Abstinence, Again?

      Okay, I still have it, for how I define it. Which is pretty loose, since my food plan is inclusionary, not exclusionary. Though, I am removing certain things because I can see them turning into compulsive bite foods and because I don’t feel as clear-headed after I eat them.

      I still don’t eat halvah, and I’m not going to. Pretzels, potato chips, and tortilla chips are now a “compulsive bite” food group since I still long for them after I finish them. Most cookies fall under that category as well, as do most candies, including bulk American chocolate. They not only make me feel off (they mess with my mental clarity and they sometimes trigger longing for more), they also have no nutritional value. I can eat cookies which I make myself, but I clearly have to watch for emotional eating when it comes to them.
      I had a small milkshake yesterday that I was able to fit in my plan, but after drinking it, I felt really off. So milkshakes are out. Most pies and icing on cakes are off my food plan, too. I seem to have little problem eating cake (I never really was a cake fan, so I can eat reasonable amounts of it–though the icing gives me that “too-much-sugar” queasy feeling).
      So, my abstinence is a lower-sugar diet, turning toward satisfying savories and fruit as my source of sweetness. I seem to have few problems with fruit sugar, though I haven’t had fructose-sweetened sweets yet, so I don’t quite know how that would turn out. It does seem like refined, bleached sugar messes with me a lot, and corn syrup is just a horrid idea–not only because the taste is off (high fructose corn syrup has a chemical taste that messes up the flavor of things I once thought I liked) but it makes me feel askew and emotionally off.
      But part of my abstinence is learning what I can eat which both improves my quality of life and keeps me out of binge cravings. I’m not cutting out foods to punitively diet; I’m cutting out foods that don’t add clarity and sanity to my life.
     
      So why am I talking about abstinence? Well, I’m reading the OA text, Abstinence, right now . . . trying to understand what abstinence really is. Unfortunately, abstinence seems to be defined so loosely (it officially is defined by the OA WSBC as “refraining from compulsive eating”) that it does come down to defining what abstinence is not for me.
      Abstinence is not just a diet plan to help me lose weight. I lost the weight. Not only that, I found anorexia in the pot at the end of the rainbow instead of perfection. While anorexia isn’t really what I had hoped to find, and while I am eating up to my food plan’s calories in order to abstain from anorexia as well as binge eating, I consider reaching a place where my anorexia has been triggered a blessing. I can have empathy for people who struggle with not wanting to eat. I empathize with “feeling fat” even though people are kindly telling me that I am getting a little gaunt around the edges, even though I feel hugely fat when I see myself in the mirror. I don’t have the body of a reality television contestant (who does, without surgery?), I will never have it, and I can’t find clothing if I wanted to.
      Recently, at the mall, I saw a woman about my height who was a size 2 or size 0. This was not a woman who was self-absorbed about her looks; she was standing near a kid-friendly restaurant with her three- or four-year-old daughter, hugging her. The woman had a bit of haunted, fretful look, but she definitely was committed to loving her kid. So, this woman, I consider, is not what I generally think of when I think “super-skinny selfish b-word”. Which, of course, is judgmental and bratty of me, and it is something I expect to find a huge pattern of in my life–triggered in my teen years when I got the broken message that being anorexically thin was how a girl could find popularity. Not particularly true, since many of the popular girls in my school were on the higher end of normal and were popular because they took the time to care for themselves by wearing clean and pressed clothes (this was the 80s), doing their hair (even if it was just washing and conditioning it), and being very nice and calm and confident about themselves. I was already in self-abuse at that point–sometimes skipping my morning shower, often looking like I rolled out of bed, and generally being frantic and miserable and hypersensitive to any potentially hurtful comment. I didn’t move forward from the unkindness of my peers, which, in adulthood, I am learning doesn’t exclude the popular kids. They only appeared immune because something in them made them less susceptible to it. Well, neither here nor there, since I didn’t take the time to pick their brains about how they survived nasty comments and I carried them . . . eventually for 20 years. When I took the time to not self-loathe and self-flagellate for being unpopular? I did fine. But I didn’t want to see it because I could reconcile with people being nice all of the time or mean all of the time. I couldn’t reconcile with people being real–a combination of kindness and cruelty. But black-and-white thinking is part of the addiction, and I defaulted to not believing that the “good” was anything but a trap for me to get screwed over once more. Ah, the ego of self-pity and self-hatred, assuming others thought of me as constantly as I did.
      So, this woman had the body I wanted (though I considered her face needed to be filled out so she didn’t looks so gaunt and hungry, just like my face does). Tall, super-skinny legs, tiny and long waist.
      Her clothing didn’t fit her long and lean frame, however. Her jeans, which she had to buy in “normal” size (try and find a 0-tall), only went up to mid-calf. Not sure if they were meant to be capris, but when one is tall, everything is capri-length. I considered getting smaller, and even yesterday I looked up the sizing of the outlet store I go to now. They start at 8-Tall online, So, even finding jeans in a size smaller was a fluke, one that I am finding myself grateful for. But I am also somewhat frustrated because, to get the length of the waist rise and the leg length, I have to go up to an XL and belt the Hell out of it. Which is frustrating because I had to belt the size 6-Tall jeans yesterday, which means I am officially a 4-Tall in pants (unintentionally), and I am annoyed by it because I still feel fat. Even men’s smalls don’t do what I need them to do in length of arm. Dressing pret-a-porter is a nightmare again (size 10 dresses because of my back and bust size; a size 4/6 waistline; a size M-Tall in shirts or an XL in regular shirts if I want arm length), and I miss walking into my plus-sized store and finding clothing I was comfortable in regularly. I was actually happier as a size 14/16 than a 4/6, if one can believe it.
      Needless to say, I miss the 1980s sizing structure simply because I would have the wiggle room to lose more weight, thereby feeding into my anorexia (I have to eat something as an anorexic, even if it’s lies).
     
