Whatever it takes

Until it is not about the food

Almost two weeks now of abstinent eating. Doing okay with it. Even letting go of some of the crazy about losing weight. (Am I skinny yet? I've been on my food plan for 13 days! Why aren't my pants loose already?) Trying to surrender the crazy along with the control over the food.

My hard drive in my work laptop died yesterday. It just wouldn't boot up. Now I have it back with a new hard drive, most of my old data and missing all the non-standard apps I use daily. I was just getting Office 2007 customized to be usable and now I have to start over. I was on XP and got to skip Vista entirely, so that is good, but everything is so foreign on this OS. What does this have to do with OA? Everything. This is life. Not a huge dramatic issue, but it could be if I was in the food. I could be weeping and wailing to everyone. Okay I did mention it, but it was hard not to when I was without a computer for 6 hours and had to borrow people's machines to check my email during that time. And I'm writing about it here. So it is a big deal, but I think I'm making a normal person big deal, not crazy lady big deal. 

The other thing that is related to my program is that I was really afraid that an action of mine had killed it*. I wanted to hide what I had done. I wanted to protect myself from blame for ruining a laptop. I wanted to stay in bed and pretend the world was not going on without me. But I didn't, I got up and got to work and talked with the local tech support and confessed my crime. She said she didn't think I had caused it; the laptop model I have is old and all of them are starting to have hard drive and other hardware issues. I'm so glad I confessed! I left a message about it for my sponsor on the drive in and realized how badly I wanted to keep it a secret. This is the type of thing I eventually eat over and never see the connection. 

I have way too many of these petty secrets. I lug around a ton of guilt and shame from four decades of living. How many of those are misplaced? The biggest revelation for me in OA is how many things I'm wrong about. Everywhere I turn I've made faulty assumptions or been taught lies. The more I talk with other OAs the clearer the wrongheadedness becomes.

* I used canned air to clean the keyboard for the first time. The buttons were getting crunchy. I must have tipped the can because I froze some of the keys. They got frosty. It was right over the hard drive. The PC was on all day after that, but next time I turned on it couldn't boot.

And the crazy train goes on and on

I recommitted to abstinent food plan last week. The usual stuff:

• No sweets*
• Three meals a day, nothing in between
• No bread as a meal

There are some new specifics, things I've been "getting away with" lately:

• No Wheat Thins
• No sugar-free Jell-o
• No sugar-free pudding
• No potato chips and dip (I could eat chips out as part of a meal, but no more snacking)
• No Colonial Cafe corn bread with honey butter (D'oh! How did that slip back in?)

The first few days were rough. Suddenly everything on the list above called out to me. I thought at first about the irony of it; as soon as I can't have it I want it more than anything. But really, there is no irony there. While I was ignoring my food plan I didn't deny myself any of those items. Want became Have without any debate or struggle. I was oblivious to the cravings.

After a few days of white knuckling it the cravings went away. I prayed and called and did anything other than eat. Then I didn't notice when the cravings ended. Tuesday night I worked until 8:30pm. I thought about stopping for dinner or grocery shopping on my way home. I was too tired, so I decided to eat something at home. I decided on a frozen dinner because I could get it over with the quickest. I could cook and eat it and get it out of the way.

Then I almost decided not to eat dinner at all and realized this was not normal thinking for me. My first thought after that was that I must be ill. I wasn't hungry and didn't care what I ate or even if I ate, therefore I must be very sick and probably dying. Instead of being thankful the the compulsion was temporarily lifted I jumped to the most dramatic conclusion. Then I laughed at myself and ate my damn dinner because that is part of my plan too. Three meals a day, no more and no less. 

* No sweets is a no brainer and required for any semblance of sanity. It is such a given that I don't think about it anymore. Without it I don't go to work and live on DQ dairy treats. It has been a few months since my last sugar binge.

Big Big Book

I ordered a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous 4th edition in large print. I've been looking for one for a while and could never find one for sale. Now I know that it is out of print. So I ordered a used one from Amazon. There are a ton listed. There are probably a lot on ebay too. I bought one for $5 (+$3.99 S+H). There were cheaper ones, but I wanted one that promised no highlighting or underlining. I like to do the underlining myself.

I first saw a large print version at a Big Book study. The leader had one. Now that I'm wearing my reading glasses more and more, I thought I could justify it. The lighting at my BB study meeting is somewhat unreliable.

I already have a few versions of the BB. In addition to compulsive eating I'm also a somewhat compulsive shopper and collector of stuff. I have the standard soft cover, a hard cover version, a paperback study version (with space for notes, got it at the BB study weekend as part of the package) and a tiny paperback version that only has the first section, no stories.

I'm totally excited to get my new big BB. I'll probably order one to donate to the meeting too. I'm not the only person in the reading glasses set.