“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver

The Christmas I was seven-years-old, I realized I had a problem. I stood next to the dessert table at my aunt’s house eating cookie after cookie, unable to move away even though I knew I should. My cousin said, “Katie, leave some for the rest of us.” Spots of color bloomed on my cheeks as I left the table’s side. Feelings coursed through me: shame that I had been unable to stop on my own and relief that someone else’s words had cut through my compulsion because my own self-admonitions had failed.

My next memory of something being wrong was the following Christmas when I ate so much chocolate, I vomited. Perhaps there were other battles with food in my upper elementary or middle school years, but if there were, I don’t remember them. In high school, my compulsive overeating changed my life forever.

Throughout high school, I played sports year round, which meant I practiced two-to-three hours a day. My freshman year I only ate one apple and a rice cake with peanut butter each day, not enough calories for anyone. When I had my first boyfriend, I stopped eating altogether. Thankfully, that only lasted a few weeks.

My sophomore year I tried something different. I would eat a large bowl of ice cream once a day. I did this day after day. But the human body is not meant to live on cream and sugar. So, my body broke down.

Over spring break, I had a cough that wasn’t going away. My parents didn’t realize it at the time. Although I was close to my dad, he was busy with his school superintendent job and wasn’t around much. My mom battled depression my whole childhood and she viewed me as competition for my dad’s attention more than a child she had to take care of.

When I stayed the night at my friend’s house, we slept downstairs in her den. The rest of her family slept upstairs in their bedrooms. It turns out the night I slept over, none of them slept at all because I coughed through the night. My friend’s mother told my mother I needed to see the doctor. My mom replied that she would take me after softball practice. I told her I needed to go now.

At the doctor’s office, he told my mom I was having an asthma attack. She replied that I did not have asthma. He told her in fact I did have asthma and that the attack was so bad I would need to be hospitalized. I spent the rest of spring break in the hospital. When I returned to school, I couldn’t even make it through a whole school day. I was so weak I could only go for the morning or the afternoon.

My junior year I fed my body more of a balanced diet and it healed. I was still on the sports teams, but I didn’t have enough energy to be a contributing member of the team. I joined the track team in the spring and began to build up my stamina. By senior year, most of my strength had returned and my stamina, but my lung capacity never returned to 100%. There is only so much abuse the human body can take.

During college, I gained more than the clichéd freshman fifteen. I made poor nutritional choices in the cafeteria and wasn’t exercising anymore. When I came home for the summer, I decided I would get in shape. So, I went for a run. I made it about a block, before my foot was in so much pain I could barely walk. I limped back to my house and took off my shoe. I had gained so much weight that there was a tennis ball sized lump on top of my left foot.

I continued to overeat throughout college until I studied abroad in Santiago, Chile in 1994. I lived with a host family and ate whatever they ate, lots of beans and vegetables. For the first time, fruits and vegetables tasted delicious because they were fresh from farms. Back home, I only ate produce that had sat in the grocery store for weeks. Plus, I wasn’t eating sugar, so I could taste the various flavors. The pounds fell off one-by-one and I was once again the same weight as my last two years in high school.

Right before I left for Chile, I met a wonderful man who would later become my husband. When I returned from Chile, life proceeded smoothly. I graduated, we married, moved out to the east coast for our jobs and everything was good with my eating and my weight. It seemed like my life was under control.

Then, I had my first child. Anyone who has had the blessing of becoming a parent knows that any delusion of having life under control disappears when one has kids. One night my son couldn’t stop crying. I put him in the baby sling and started running from one end of the apartment to the other. Each time I ran through the kitchen, I ate a piece of brownie. I was treating that brownie like it was God, like if I somehow kept eating it my son would stop crying. Once again, I had that out of body experience like I had when I was seven of seeing myself acting insanely and not being able to change the behavior. The sun finally rose and that long night was over. But my disease kept on.

I decided sugar was the problem. So, I cut it out for a few months. That made things better until I became pregnant with my second son. I vomited a lot and could only keep certain food items down. It made no difference to me whether an item had sugar or not. The only thing that mattered was that it stayed in my stomach.

When I was thirty-four weeks pregnant, I woke up in the middle of the night covered in blood. We went to the hospital and had an emergency c-section. My son’s heartrate was dropping. He made it but when I saw him, I didn’t care. It was as if I was looking at a stick or something instead of a miracle. This was bizarre because I loved babies and kids. I was a teacher and had a strong bond with my first son. But everything changed after that traumatic birth.

We came home and the lack of connection continued. I breastfed him, co-slept with him in our bed and I felt nothing for him. I could have cared less about his milestones like his first smile. My husband was so excited and I felt nothing. When I told the midwife at a checkup, she told me what I was feeling was normal. It was exhaustion from having two young kids but that she would have a nurse call me to a depression screener.

