Profile of A Member of OA
Name: Kevin
Residence: Kihei, Maui
Sex: Male
Age: 46
Type: Compulsive Overeater
Abstinence Date: Nov 8, 2000
Top Weight: 335
Maintaining Weight Loss: 110 pounds
Maintained for: 3.5 years

Hi. My name is Kevin and I’m a compulsive overeater....

The first time I can remember being called “fat” was when I was 9 years old. The youngest of a dysfunctional family of five, food became my anchor in a sea of troubled family emotions. Early on, my brother and sister learned it made them powerful to taunt me for being fat. Looking back through family photographs, I realize now, that at 9 years old, I wasn’t obese at all. But somehow, I swallowed their bait and latched onto the role as family scapegoat.  The emotional impact of being the brunt of their ridicule, made me pack on 35 extra pounds by the time I hit puberty.

My mother hustled me in episodes of shame and recrimination off to “husky” specialty stores to cover my swelling body. In desperation, my mother’s doctor put me on Benzedrine by 6^th grade. It was 1970. My elementary school diet made me the only kid in elementary school with permission to walk home on his lunch period. I was 12. I was a star performer and dropped 30 pounds on broiled fish, sugar-free Jell-0 and Tab that year but unfortunately, when the diet pills stopped, I ballooned right back up—with interest.  By 13, my destiny as a compulsive overeater was already set into motion.

My childhood was troubled and I remember hiding out in food, taking my allowance and buying chips, candy bars and sodas to binge and escape reality. As I grew fatter the teasing got worse. My siblings took to physical and verbal abuse. To quell the anguish, I’d buy a “six pack” of Snicker’s bars and freeze them, and proceed to zone out on episodes of “Dark Shadows” and “Bewitched” while eating all six bars, downed with soda and chips until they were all gone. I’d eat until my stomach hurt and could hardly move. Then I’d get up and eat some more. I felt insane, but didn’t know what to do, or how to stop.

One time I threw up and my father scolded me for it. “You’re such a glutton. You pig! Look what you’ve done! Now clean it up!!” he grimaced. Miserable, and lost, I swabbed the floor as he looked on, and went to my room crying.  I vowed not to eat like that again. Of course, by the next day, the anxiety of being the fat kid in school, the youngest of three kids with little parental intervention brought me right back to bingeing again. I’d often fall asleep after bingeing and wake up at 2 in the morning to cook food while everyone was asleep. While I waited for the food to be done, I’d stare in the mirror at my body, horrified by what I had become. Huge red stretch marks erupted on my belly and arms. I was out of control. Why couldn’t I just stop? What was wrong with me? I was 14.

By the summer between 8^th and 9^th’ grade I was ready to accept one of the many “weight loss bribes” my parents concocted for me. I felt like I was on “Let’s Make a Deal!” They opened with, “How about a whole brand new wardrobe!? Or one dollar per pound?”  I took door number one, figuring I could spend more than $70 on clothes. I lost 70 pounds in 70 days on the Opti-Fast diet.  For the first time off of diet pills, I got to my “goal weight”. Consider the irony, that society thinks fat people lack will power. How can that be? Not one bite of solid food passed my lips for over two months! One ounce of liquid cherry flavored protein syrup, five times a day, is all I consumed. In hindsight I know that what obese people lack not will power. It’s an education. I wish I knew then what OA has taught me now.  But I also know that if I didn’t go through every step of that rocky past, I wouldn’t have attained the drive to succeed that I needed to become abstinent.

When I returned to school that fall, I expected everyone to be surprised and thrilled to see the “new” me. When no one even said so much as “hello” during first period, in disappointment I turned to one of my good friends and asked why. I remember the look of shock and surprise on her face when she recognized my voice and realized it was actually ME! I had changed so much, no one had even recognized me. They all thought I was a “new kid” in school.

Unfortunately as we know now, the Opti-Fast diet doomed me for failure from the beginning. I was destined to experience the “incomprehensible shame and demoralization” they warn us about in OA. I remember the high school band director called me into his office once. After I had put back on 40 of the pounds I had lost, he pleaded with me, “Why? Why can’t you just stop?!” I didn’t have an answer for him. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know why I couldn’t.

I figured somehow I was just weak, that I didn’t have self control like other people. I gained back all 70 pounds plus interest. Imagine the shame as I exploded out of my brand new “skinny” wardrobe right in front of the 9^th grade class to became fatter than I ever was before! So fat in fact, that they couldn’t find a marching band uniform large enough to fit me. At sixteen I was sporting a size 46 waist. My mom had to rip the seams of the largest uniform and install safety pins on the sides so that I wouldn’t burst out of it.

I gave up any hope of ever losing weight on my own.  By college, I had discovered more adult alternatives to eating such as smoking cigarettes or taking the edge off with booze in stead of pizza. I was living in Monterey, California, world headquarters for one of the more popular “herbal shake” meal replacement diets. I tried it and lost about 30 pounds, not thin, mind you, but I had attained “mid-zone” acceptance. I even became a distributor! With newfound reprieve, I threw myself into college social-life and even became a nightclub singer. Ah the 80’s! Where alcohol consumption was rampant.  Cocaine was considered a “designer” drug for the rich and status-conscious.