      So back to defining what my abstinence looks like. My abstinence is:

* not bingeing, even if I eat a little more than I intended so I feel “full” instead of just sated–getting “full” is a lesson I take with me, that I need to respect the boundaries of my stomach better;
* not undereating, even if I’m sure I’m not hungry–I need a certain amount of food per day to function outside of the body image obsession and my stomach shrinks when I undereat, making it hard for me to not undereat the next day;
* avoiding food which leave a residual longing for more, even if I am physically full;
* eating foods which promote the mental clarity to make real progress in recovery.
a combination of eating enough so I don’t lose more weight but. My abstinence promotes mental clarity through experimentation; it supports my recovery by keeping my mind clear enough to get daily progress in recovery.

      I can’t have perfect abstinence, but the freedom to eat within those guidelines and the understanding that when I trip over a trigger food–that either (1) destroys my mental clarity by triggering character defects or irrational emotions I remember from my active addict state or (2) makes me long for more–it needs to be put aside. Like most compulsive eaters, I can binge on anything if I hit a perfect storm of emotional distress that I don’t want to do a recovered examination of the binge-longing’s source. When I reach an even keel, certain foods encourage the kind of serenity and sanity that promotes the use of the OA tools and the mental clarity to do even a little stepwork.
      Now, I am very clear on a few definitions of “a break in abstinence” would look like:

(1) If I am full yet continue eating anyway because I want food to soothe me emotionally–even if it causes physical agony;
(2) If I eat a whole container of something which has 5 or more servings contained in it (like a whole pie, a whole cake, a whole pizza, a whole bag of chips);
(3) If I eat a half-pound of any one food type or group in a sitting (even 50 calories of green beans is less than 6 ounces). A burger, for example, doesn’t count because it’s a combination an ounce or two of several kinds of food–bread, protein, vegetables, possibly dairy. A half-pound of peanut M&M’s is not considered a combination food because it’s candy;
(4) If I don’t eat at all over the span of a day, or only eat one, small meal, especially if I am hungry and avoid it because I am obsessed with losing weight.
     
