Posting Again

Ok, lets play "Spot the Compulsive Eater". There is a person who starts her blog and posts every day for a couple of weeks, then doesn't post, then posts again, and then stops posting for almonst two months, and posts twice in a week. I'm not a person of extremes....well not really...well perhaps a little bit...

Did you spot those two second addictive traits? Denial and a need to control everything, including the actions of others? I put them in red in case you missed them. You might also have noticed some progress...some moving out of denial. That's the stage I'm at now. I've been in denial for several months and five kg about my slide towards relapse. Perhaps it's been even longer. But now I'm being totally honest. I posted my new weight here on my blog, and I admitted it at two meetings. I know honesty is important to recovery. In the Big Book it says that the three essential traits needed for recovery are "honesty, openmindedness and willingness". I don't have any of these in spades. But I have a smidgen of each. I'm just hoping they'll be enough for recovery. I'm praying for more of them every day.

I've been working my program harder the last week or so. Last week a drove an hour round-trip to go to a second face to face meeting and I emailed my sponsor and sponsee, read my online program emails, meditated, prayed, journalled and worked on my fourth step, almost every day. I try and do 5-10 minutes of each every day. I find committing to a tiny tiny action is much easier for me than committing to anything massive. I've also started listening to OA speakers in my car. That's a useful thing to do. I highly recommend that one. I download my speakers from www.oalaig.org

As a result I've got back some semblance of abstinence. I've given up the sugary foods and the three big binge foods: ice cream, chocolate and buttered bread. The buttered bread binge food is a big one that I've been trying not to admit for a long time. But if you can't stop at two pieces of buttered toast, but you go on to half a loaf, or even more, so that at the end you feel sick, that's compulsive eating of an alcoholic food. I'm not snacking as much either. Just one or two snacks if I need them because meals are too far apart or I need ot take my antibiotics. The next step now is to cut down my meal sizes. At the moment my meals are still binges. I don't know if I'm still putting on weight or if I"m losing it. That's actually a good thing, because it means I've given away a bit of that obsession with weight. I've even put my scales away in my room without going back to get them again.