I'm Jim, and I'm a Compulsive Overeater

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by monster

Are you back home?

No, monster. I'm living at my mom's. In my old room. She didn't mean 'a while' ...like a few hours. It wasn't a quick time out... It was either that or she was going to take the kids and go who knows where. she was/is that freaked out. She's 37, and completely dependent on me to provide for her and her kids... she trusted me to do that.... and I'm fucking it up badly.

I don't know yet how bad this is. I keep thinking I do, but then something else is made clear to me. I've been ignoring warnings and symptoms of stress in our relationship for many years, it seems. I want to be as honest about this as I can, and I keep thinking that I am, only to realize later that I haven't been. I can't even tell when I'm spinning the facts at this point. If I can't see the truth, how can I tell it?........I don't know.

I haven't had a drink in 10 days, or coffee, or junk food.... and last night I finally got more than 4 hours of sleep, so I'm starting to realize some of the things I've said and done... .

Today when I woke up, I felt a little bit more optimistic about things, and then a past due electric bill turned up. I had put off paying that. It was due early this month and I had carried a smallish amount from the prior month... so I owed 369 on July 3rd or something. I knew I was falling behind there, and I was planning on calling... blah blah blah...spin deleted.... now next months bill is here and its 6something.

anyway, I had to go in and ask my boss for an advance against my bonus to hopefully cover it, so that when jinx takes over the bills, she's not starting in a hole. I had to tell him what I was dealing with, so he'd understand it if I make some colossal fuck up here at work. I told him I was out of the house, and that I am going to get help. He was just as nice about it as you all have been. I am so ashamed about this that I don't want to tell anyone else I work with. I will eventually, but not while there's a danger of my bursting into tears in front of them. I work hard and make a lot of money. Our bills should be paid. All of them, every month.

[lumberjim]

i lied. I had one of my sister's homemade beers on Sunday after we built the deck. It was delicious.

[monster]

oh man. I'm so sorry. But like the others, I can't believe it can't be fixed. You're way stronger than you are currently giving yourself credit for, but that's not too surprising at this point in the journey. Congrats on admitting to the beer. Definitely the key here for you seems to be to fix the sneaking/avoiding the truth first. You can't fix everything at once, pick your battles and that one seems like it's first in line.

[Pico and ME]

When it comes down to it its just all about learning new habits. OA will help you figure out what those need to be for you. Once you have a better handle on your healthy habits, you wont feel the need for the deception.

[lumberjim]

Originally Posted by monster

oh man. I'm so sorry. But like the others, I can't believe it can't be fixed. You're way stronger than you are currently giving yourself credit for, but that's not too surprising at this point in the journey. Congrats on admitting to the beer. Definitely the key here for you seems to be to fix the sneaking/avoiding the truth first. You can't fix everything at once, pick your battles and that one seems like it's first in line.

I don't think the beer was a big deal. I just forgot that I had it. I had worked out in the sun all day, and she had brewed it herself, so I had one. But I'm trying extra hard to be 100% truthful here. reality Is.

[lumberjim]

Driving home tonight, I was thinking of all the different ways Shelby has tried to help me control my weight. I should actually say SOME of the ways, as there have been far too many to remember half of them.... How long she spent coming up with one good idea after another to help me get control of it. She got me going to the gym, she cooked healthy food for me to take to work, she tried letting go and saying nothing about it, she tried threatening me, she tried shaming me, she tried every thing a person could to help another get it. And I blithely pretended to take her advice...maybe sometimes I'd even go so far as to follow it for a week or two.... rarely. And then I'd go right back to my usual thing. Eating to capacity at every opportunity, eating more meat than a family needs.... eating 4 or 5 meals worth of food in a day some times.

My mind and body are way out of harmony. I need to get that balance back. I feel so terrible about how much time she wasted trying in vain to get through to me about this.

I think I really do believe in my heart that I couldn't and can't handle this alone. How else can I justify the way I've treated my wife? I would have gotten a hold of it at some point in the last 10 years or so right? But my compulsions have slowly gotten worse, and I was teetering at the brink of 300# in spite of the active lifestyle and exercise we did together.

I'm going to struggle with the next part. I am unsure about what higher power i can identify to restore me to sanity. I was brought up Christian, but intellectually, I don't believe in 'God' as a specific entity. Can I believe in him Spiritually? I wonder if I can allow that dichotomy to exist inside me. I've always been more of a believer in a Force.... which makes individual attention from that force a bit suspect in my mind. I's like to say I'll use FSM, but I don't want to joke around about this.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Oh hell, that's an easy one. Jinx is god(ess) and you're going straight to hell if you don't shape up.

[Undertoad]

You created the shame feelings because they recreated feelings that you secretly enjoyed as a child. They were a comfort. And the full feelings, also a low-level, basic comfort. You may have sought to create an emotion over which you actually had full control, to avoid more painful or complicated emotions that you could not control. The excitement of "getting away with it" can also be part of the addictive reaction.

That will be $90. Same time next week?

[sad_winslow]

Unrelated to 12-step programs or religion or whatnot, but maybe helpful:
my doctor wants me to lose weight, and recommends some supplement beverage drink mix junk called Bioslife Slim.

It's expensive as hell if you buy it outright, but if you call the company and do auto-pay monthly shipments and some membership it's about $60 for a month's supply. I bought a short supply of bios life (regular, not slim) from my doctor directly a while ago, but haven't tried it long enough to report on any benefits yet. it's supposed to help lower cholesterol, blood sugar with chromium, and basically thickens in your stomach to help you feel full without eating as much if you chug it a bit before a meal. It does do that, at least to me. Maybe it'd help you eat less.

