living a food-sober life. We like what we see in them. They seem to enjoy their lives and have found contentedness. They have the ability to say what they mean and mean what they say. They don’t shirk from responsibilities, and they don’t need to self-medicate with food to meet what life throws at them. They have very little internal drama about food, people, and life.

The rest of our thinking, it turns out, is dishonest. Our minds are diseased and bear down on us. Those people are not really that nice. I could never do what they’ve done. I couldn’t live without my foods. And here’s the big two lies our brains tell us:

  • God, if there even is one, won’t help me anyway.
  • I should be able to do this myself.

We can obstinately keep on believing these untruths if we want to, but if we are food addicts, we won’t be able to abstain from food if we do. So let’s pick apart these two falsehoods for a moment.

God, if there even is one, won’t help me anyway.

If we believe in a Higher Power and believe it won’t help us, then what’s the point of that belief in the first place? We might as well believe in no god because it’s really the same difference. And in OA we don’t have to believe in a godhead. We can define our Higher Power as “Gift of Desperation,” “Good Orderly Discipline,” or “Group of (food) Drunks.” In any of those, we lean on the power of the fellowship of OA to help us change, recognizing that there is something special, spiritual, and powerful about two or more compulsive eaters working together to solve their common problem.

 

Also, if we believe there is a god who helps others but won’t help us, then we need a big reality check. Are we really so uniquely broken that we don’t deserve what other OAs have gotten? Are we really so uniquely broken that a powerful God won’t help us…and just not us? Seriously? We need to remind our brains of how unhinged our thinking has become and stop putting ourselves in the company of the worst monsters of history. We’re not that special and not even one-thousandth as bad as our disease tells us we are.

I should be able to do this myself.

If we coulda, we woulda. But we’ve been programmed from birth to avoid seeking help. We don’t want to trouble anyone else with our problem. We just need to soldier on and keep at it, suffering in silence, and maybe someday figuring it out. Getting help means admitting weakness and showing vulnerability, and that’s a fate possibly worse than any other.

There’s just two words for that: GET REAL!

We’ve never, ever been able to do anything about our eating. Some of us have spent forty, fifty, sixty years in a constant war with food obsession. Why will tomorrow be any different? Is admitting our failure and our problem so painful to us that we’d rather endure the misery of our disease until we die?

And this is what’s so hard about food addiction. We don’t even know that our minds have been turned against us by this disease! We have disordered thinking, an insanity around food. Our brains are actively trying to kill us. It is this illness that tells us that our pride is more important than our recovery. That we’d rather be “right” than happy…when in reality we are wrong anyway. Dead wrong.

The reality is that our obstinate thinking is all a symptom of our illness. Another reality is that OA and the Higher Power we find there will allow us to lead a normal, abstinent, and happy life. But we must set aside our pride, our terminal uniqueness, and our doubt. Once we know we are compulsive eaters, we must drop our carefully crafted facade and let ourselves appear weak and vulnerable to ourselves. Because we are the only ones we’re fooling.

10 ways to know if you are obsessing about food

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Are you really obsessed with food and powerless over it? Here are ten common forms of obsessive thinking about food that many OA members have experienced. If you’ve experienced these or similar thinking, you may be in the grip of the obsession with food.

1. Moments after finishing one meal, you begin thinking about the next

You arrive at work at 9:00, having just tossed down a quick breakfast. For the next several hours, you fixate on what you’ll get for lunch. The minutes tick away. You tell yourself you’ll wait until 1:00, but at 12:15, you say “screw it” and yank the takeout menu from the top drawer of your desk….

2. Anytime you have a strong feeling (happy, mad, sad, glad), you get the urge to eat

The Red Sox win! Time to eat. My daughter has filed for divorce. Time to eat. The cable is on the fritz again. Time to eat. My doctor called, and the diabetes hasn’t gotten as bad as I’d feared. Time to eat.

3. Food thoughts pop unbidden into your mind throughout the day and over time

The deadline for that report is the end of the day. You’re about halfway done. This section is just killing you. Then this thought: Oh, remember that time in Denver when I had that dessert with….

4. The same foods or food types dominate your thinking

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5. You rationalize food behaviors

“Just because my blood sugar is at dangerous levels doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have a little fun. My doctor is such wet blanket. He’d eat too if he had to deal with what I deal with. What’s one little bite going to do to me anyway. I’m making too much of this.”

6. Ultimately, you always lose the argument with yourself about your eating

  • Good Self: Don’t eat that last helping that’s in the dish. You know it’s just going to make you fatter.
  • Bad Self: But it’s good. You deserve a treat.
  • Good Self: Think about how much more exercise or dieting you’d have to do to get rid of it.
  • Bad Self: Like you’ve worried about it lately, anyway?
  • Good Self: And your knees always hurt, and your back hurts, and your neck hurts.
  • Bad Self: Exactly, so just have a bite and we’ll take away the pain for a few moments.

7. The idea of going without certain foods creates a visceral reaction of fear or anger

Something is upside down if life wouldn’t be worth living without a favorite food.

8. You often plan elaborate meals months in advance, sometimes even for fantasy meals that will never happen

And you’re not a chef, caterer, wedding planner, or other culinary or event-planning professional.

9. Passing a convenience store triggers you to stop and buy food

Our dealer is on every corner and even has signs inviting us in. But we don’t really need those signs because we know exactly where the store keeps the goodies we want need.

10. Pushing away a half-eaten plate seems utterly foreign

She’s not going to finish that? Is she ill? What planet is she from? If she’s not going to eat, maybe I can.

11. I’ll never get skinny—I might as well just keep eating my face off

There’s a lot truth here. We likely never will get the body we want when our mind constantly thinks about food. That’s because we can’t fix ourselves. We can’t outwit our own diseased minds.

This is just a selection of the kinds of thinking we hear about in OA meetings all the time. These old tapes run endlessly in our minds while we remain in the throes of compulsive eating.

But there is a solution.

The 12 Steps of OA provide relief from the daily slog of trying to think ourselves out of a disease that works through our own minds. With OA’s help we can eat like a normal person, one day at a time.