Drop the rock

I'm an active member of Overeater's Anonymous. Now that may sound fatuous (bad pun) to some people but I am the kind of overeater who is never full, no matter how much my stomach hurts - I'm not a normal eater. I enjoy food, I like cooking - but my eating habits have been a real problem for me for years.

So I'm happy to find a program that is NOT a diet but gives some direction and ways and means to dealing with compulsive behaviour (of all kinds).

It's a comfort to me to find that I'm not alone. There are lots of other people out there - smart, well educated, creative blah blah blah - but we all do similar things with food and it isn't a pretty picture.

It's also a comfort to me to realize that there are physical addiction aspects to my behaviour. Certain foods we call "alcoholic" foods set me off on this crazed path. Chocolate, sweets, French bread, tortilla chips, salted nuts, fresh bread of almost any kind - and I'm off to the races. So one day at a time, I don't eat them.

There's also a mental obsession involved in this kind of behaviour. My brain turns to food in almost any "tense" situation whether it's happy or sad, scary or happy. I don't believe other, more normal, people experience this. But maybe they do. Does anyone else sit reading quietly after a busy day and a "normal" dinner and suddenly "remember" that there is leftover Halloween candy in the back of the freezer and my husband probably won't notice if I eat it?
That's mental obsession.

That said - it's no easy journey this travel through a 12 step program. I've had to "find" a Higher Power I could connect with and I think I've said elsewhere that my Higher Power looks something like the Force in Star Wars - but, you know, it works for me. I can pray to the Force that I won't eat the tortilla chips in front of me and somehow I notice much later, that I haven't even thought about them again, let alone eaten two baskets of them.

Now I'm at a place where there are things I don't want to do - things I don't want to look at and these are probably core issues that I need to work on. But boy, do I resist.

The story goes that "in a stormy sea, a bunch of people are rowing to safety - one of their members is swimming like mad towards the boat, but they have a large rock hanging from their neck. Obviously, that rock is impeding the swimmer's succes in reaching the boat and the people on the boat keep yelling "Drop the rock." But the swimmer, for reasons of her own, hangs onto that rock even though she is falling further and further behind. So I need to drop my rock! The rock, for me, is composed of guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, pride, self judgment, - you name it. I need to reach my boat...............will I be able to drop that rock? Tune in ..................etc.