      Those are easy.
      When I cut closer to my abstinence, I enter into the realm of “slips” instead of breaks. Eating something I didn’t realize would give me a longing for more is a slip, and I can slide that food into my trigger foods box. Missing a meal because I’m not hungry is a slip because I am not intending to undereat–I’m just trying to respect the hunger. Eating something that I didn’t realize messed with my mental clarity is a slip, and I slide that food into my trigger foods box (because it triggers the loss of mental clarity). Eating more than three servings of one kind of food over the span of a day, even if it fits in my food plan–like a certain type of crackers I get at the grocery store which I enjoy a little too much–is a slip, and I slide that food into my trigger foods box. Eating less than my daily allotted calories yet more than half of them (my anorexic plan minimum) is a slip, and I use that signal I am undereating as a sign that some negative emotion is eating me, instead.
      My food plan, as it rests, is one which encourages a day’s worth of sound nutrition plus access to non-nutritious pleasurable foods. I can eat good chocolate, for example, along with my balanced core diet, because good chocolate does not trigger the need for me to eat more. I enjoy it, and it’s over. Crappy chocolate? I can’t eat. Why? Because I am always looking for the ideal bite and am left with longing for that ideal bite . . . the stellar piece of chocolate in the unsatisfying load of ho-hum.
      In theory, I can even drink another strawberry shake, since I had about 5 minutes of longing for more until food satiety hit. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes after food satiety hit, whatever ingredients in the shake ended up making me addict-nuts. Not sure what was in it, but I lost mental clarity and was running on secondary emotions (I have the clarity back, now, after sleeping overnight). Therefore, I don’t want to eat a food that makes me feel insane again, so I won’t. My sanity is worth more than any potentially tasty calories. Excellent chocolate doesn’t trigger the loss of clarity like that strawberry shake did. Therefore, I wait out good chocolate, try new sources of it, and set those sources into the trigger box if I find myself either having longing or losing mental clarity. And I generally toss what’s left out the door with my family, who are not compulsive eaters–to eat or throw out however they see fit.
      What I do not do is diet punitively and call it abstinence. The whole point of abstinence, for me, is to learn more about my disease by trial-and-error and use what I know to keep recovery moving forward. If I eat a little too much in a meal and feel full instead of sated (I never get to that painful overfull feeling any more), I know for next time to eat less in a sitting. And these days, “a little too much” is half to a tenth of what I ate while in active addiction. In active addiction, I ate my food, some of my husband’s food, some of my kids’ food, then went home and kept grazing until I was numb. I don’t hit numbness, either, any more. I may feel a little raw and emotionally on edge because of something I ate disagreeing with my body chemistry, but I never get numb any more.
      Now, some people might look at what I wrote and scream that I have broken abstinence. Well, my abstinence is not theirs, same as the people whose abstinence doesn’t match mine don’t deserve me thinking, “That’s a break in abstinence!”
      If one gains weight on a food plan but keeps mental clarity? Still abstinent. If one has a three-a-day-plus-a-snack and eats three large meals and one large snack? Still abstinent. If one even uses the scale to regulate one’s eating (which I wouldn’t do because we gain and lose weight sometimes completely unrelated to how many calories we take in over a day) and they follow it? Still abstinent. We define our own abstinences based on what we want out of the physical part of the program and what mental clarity we want out of the mental and spiritual parts of the program.
     
      I do, however, have some thoughts about abstinence for people trying to find a consistent abstinence on their own. These have come from my own experience and from the experience of meetings, and I hope they can help someone looking for abstinence to nail down precisely what they need:

