Desperate, I drove to an OA meeting on a Friday evening and found three of the most seasoned, loving OA members. Their welcome was the first time I ever felt lovable despite my mental illness and my obesity.
My OA story didn’t begin till I was many years into my history of mental illness. In my mid-twenties, my father passed away from alcohol disease, I was married and divorced, and then my mother passed from alcohol disease. Soon after her death, I plummeted into a severe and dark depression that lasted many years and required more than twenty hospitalizations. After electric shock treatments, medications, therapy, and the learning of many important coping skills, I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disease and post-traumatic stress disorder. I spent the next twenty years consumed only by my work as a registered nurse and being in therapy. I had the best of all types of treatment and providers and am eternally grateful for that.
My eating issues were minimal in the early years of my depression, but they did finally blossom. I was at a normal weight when my unhealthy relationship with food began. Food and especially sugar foods were already highlights for family celebrations, social connection, and love. As the years of my depression stretched out, I began reaching for food to comfort my distress and fill my emptiness. I went from normal body weight to 65 pounds (29.4 kg) overweight.
During one short-lived period of relief from my depression, I took on a medically supervised fast for nine weeks and lost those 65 pounds (29.4 kg). But I gained no awareness or knowledge of my eating disorder and compulsive overeating. So by the time my antidepressant and antipsychotic medications had gotten my bipolar illness under control, I weighed 100 pounds (45.3 kg) over my ideal body weight.
I was able to return to work as a fully functioning nurse, completing my master’s degree, and publishing research, but I was still in a state of deep self-loathing about my weight and bingeing and compulsive eating. Desperate, I drove into an OA meeting on a Friday evening and found three of the most seasoned, loving OA members. Their welcome was the first time I ever felt lovable despite my mental illness and my obesity.
The beginning of my OA journey was a “pink cloud” recovery with a 70-pound (31.8-kg) weight loss in four months while working the Steps and checking in with a sponsor each day. However, my life got complicated again with a cancer surgery, an orthopedic surgery, and a move across the country. I regained all but 30 pounds (13.6 kg).
But I have not binged in all these sixteen years, and I am free of recreational sugar. I work with therapists, dieticians, OA sponsors, and medical doctors to manage my mental illness, and I work on healthy eating and achieving a healthy body weight. Many food miracles keep occurring as I continue to work this program. For example, sugar foods no longer call or talk to me as they once did daily! Though I still choose food and medication to manage my ongoing intrusive depression, I choose healthier foods. And I don’t harm myself in other more destructive ways.
I am so grateful to God and to program for my abstinence from bingeing and for my not climbing further up the weight scale. I’m grateful, because OA is the one place where you are never a statistical failure and where you are always welcome—welcomed and loved even more when you need it most. May God continue to welcome us in all our forms and struggles and give hope to each one of us.
—Vicki H.