But, an important aside: the annoying part is, and consider this carefully, that the company pushes it as a multi-level marketing thing where you can open a 'franchise' and sell it to other people, so i am wary of it a bit, but my doctor swears he has seen results from it in patients who have tried it, both in weight loss and blood sugar reduction, to the point of having at least one patient able to lose weight and stop taking insulin. I'm type 2 diabetic myself, so that is of rather great interest to me. i don't take insulin yet, and i'm trying to keep it that way.

I wouldn't EVER buy INTO anything from them (or a similar company) as far as a "business opportunity" goes, but I may give their product a try for a couple more months and see if it does anything. It shouldn't hurt anything but the pocketbook at worst, and I keep meticulous logs and trend graphs of my blood sugar so I'll have a little bit of data to watch. I need to get a good scale while I'm at it to watch that. Of course, diet and behavior modification, exercise, and calorie counting also goes hand-in-hand with it. I'm not conducting a "real" research study either so as far as confounding variables go those are something that I'll have to consider too.

http://www.unicity.net/usa/page/slim is the url for the stuff, if you dare.

And speaking of similar companies, another one called Melaleuca sells all sorts of junk in a similar fashion - but one of their products I tried actually I really, really liked. They also have a fiber supplement drink called "Fiberwise" that fills you up in a similar way, though doesn't have the weight loss claims attached. It's got a lot of different fiber sources, vitamins, and nutritional supplement stuff that may or may not do much, but as a whole the fiber content alone was actually excellent and it did its job (ahem) well.
http://businesscenter.melaleuca.com/...=1&sCatId=2156 is a direct link to the product. I went through a jug of the peach flavor over a couple of months. The upshot is that it's far, far cheaper than Bios Life Slim.

A disclaimer, to be clear: i don't sell the stuff, not affiliated in any way, etc. And, I can't stress enough, if you try either one, I strongly encourage that you don't get sucked in by the multi-level marketing part. It's *way* too easy to get burned doing that. But the products do seem decent, good even, so it might be worth a shot to try buying some. YMMV.

No matter how you choose to do it, I'd truly like to hear that you're able to succeed at this. It really makes me happy to hear about people making positive changes in their lives.

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

I'm going to struggle with the next part. I am unsure about what higher power i can identify to restore me to sanity. I was brought up Christian, but intellectually, I don't believe in 'God' as a specific entity. Can I believe in him Spiritually? I wonder if I can allow that dichotomy to exist inside me. I've always been more of a believer in a Force.... which makes individual attention from that force a bit suspect in my mind. I's like to say I'll use FSM, but I don't want to joke around about this.

I had a terrible time with the higher power thing when I was first introduced to AA. I was a pretty firm agnostic and studied biology in college on top of that. There is no room for God in a strict scientific discipline. God kept driving me out the door of AA, and alcohol kept driving me back in. It sucked.

Finally, I realized that I had had a higher power all along - alcohol. For you it may be food. I loved Jack Daniels more than I did my husband. I put my spouse through hell, so I could maintain my relationship with old Jack. I lied for and about my alcohol use. All my extra money was tithed to Jack's church. I woke up thinking of my next drink and went to sleep wishing I would die because I hated myself for drinking so much.

Alcohol was THE NUMBER ONE higher power in my life. So, I figured that since I already did have a higher power in my life after all, I might as well try switching to a new one. Some people use their group, but that didn't work for me.

I started reading about spirituality and the different types of beliefs. I liked Buddhism the best, and I began very haltingly to try to practice that. I could go with an intelligence of the universe, so I began to pray to that.

After a couple of years of this, I had two extremely powerful spiritual experiences about a year apart - me the confirmed agnostic.

You don't need to join an organized religion or become a Buddhist or even have a spiritual experience. What I have discovered is that there is much truth in "seek and you shall find." Even if you don't know what you are looking for, the act of seeking is enough.

Good luck on your journey, Jim.

[Trilby]

brilliant, Sam.

The act of seeking IS enough.

I found that to be true and I'm a recovering Catholic - talk about shame.

[LJ]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Oh hell, that's an easy one. Jinx is god(ess) and you're going straight to hell if you don't shape up.

I know you are joking here, but this actually touches on something that I was thinking. I think I was using jinx as a higher power, or as my conscience.(Hugely unfair of me, btw) Knowing all the while that I could fool her. As long as she didn't ask me directly if I ate at mcdonalds, I wouldn't get caught. And she never asked me.

I should be able to be honest enough to myself to see that what I'm doing is counterproductive to my goal, and stop that behavior. It shouldn't be ok if no one else knows. I know. I am the boss of me. I have to do the right thing because it is the right thing. Not because I'm trying not to get caught doing the wrong thing.

I see it now, today, and I hope to be able to maintain focus on that.

[Shawnee123]

You help others by talking about this, you know. It's part of the process. So, thanks, on behalf of those of us who have such things to think about in our lives, as well.

[LJ]

Sam,
Thank you. I think I will look into buddism.

[Pico and ME]

Jim...are you a reader? I am and I have always found comfort in looking for answers in books. A while back I was in crisis - mentally and emotionally. So I went to Barnes and Nobles and bought a bunch of books. Most of them were based on Buddhism and even though they didn't supply answers right away, they did show me that a lot of my problems stemmed from how and where I spent my mental focus. Another book, the Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns, helped me with that a little better because it was much more straight forward.

You can do this Jim. Your mental capacity is strong...very strong.