I was able to maintain my not-so-obese weight though alcohol, drug use and smoking a pack and a half of Benson & Hedges a day. It seemed that my entire life was built around how to manage the ever lurking, “fat monster” hidden inside of me, struggling like hell to emerge again at a moment’s notice. I was living in terror that the monster could return and take hold of me at any moment. I was afraid of food. Afraid to eat. Afraid of losing control again. It became more and more a struggle to maintain the equilibrium of food, alcohol, drugs, tobacco, caffeine. I was headed for disaster at 24 years old.

Then one night, intoxicated and high after a New Year’s Eve party, I became the perfect target for a gang of youths out for a holiday violence spree. I wound up being beaten and stabbed on my way home from a Denny’s at 3am New Year’s Day. I was rushed via ambulance to the hospital. As I lay on the gurney, waiting for treatment, a crisis worker came by and interviewed me. She warned that I might experience some emotional  after the trauma of this event, and invited me to see her privately in counseling afterwards. I said “Yes. Thank you. You’re so kind.”  As I dismissed her with a pained look, she pressed her card in my hand. I squirreled it in my breast pocket and forgot about it.

I was discharged from the hospital with stitches and a tube hanging out my side. I had hit bottom. During the next few days my life was in turmoil. I had been beaten and stabbed, my name and address was in the paper and I was frightened that the perpetrators would come back to finish what they had started. I continued to drink, even though I didn’t want to. I had no other tools to deal with life at that time. I knew I had to change. I couldn’t go on living such an insane life. Three days later, I called the therapist’s number and made an appointment.

Though apprehensive, I was willing to listen. After all, left to my own devices, I had gotten to a very bad place, and I was looking for help to dig my way out. In my first session she taught me that I was co-dependent and had an addictive personality. All of my relationships, to family, to alcohol, to food, to work, were addictive in nature. Remember, this was in 1985. There were no books on Co-dependency on the shelves. No one had even heard of it.  A new movement called Adult Children of Alcoholics had started and there were some meetings at the local hospital. I attended my first one and thought that the people writing it had been eavesdropping on my life. I learned there that I might have a problem with alcohol and drugs. (Denial is an amazing thing!) It took me from January 1^st to August 18^th to finally get the courage to stop drinking, but I did it, and I never looked back.

After my first year of sobriety the program of the 12 Steps allowed me to face my fears about gaining weight and stop smoking. I knew that I’d eat more. But I learned from programs like ACoA and AA, one of the slogans they often use in the rooms. It was,  “First Things First”. So, after a year or of not smoking, I allowed myself the latitude of to attempt weight loss while in recovery. I was ready to try OA. I figured that if the 12 Steps could enable me to stop drinking and smoking, maybe, just maybe, they could help me tackle my obsession with food.

I can’t say as I walked in through the doors of OA and was “struck abstinent” from day one. In fact, I did check out an OA meeting very early on after I started therapy. I was “shopping” the self help circuit and wanted to see what OA was about. Being a skilled people pleaser I knew just what to say to make everyone like me. I thanked them and told them I’d be back, but inside I was thinking, “What a bunch of sorry losers! I can do better than this!” I thought to myself, “I’m so much more together than these people.” It was years before I would come back. And it was years before I could wrestle my huge ego down enough to sit in the rooms and stay.

In my opinion, OA is a difficult program to work. Much harder than a program like AA. In fact, I have heard ex heroin junkies attest in the rooms of OA that it was easier to give up a $200 per day habit than it was to get abstinent from compulsive overeating! Unlike with alcohol, food is everywhere. We all must eat to survive. I was much more prone to relapse in OA. My ego didn’t want to have to get back up off of the sofa after a weekend binge, dust the crumbs off of my shirt, and walk back into an OA meeting and admit  I’d failed once again. But I did. I did it because OA was the last house on the block for me. I’d tried everything else and failed. It was my only hope. But each time I was welcomed with love and acceptance. The people in OA taught me systematically to learn which foods were triggers for me to overeat and binge on. I had to attempt, many, many times, to give up sugar. I’d give it up, and take it back. Give it up, and take it back again.

Slowly, with the help of my friends in OA, the steps, a sponsor, I learned that I cannot negotiate with certain foods. I can’t eat like “normal people”. I have a disease. But one day at a time, I can arrest that disease through the simple program of OA. With measured success, I’ve maintained what is  called “abstinence” from compulsive overeating for the past five years. During that time, I’ve lost about 130 pounds. And this time, when I put back on weight, I did it purposely. I  put back on 20 pounds of pure MUSCLE! Now I’m working out in the gym as a body builder. I play competitive volleyball and I’m learning to surf!

People who meet me today have no idea I have ever been obese. I have finally earned the “Promises” of the program.  Food has taken on its proper perspective in my life at last. I can so clearly remember when I didn’t have the choice as to what foods I ate and when. And now, I’m able to go out and eat in any situation, and not be afraid of food. Food rarely if ever “calls” to me, as long as I keep to the principles that were taught to me at OA.

If you’re new, and considering OA as a possible option for you, my advice is that you come to at least 6 meetings read The 15 Questions to see if you’re a compulsive overeater.  . I admire and respect the courage it takes to try again. It is not easy. But, if you get a Food Sponsor to work out a food plan for yourself, you can INSTANTLY commit to that food program and achieve abstinence that same day. What a reprieve from insanity it was for me to feel I could stop bingeing and attain abstinence.

There is a solution.

Keep coming back. It works.

Yours in recovery,

Kevin

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