(1) Punitive diets tend to lead to breaks in abstinence. The reason that all those diets didn’t work before is because most diets are a one-size-fits-all plan. I remember doing a national diet company’s summer diet camp program in the 1980s, where the diet portion of the food plan (both in and out of camp) was 1,200 calories. That sustains a moderate-to-low active, 100-lb. person. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that we all are not 5’0″ and moderately active.
      I arrived at the national diet plan’s camp at 5’9″ (at the time) and 40 lbs. overweight by their estimation. I weighed 189 lbs. when I walked in; the company’s goal weight for me was 151 lbs.; I left the camp at 157-158 lbs. and 4 sizes smaller because I converted a lot of fat to a lot of muscle there. Working out at a camp for 8 hours a day and eating only 1,200 calories per day (which my body did not like one bit because I think it needed more nutrients to sustain me), I lost just over 20 lbs. in 4 weeks.
      Another girl at camp who arrived in the high 300-to-low-400 lb. range actually shed almost 60 lbs. the first week and continued to drop 20-30 lbs. weekly thereafter while I was there.
      Sounds amazing, right? Utopia for the diet crowd, right? Wrong. The people in charge of the camp ate with us, and (despite being overweight) they ate really well. So as we’re noshing our playing-card-sized chicken breast (oh, don’t get me started on the two days they served shoe-leather dry beef liver, despite the promise in the brochure in all caps– “NO LIVER!!!”) these people are eating two-inch-thick half-pound to whole pound steaks with all the trimmings. Okay, maybe not a pound of steak, but when you’re eating tiny amounts of diet food and someone walks out with a steak that you’d see in a steakhouse? It looks like something out of the Flintstones in terms of size.
      Resentments built. We unified under a hatred of these two people who were uncommitted to leading a weight camp–despite leading summer camps before. Even the camp counselors thought it was really bad form having the two eat differently than us, and to feast in these ludicrous quantities. After the resentments came the sneak eating.
      The new kids coming in would get hit up for any food they snuck in their luggage. On our weekly outings, some kids would either sneak-eat junk food on site or buy quantities of candy bars and hope they wouldn’t get caught smuggling them in. A lot of kids got caught and lost outing privileges.
      Me? I didn’t sneak eat because I didn’t want to lose my outing privileges and be publicly shamed to boot. No, I used another weight-loss staple: cigarettes. Yes, in the 1980s, cigarette machines were abound and carding for smokes was pretty lax. So I, at 14, and others at 14 and 15, would sneak out our windows and stand behind the dorms smoking in order to get through the food cravings between meals and snacks. The counselors who were there for weight loss did the same, and sometimes we crossed paths behind the dorm, huddling and talking and smoking.
      Punitive food plans don’t work.

(2) Successful abstinence from any of the eating disorders simply moves the food out of the way. We got into food control for a reason–our lives were completely unmanageable before food came into the picture. Once the food is out of the way, we can see the source of the addiction. That’s when we can get the best stepwork done. Read any stories about it, and one can see that people who adopt abstinence by Step Three seem to manage cravings better.
      However, one still has to keep progressing in recovery to keep that abstinence. Moving the food out of the way gives an OA member the mental clarity needed to examine the addiction from a new perspective, what I call “recovery mind”. That duality of thought is probably the greatest strength we have in OA. When we can see the insanity of the addiction, we can turn from indulging in it through practice.
      It doesn’t take long, either. Most people who start a food plan–any food plan–and who remove the worst binge offenders to an off-limits trigger-foods list have said they hit their first taste of real clarity between week one and week two of their food plan. The moment the clarity hits, the secrets that addiction has kept us blind to are suddenly visible. We learn in leaps and bounds about how we eat in addiction and put those things aside. As eating sanely takes hold, we hit our first taste of serenity a few weeks later. It may only be for a few minutes, but it happens.
      Mental clarity allows OA members to keep practicing abstinence while working the steps. It can be fast or slow going, but once we get tracked into recovery because of the removal of food control, we have the ability to change our old ways of thinking–both intellectually and spiritually. We start breaking down the old messages. And if we work the steps to the best of our abilities (not perfectly, best of our personal abilities), we will find that abstinence gets easier because we’re not burdened by what made us eat.

