"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." Martin Luther King 

I'm avoiding writing in my blog. I'm not sure why but part of my Zen practice is to commit to something, almost for the sake of seeing who you 'become' (what lesser known part of you appears) when you don't want to keep, or can't even remember (!) your commitment. I committed to the blog this last time to take note of the feelings that arise as I relinquish food and eating patterns to excess, and I can't say why I'm turning away today from writing about it.

I suppose there is a part of me that wants to think my urge to overeat doesn't exist when I'm not struggling with it, and of course in Zen practice that is absolutely the truth. Suffering cannot exist in the present because when we are present we are attending as fully as possible to our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Though those might not always feel good or in sync, we are usually able to take them for what they are and not so much see them as an enemy tide sweeping us into whatever unpleasantness conditioned mind would have us lunge toward.

Wishing there were more food on my plate is not in and of itself a crisis. Believing I "deserve" more and that I can't resist the call toward more tips the balance of contentment and pain toward suffering. And the endless debate of "I know I shouldn't but I can't resist," is the ultimate stronghold for suffering because we can spend a lifetime believing that that debate is something other than a pointless sham, designed to pull us out of present awareness into an unresolvable, futile conversation-- a thinly veiled, if very compelling, "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

I now write down what I eat each day and email it to my sponsor. Some folks commit to what they are going to eat ahead of time and send or call that in to their sponsors. I chose the former because that seemed more do-able and it has the benefit of helping me really see what I eat and, even more illuminating how. Many things have been predictable, some have caught me by complete surprise. The revelation that I'm not in need of more than 3 meals a day is huge and strikes me as funny all at the same time. I was so sure I needed a snack between lunch and dinner but that snack was a small meal (!). I noticed instead that having an actual snack, in the form of an apple or the fruit, is more than sufficient to last until a dinner at most any hour.

The largest surprise has been the depth of what I am forced to call affection for food. I am at turns grateful for the realization and embarrassed that something inanimate and eventually deadly when abused can have become an object of adoration for me when I have so much love in my life and within myself. Seeing all of this clearly, without what's called a food fog, is more than anything joy producing because I no longer feel led down the garden path of delusion that eating out of control will solve some sort of emotional deprivation in my current or prior experience and that feels like the way out of emotional bondage. I suppose it's not unlike being in an abusive relationship and then 'one day' waking up to the knowledge that you do not have to keep participating and the future though not certain, is sure to be brighter than the past with this knowledge.

Avoiding writing these things down provides another decoy to really seeing, which of course is the path toward true freedom. Both my 12-step program and my Zen practice speak of 'the key' as willingness. While those keys abound, I figure I'm good.

"It is not my experience that we are here to fix the world, that we are here to change anything at all.  I think we are here so the world can change us.  And if part of that change is that the suffering of the world moves us compassion, to awareness, to sympathy, to love, that is a very good thing." Cheri Huber

Moment by Moment

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen

The horrible for me is realizing I could stand to lose at least 50-70 pounds and the miserable is standing on the scale after an eternity of what feels like the worst deprivation ever, lasting 1 month total, to find out I'd shed exactly seven of those unneeded pounds. The only reason I'm not flooded with self-hating thoughts regarding what a failure I both feel like and no doubt will turn out to be as I try to quench a tsunami like desire to over eat, is that I'm so busy remembering to phone my sponsor and figure out what vegetable or how much salad I need to make to fill half my plate that I don't have inordinate amounts of time left over for anything else. That and I lie down to go to sleep and become riddled with anxiety that even without the excess poundage, I'll somehow starve between dinner and breakfast (this I have come to learn is a common fear amongst overeaters!).

All in all, I am getting through, one day, one meal at a time as the encouragement often. goes. What I'm seeing is how very much free access to food and a perceived need to eat throughout the day, pervades my identity. So  many times I've reached for something I wasn't hungry for and even stopped to ask myself why I think I'm doing 'this'. The answer quite often was 'It's who I am. It's what I do."

I just completed a food history, something it never occurred to me to do in easily 25 years of making concerted constructive efforts to reduce the need to overeat. I don't know why I find it surprising how important I've made eating but it has infused every ordinary and extraordinary breath I've taken as long as I can remember.

