Intergroup Retreat- Morning After

Lots of things happened on the Monday morning before breakfast at the intergroup retreat....
I wouldn’t know about them. I got out of bed, got dressed and rushed down to the main hall just in time for breakfast (who isn’t surprised I missed that? It’s amazing how effective a motivator food is to the compulsive eater). I was pretty ticked off that they put raisins in the porridge, since that was the item that was on my food plan for breakfast that morning. I don’t like raisins.

I had a good chat over breakfast to some people who were interested in Asperger’s/autism. As usual I did most of the talking. Learning to listen is going to be an important part of my recovery, I think. I also had a good chat to a lady who had a similar history of “never having been slim” before OA. There are so many OAers who weren’t that overweight to begin with, or who were yo-yo dieters. She was on a very restricted food plan because as she became abstinent she discovered heaps of food allergies. She pointed out the link that some people believe exists between food intolerances and autism.I know about that. I’m not supposed to eat Gluten and Casein. That means no wheat, oats, rye or dairy. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that dairy and carbs tend to be big triggers for me,. But I’m trying to give up one food at a time. My first total eliminations were weetbix and ice cream. Besides, my psychiatrist is very scepitical of the food intolerance theories of autism. He is much less sceptical of the idea that I have a physical reaction to refined sugar and simple carbohydrates. Apparently that's fairly common in people with ADHD.

Now I have been committing to my sponsor daily that I will abstain from ice cream, chocolate, bread, sugar and white flour. The weetbix is also off the table, but it comes under the sugar thing I think. Anyways, I don’t eat weetbix. But at the meeting after breakfast I discovered that merely refraining from binge foods does not constitute abstinence. One of the veteran members said that “you mustn’t eat an abstinent meal compulsively” I can completely relate to that idea. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. For example, on my birthday this year, I thought that I was abstinent because I didn’t have any sugar or white flour. Now i know that was a huge achievement to get through the day like that. But it wasn’t abstinence. I was eating non-stop even if I wasn’t eating my so-called trigger foods. In fact, if I’m honest, I was bingeing. It was only a matter of time after that before I did break my sugar and white flour rules.

The fact is that abstinence is defined as “refraining from eating compulsively”. This means, whenever I eat for my own self-will and not God’s will, whenever i’m not submitting to the guidance of God and the program, whenever hte food is eaten selfishly not to nourish my body so I might better do God’s will, and whenever I’m failing to have “life in between meals”, constanntly thinking about the next meal instead of being present in the moment,-whenever I’m doing all these things I am not abstinent. That’s a hard definition to have, but it’s true. Lots of OA members shared that they still struggled with the freedom from the obsession. I don’t want to have that obsession for the rest of my life, to be a “dry drunk.” And yet that’s what I do. I do feel powerless against this obsession, but I find it hard to trust thqt God can relieve it.