(3) The OA tools really do help maintain abstinence. Using any food plan starts the process of finding the mental clarity to stop eating at others or to punish ourselves for the bad feelings we have toward others and the resulting guilt at having bad feelings toward others. Reading literature reminds us we are not alone and exposes how the addiction tailored itself to us, specifically. Writing allows us to get our secrets out of our heads and to a place we can see them. Sponsorship, meetings, and telephone keep us in communication with other OA members. They get us out of that isolation by keeping us in contact with people who think like we do about food and by encouraging us to expose our secrets in order to live with the vigorous honestly necessary to maintain abstinence. We are as sick as our secrets, and if we are willing to shine a spotlight on them, they cannot make us eat any more. Service commits us to the program by giving us a taste of purpose. Even accepting a phone call is service, and what is said during the call often gives us insight into our own recovery and addiction. Last, anonymity allows us to be brutally honest with ourselves about this addiction and teaches us trust of others. It’s hard for us to trust, as addicts. We’ve been failed so often that the only thing we believe we can trust is food–not even ourselves. By giving the gift of anonymity by not gossiping about our meeting outside of meeting, we serve our fellow compulsive eaters. Also, we can have some amazingly strong meetings which advance everyone’s recovery and sustain abstinence for the rest of the day. I, personally, eat because of my secrets. When I am brutally honest and lay it all out into the open, the feelings I am struggling with often vanish because it’s out there. It’s done. I’m not hoarding events which made me feel bad, whipping them up into these crazy and complex situations which used to drive me straight into the food.

(4) The only food plan that works is the one which is tailored to the individual. I’ve said before that our stories are all the same, but only the details are different. The program works because it is a solid lattice upon which we can grow our personal recoveries.
      Our addictions were tailored to us . . . why not our recoveries? By Step Three, we are asked to find a Higher Power of our own conception from within. We are told there is no one way to do Step Four, often being told, “It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you do it”. Step Five can be done in many ways, as long as another person who we intuitively know will accept all of us (part of why it can take so long to find someone to read it to) is available to listen. It can be a reading of everything just to purge it, or it can be a discussion which opens up new resentments and new ideas on how the addiction has gripped us over time. Our character defects we expose in Steps Six and Seven are individual to us, even if we have overlapping ones. And Steps Eight and Nine are all about walking to people humbly and asking for forgiveness for harms we have done them. Steps Ten through Twelve are also personalized–some people do spot-checks and amends during the day and others do an end-of-day inventory then make amends at the soonest opportunity. Step Eleven’s daily communication with a Higher Power can be done many different ways. And Step Twelve, reaching out to others who share our addiction, is as individual as our personalities.
      So, why would we think our abstinence should be one-size-fits-all? For example, some people thrive on structured diet plans because they need the organization. Some people like to plan day-by-day. Some people like to eat three structured meals, with or without daily snacks. Some people find that five or six small meals keeps them mentally sound because they don’t have sugar crashes. Some people have dietary restrictions due to medical issues.
      For me, I wanted to learn how to eat at the end of a healthy weight. So, I prepared a calorie-based food plan which honestly keeps me to three meals per day with or without a snack. I am learning about proper portion control, about respecting my hunger, and I am especially learning how emotions affect my desire to graze. I can have a craving (which normal eaters have, so cravings are not evil), and I will often wait a day or two to see if it was a binge craving or if it was a normal craving. Binge cravings don’t last for days, or, if they do, they are always partnered with anxiety. I definitely won’t eat something that starts calling to me; it gets dropped into the trigger food box for the day while I seek out the emotional source of it through writing or communicating with others.
      My point is that when one breaks abstinence, it’s a signal that something in that food plan was inherently broken. I’m not saying one won’t struggle with one’s abstinence at times, but if the food plan is so restrictive that we get so angry we punish ourselves to prove we cannot be tamed by that food plan? It’s the wrong food plan.
      Examine what did work and keep that. Consider what might have been the problem–Was it too loose? Too restrictive? Did it bring up unmanageable emotions that didn’t bring up the red flags to either send it up to Higher Power or learn something about one’s addiction? For me, my food plan allows me to see how my addiction sneaks in through the cracks between the windows and under the doors. And my food plan lets me catch it. I need enough looseness in my food plan to be able to respect my hunger–which doesn’t come at 7 a.m., 12 noon, and 6 p.m. like clockwork. If I had time-based meals, I would be obsessing about them and would binge at those meals because I would be terrified of being deprived.
      My food plan encourages me to ask if I am actually hungry. And if the answer is no, I know it’s not a physical desire to eat but a mental one. And if it’s a mental desire to eat? That is my addiction sneaking up on me.
      My food plan also keeps me on a balanced diet, overall. I eat whole grains, dairy, fruit, vegetables (more than I would if I was just eating 3 meals a day–I neglect my veg given the chance), and proteins. I need that balanced foundation to think clearly. And I have just enough spare calories to eat anything I want. Those spare calories are where I find my trigger foods most often, and I have learned a lot about my addiction from my food plan.
      But it fits me, mostly. While, yes, I have bumped up the calories because I need to maintain my weight, I have found that the new freedom in my increased maximum caloric intake is showing me more places where I can learn about myself. For example, I considered only drinking half of that shake last night then decided to drink it all. Though I am sliding it aside because of the post-eating emotional hypersensitivity that happened later in the evening, I did learn that I am definitely more comfortable when I eat much less. I would have been physically happier with 8 oz. instead of 15 oz. of it (despite being pretty sure the post-shake crazies would have come anyway). I learned. I’m moving on. Still abstinent because I did not leave my food plan, nor did I go back for a second shake and follow it up with a classic binge or grazing last night. When the meal was over, it was over. I considered eating more vegetables to balance the drink, but I didn’t because I was full. Eating after I was full? That would have been a break in my abstinence, because I would have been eating for a reason besides sating hunger after my body was saying very clearly that it wanted no more food.
     