I didn’t pass the screener. So, I received no help. No medicine. No counseling. My misery grew. I would sob after my husband and I had sex. I yelled at my kids all the time. There’s a passage from the Big Book on page 52 that reads, “We were having trouble with our personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were happy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people.” That was my life.

One day when my kids were two and four-years-old, I was at the beach with a bunch of moms and one mom said she didn’t eat flour and sugar. I asked her how she did that because I thought I had a problem with sugar. Eventually she disclosed she was in Overeater’s Anonymous. I told her I wasn’t an overeater. She looked at me and said you should go to six meetings before you decide you’re not an overeater.

That fall I was treating my kids so roughly when I was putting them in the car after my older son’s violin lesson, that a woman in the parking lot stopped and watched me with a look of horror on her face. She stood by and waited till I got into the driver’s seat and drove away before she moved. She was stunned and worried for my children’s safety. She should have been.

A few months later, I went to my first Overeaters Anonymous meeting. For the first hour, I was literally white-knuckling it, gripping my chair to force my body to stay seated. The people were talking about God. I didn’t want to talk about God. I wanted to stop eating sugar. But during the second half of the meeting, my first sponsor shared that she was celebrating twenty-one years of abstinence and that she had joined not because of weight but because she couldn’t stop yelling at her husband and her kids.

Relief washed over me. I was in the right place. I wanted to stop yelling at my husband and kids, too. She sponsored me, I stopped eating sugar and started working the steps. Right away, I received recovery gifts. I lost twenty-five pounds in a few months-that’s how much sugar I had been eating. But more importantly, my behavior started to change.

About two months after I joined program, my sons were three and five, one of them dropped a glass object and it shattered. They had absolute looks of terror on their faces. I told them not to worry about it, that it wasn’t a big deal. Relief flooded their faces and their bodies. Their shoulders dropped away from their ears. I had been terrorizing my little guys for three years. How awful it must have been for them to live in fear of me for that long.

One day I was stressed about grocery shopping with the kids. We live in the country and it’s about a twenty-five minute drive to the grocery store. I was pushing my cart down the aisle and I looked up to see my husband pushing a cart. He said he had come to help me because I seemed stressed and needed help. Before program when I was screaming all the time, he could never tell if I needed help or not because I was so miserable every moment.

My mother and I stopped fighting, the flowers were literally brighter, life was better and I thought it was all because I wasn’t eating sugar. Wrong. I worked steps one through nine to get recovered, but I never worked steps ten through twelve to stay recovered. I thought as long as I didn’t eat sugar, my recovery would continue. My kids got older, I couldn’t go to my Tuesday night meeting anymore because my kids had activities and the misery and out of control behaviors returned.

When my kids were both in grade school, I started working part time as a teacher and pursuing my MFA in writing for children. One day in my principal’s office, I found myself yelling at him. I was watching myself thinking, who is this crazy person screaming at their boss? I knew it was me, but I couldn’t stop. A few weeks later, the same thing happened in my graduate class. I was screaming at my professor. I was baffled. Why had these old behaviors returned if I wasn’t eating sugar?

I called into a relapse and recovery meeting and listened to a woman sharing her recovery story. She said, “I thought food was my problem, but it was my solution. It didn’t matter what kind of food I ate, I would compulsively overeat anything to try and control life.” It hit me. Food wasn’t my problem, it was my solution. My problem was I was trying to control my life and the life of the other people around me. As the Big Book says on page 62, “First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work.” That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t eating sugar, but I was still playing God. That was my problem.

So, my sponsor took me through steps one through nine in a couple of weeks to get recovered. That was more than eight years ago. Since then I have worked steps ten, eleven and twelve to deepen my recovery. I live in peace and a place of gratitude each day as long as I assess my defects (step 10), make conscious contact with God (step 11) and help carry the recovery message to others (step 12). Through miscarriages, my father’s multiple heart attacks, my sons’ transition from kids, to teenagers, to adults, recovery has been my life raft.

Recovery has also been my sail. I have a teaching job I love in a demanding district with high expectations. There is no way I could work there without recovery because I have to be able to admit my wrongs and right them. This was something I could not do when I was compulsively eating. I am a published author because I listen to feedback in order to make my work stronger. Before recovery, I thought I was perfect so I couldn’t ever hear or accept feedback. Both of my sons contribute to society and my husband and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary this year. These are all gifts I would have never received if I were still immersed in my disease convinced that other people were the problem and not my spiritual illness.

I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to share my recovery story with you. We have one wild and precious life and higher power has a plan for us. Connect with your higher power by putting down the food, picking up the Big Book, getting a recovered sponsor, working the first nine steps and living daily in steps ten, eleven and twelve. As the Big Book says on page twenty-eight, it is, “a design for living that really works.”