Sian L.

This speaker has been recorded at an online meeting of Addictive Eaters Anonymous. You can email us at contact@AEAinfo.org
Thank you. And Sian, if I could ask you to please unmute and share with us. Hey. Thank you, Claire. My name is Sian. I'm an addictive eater. Welcome to the newcomers, it's good to see so many people at the meeting. I thought what I might try and do is just share a little bit about what brought me to Addictive Eaters Anonymous. And what were the things I really needed to do in the very beginning as a newcomer. So I suppose firstly, what brought me here was that I wasn't the type of person who just developed a problem with food later in life. Erm... I was one who always had a problem with food from a very, very young age. I don't think I was born with a off switch when it came to eating. And I don't really remember as a as a kid, when I ate really ever getting a sense of feeling full. And food excited me I got excited by eating and food and particularly the high fat sugary, sweet foods. And but I was just always drawn to wanting to eat. And, and I can recall from a very young age that not having that off switch,
I I would be sick a lot. You know, in food, eating food, I
would vomit quite often because I just kept going. And I would say that as a child, you know, my eating would have concerned my parents. I learned from a very early age that the way I wanted to eat was different from other people. And so a lot of my eating was done in secret. And I used to take myself off and you know, just just eat wherever I could where there wasn't other people around, I would hide food. And I remember hearing a member talking about eating in the bathroom and it gave me such a flashback to trying to smuggle food into the bathroom. I used to love being in the kitchen when there was nobody else around. And I had weird behaviors. You know, I knew which floorboards in our house creaked and which floorboards to avoid on the way to the kitchen and going down the stairs which which stairs to skip so nobody would hear me sneaking in. How to close the kitchen cupboards really quietly. Yeah. And same with the fridge and the freezer was just very young to be doing strange things like that with food. But I never you know, it never occurred to me as a kid or growing up that that was a problem. Um, I'd say as time went on and into my teens and late teens, my addictive eating morphed itself in different ways. I hated the effect of gaining weight. And so dieting extreme dieting was something that I did, excessive exercise and trying not to eat, trying to induce vomiting and using pills to try and manage or control my weight and that obsession to want to eat all the time. I want to lose weight was just with me all of the time. Erm I'd go to bed at night with plans in my head; food plans, diet plans. And, and my mood. And how I was with other people was determined by what the weighing scales erm read. Erm and when I came to this fellowship, I was introduced to the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which I thought was a very strange book for an addictive eater to be introduced to. But there's a paragraph in it that I'd just like to read out that really describes how I felt inside. And, and the problems that had built up as a, as a result, I believe, of this illness of addiction. And this paragraph is on page 52, of the big book, and it's referred to in as 'the bedevilments'. And I also like to think of it as the ''isms'' of this disease that I have. But it talks about the human problems. And it says, ''We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn't control our emotional natures, we were prey to misery and depression, we couldn't make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn't seem to be of real help to other people...'' And there were probably a lot more things that I felt but I just really identified with with that, and that that build up of suppose the, the self that happens in addiction. And coming here and coming to these meetings and meeting members, and meeting other addictive eaters, changed me. The things that other members shared with me... I got hope from because they described their eating, and how they had found their eating had caused problems for them. And they described a solution that they had found in this in this program. And for the first time in my life, I did I felt I guess I felt hope. And and I wanted what they had. So in the very beginning, what was really important and what was really needed for me was I needed to go to a lot of meetings. I needed to try and listen out for the similarities. It was very easy for me to go 'Well, I wasn't that bad.' When I listened to other people share 'It wasn't that bad. And that didn't happen to me. And maybe I don't need to really be here.' And I had to try and cast that aside and just listen out for the things that I did relate to and that I could identify with. And that I was kind of sitting there nodding and going 'I've thought like that or I've done those things or I've felt that way.' So a lot of meetings were important. It was suggested to me that I start phoning other members, other sober members asking them would they share a little bit with me about their experience? And again, that all helped to make connections and I guess I began to feel a part of... the more I phoned the more I identified the more I listened. The more I wanted what these members had. So, you know, there was these meetings which last an hour but there was all the rest of the time in between meetings. It was suggested that I stick with phoning the women, you know, women phone women, men phone men. So that's what I did, you know, just I asked for a few contact numbers, and I started phoning. And from there, it just kind of built up. And that really, really helped, really helped me. Because when it came to a point where I felt that I was willing to do anything to get well, I know I knew who to go to. And I asked one woman, would she sponsor me? And a sponsor is somebody who has a sponsor themselves, is working these 12 steps of this program,
living this way of life, and trying to help somebody else. And so I knew that I needed to do what these people had done, if I wanted to get well.
I needed to surrender the addictive eating, food. And I knew that there were other substances that were making me very unwell, that also this addiction would swap to. And so they were substances that I needed to be willing to let go of and surrender. And I believe that, you know, there is a power greater than myself because I wasn't able to do that that powerlessness, that unmanageability that inability to be able to stop when I really wanted to,
I couldn't do it. Prayer. Wasn't too excited by the idea of prayer. But when my back was against the wall. And I had no where else to turn. I did say 'God, if you're out there, please help me.'
And funnily enough, that that simple prayer began to help to you know just just that little, those few words, just please help me if you're there. And so yeah, meetings, contact sponsorship, the 12 steps. Prayer. And in the beginning, my sense of a higher power or something greater than me was, was the members in these rooms, because they had found something that I wasn't able to find before coming here. And that was something greater than me. And in time, and through the 12 steps, my feelings and my attitudes and my behaviors began to change. And today, the obsession and that craving and that compulsion to want to eat and use other substances is no longer with me. It's all around me. You know, it's all around all of us. We go down, we go down the road, go down the street, go to a supermarket, we pass a cafe, pass restaurants, we're with other people that are eating, drinking, using perhaps, and you know, there is that defense. And before I had no defense. So this program really really works. It has worked for me it's worked for many others for many years. And yeah, if you're new, you're welcome. Just keep coming back. And I'm very grateful life is a real joy. And those bedevilments, those ''isms'', you know, they don't have the power over me like they did when I came here. They don't ruin my life the way they did when I came here. And and what's on offer here, I believe is freedom. It's not just about not eating the sweets or the chocolate or the food or the and trying to sit on our hands and white knuckle our way through life. There is a there's a freedom there's a peace of mind, it's a serenity. And we can go anywhere do anything and be amongst others and have that freedom. So I'll leave it there for this evening. Thanks for asking me to share.