      This . . . is a long, long post. I’m ready to end it. As I have written before, this is not officially an OA stance but my own views based on my own experience and the experience, strength, and hope of others. If what I wrote gets a person thinking about their own food plan and whether or not it encourages their abstinence? That’s fine. If a person reads this and is offended because they want to be in OA simply to lose weight, and screw that spirituality mumbo-jumbo? That’s fine, too.
      It’s out there, and it’s the truth I have learned for myself. Yes, I present it as strong opinion sometimes because I am an addict and I love my own opinion very, very much (it keeps me from dealing with my own problems 😉 ). However, my opinion is just that–an opinion. It is not authoritative and it should not be taken as such. I’m just a compulsive eater exposing personal experience that some may find helpful and others may not. This is how I lost 120 lbs. since June of 2009 and a confirmable 105 lbs. through my own food plan and abstinence. And, as I try to understand what abstinence means to me (outside of “refraining from compulsive eating”, which I cannot do perfectly since I sometimes realize I ate a serving of something emotionally after the fact–though I can keep from the one-continuous-meal grazing and hard-bingeing until I was physically immobile and mentally dazed which I used to do), I want to share it. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of abstinence; we still have to eat, despite food being our addict substance.
      But this is how I estimate that I was able to somehow stay abstinent for a whole bunch of just-for-todays, how my abstinence seems to be chugging along today (though I do need to eat breakfast, despite it being late morning, now), and how the miracle of eating 2,000 calories somehow sent me through my ideal weight right into more food control issues. I am thankful for that, because I have my best recovery in adversity.
      I am here to learn and grow, to make progress as a human being. Food addiction gets in the way of that. Therefore, I get to practice on a daily basis the use of abstinence–as I define it today–to keep my mind clear enough to at least make progress on my journey of recovery through the 12 Steps.
      My name is Jess, and I am a food control addict and approval addict. And I am loquacious as the Dickens. Or maybe as Dickens, himself, since he was paid by the word and it shows.
      Meh, I like to write. It helps me get out of my head and expose the often laughable weirdness that is my addiction. And I do laugh about it, because I got drawn from that ocean of addiction and lived to tell the tale. And every day I don’t jump back in to those deadly waters is a day worth a smile or laugh. I am alive today, imperfectly human and right where I am supposed to be. That alone brings me such happiness that I want to laugh out loud.