I love knowing this and really seeing this as I work at not needing to eat when I'm not the slightest bit hungry, yet I am well aware of this appalled aspect of myself that is horrified the extent to which what I think I need is so different from the fact of the matter. In addition to the revelatory knowledge that very little starving takes place between those who get a nutritive dinner and breakfast the next morning, it has also come as a shock that one can subsist on 3 moderate meals and that if a snack is in order, the traditional apple, banana or other type of fruit can suffice, even satisfy any biological hunger that might arise. You couldn't provide me more shocking data if you told me not only is Elvis alive, but I am he. (And by the way, can you prove I'm not?)

"The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it." Emerson

Fruit of My Labor

"It's good to do uncomfortable things. It's weight training for life."
— Anne Lamott (Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

I can't describe this last month in simple terms. I resumed going to Overeaters Anonymous meetings after an 18 year absence. In 12-step terms, that's some relapse. "Why'd I leave?" I've been asking myself. That alternates with the more timely, "Why am I back?" Incidentally, when I was overwhelmed by the emotions associated with how tethered a nursing mom feels toward her new infant, I'd often wonder why women had second babies. Who could know how life would change with one, but to go back for more?

 

I left OA because I wanted to try a more moderate way of eating, sometimes referred to as 'demand feeding'. Back in the early 90's there weren't the wide range of food plans in writing available that there are now so that had something to do with feeling I needed to go elsewhere. Honestly, though, I think I was just tired of dragging myself to 2 or 3 meetings a week on top of 4 days of psychotherapy, work, and all else that was going on at the time. I was in the process of buying my first home and, unbeknownst to me, about to get pregnant.

 

I had been thinking this over a while because my weight has ballooned and binging in the form of all night grazing is a big part of my life. I happened upon an excerpt from a book called Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore by Rachael Brownell about her own path to AA and couldn't put it down. I know that feeling of being insatiable for something I deep down realize can't be quelled by excess versus the reality of feeling like stopping isn't an option.

I put a little post-it note in the back of her book when it arrived into the library that read "OA 24" indicating a challenge to myself to attend an OA meeting within 24 hours of finishing up the book. The weeks leading up to the end of the book (as if I couldn't go anytime I wanted!) had me obsessively reading and re-reading the online schedule of meetings in case today or tomorrow 'happenned to be the day'.

The night I selected to attend, 24 hours upon finishing Rachael Brownell's book, as promised (to whom? to what?) brought with it a driving rain. The rigid rulemaker in me didn't care and off 'we' (rigid rulemaker and me) the 25 miles to the meeting, driving in circles as raindrops pelted the car, trying to make out the street number in the church driveway where the meeting was held.

It was a 'Big Book Study,' referring to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous used in most 12-step programs. I nervously took my seat along side one of 2 8-foot 'craft' tables pushed together, and was amazed at how little and how much had changed all at once. Cross talk is discouraged but members had big smiles for me, and it was amazing how welcoming people could be just hearing that I was a newcomer, returning to meetings.

Everyone at the table takes turns reading from one to three paragraphs in the big, blue book, that is the cornerstone of AA, and is now in its 4th edition. People can then share for up to 3 minutes, moderated by a timer, on anything they have read or anything at all. No one cuts them off when the timer beeps. The meeting secretary just resets the timer for 3-minute increments until the speaker winds down.

I don't remember what I said exactly, but I did share that I was returning after a 20 year absence. I remember being amazed that the meeting secretary had lost somewhere around 100 pounds, and was in another 12-step program, in addition to OA. I also remember coming home and immediately heading to the pantry to eat-- as much to calm the rush of adrenaline that accompanied my excitement in feeling so welcomed, as out of the well worn habit of night eating to which I was quite wedded.

So I've been going to a month of meetings and somehow find myself with a sponsor, a food plan, and a 7 pound weight loss. I didn't try for any of those things, they just seemed to evolve from the decision to incorporate meetings regularly and sanely into my schedule. The most helpful part of it all, is the sense of feeling completely in sync with everyone I encounter, regardless of their size or current ability to suspend their compulsive habits. And what's making this all hang together is the 'promise' that this can and should be faced *at most* one day at a time.

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'" Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird