Nothing is forever, my sponsor said. Just take it one day at a time. Don’t obsess about tomorrow. That’s way too big.
My close friend Raizy and I were partners in crime – the crime of killing ourselves with food. We’d go out together to those all-you-can-eat restaurants and pack away enough fries, pita and chummus for an army. She’d come over Shabbos afternoon and together the two of us would polish off a tray of brownies, a family-sized bag of potato chips, a bag of toffies, and a container of pareve ice cream – all washed down with a Diet Coke.
For those of you who are not compulsive overeaters, this probably sounds pretty gross – who can ingest so much? But for those of us whose feel-full mechanisms are out of whack (along with our ability to handle painful emotions), that’s how we are – always hungry, always needing to fill up, never allowing hunger pangs to get the better of us, using food to soothe all our troubles.
When we were both about 100 pounds overweight, we knew it was time for desperate measures, and we joined a women’s-only 12-step program for overeaters. As many people know, the First Step is to admit powerlessness over your addiction, that your life has become unmanageable because of it. What that means is that all the willpower in the world is no match for your craving, and that even though you might be pulled-together and high-functioning on the outside, inside your addiction is making you into a mess. Because every addict at some point winds up facing the helplessness, misery, shame, isolation, secrecy, ruined relationships, spiritual distance, and unfulfilled potential. (My personal rock-bottom? It was on Simchas Torah morning and while my family was in shul for hakafos, I was busy munching away in the quiet of my kitchen – until one of my boys rushed in and said, “Mommy, where were you!? You just missed all of us under the tallis at kol hane’arim!”)
Could I do it? Could I make a decision to pull myself out of the morass I’d created, a morass that felt so comfortable, dependable and reliable? Raizy was gung-ho. She pulled out of the gate in a sprint. After all, the program offered a great diet as well. “It’s amazing!” she told me. “Can you imagine, we’ll never eat cake again?!” I was devastated. While she was busy chopping her vegetables, I was stuck in the overwhelmingness of “forever.” The idea of forever made me want to crawl under a rock, to go to bed and burrow back into my covers. (P.S. “Forever” was also too big for Raizy – she quit after a month, and never went back.)
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