A friend once told me he stopped smoking and started breathing.
When I quit doing drugs, I woke up.
I was 20 years old. I’d been smoking marijuana daily since I was 13. Just before I went cold turkey, I was lying on my bed, paranoid and fearful, curled in a fetal position. I then heard a gentle voice. It said, “you do realize that you’re killing yourself.”
It took 6 months for the drugs to finally clear my system.
I still remember that moment. I was standing on ancient Roman ruins overlooking the panoramic countryside. As I breathed in the fresh morning air, a thick fog cleared from my mind, and for the first time in my life, I felt truly alive.
I was ready to know God. I just wasn’t sure what those words meant, but that became the focal point of my life.
Unfortunately, I still had to deal with my eating disorder.
I knew to be successful on my spiritual path, I had to have a healthy psychology.
It was time to heal myself.
From the time I was a girl, food had been my constant companion. It consoled and nurtured me. But in high school, I could not stop eating (or smoking pot) from all the anxiety and stress, so I ballooned. My weight continued to yo-yo throughout my early 20s until I was ready to finally address it.
At 22, I read Geneen Roth’s book, When Food Is Love. Roth spoke directly to me and I began to use her strategies. I stopped dieting and listened to my body. “Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full. Eat whatever you want.”
This process was a decision.
My relationship with food was like my drug habit. It controlled me. It was the only thing I focused on, obsessed over. But unlike dope, I couldn’t just quit. I had to change my relationship with food.
I wanted to shift from being a person who lived to eat to a person who ate to live.
It took 4 years to work through the underlying issues that caused me to eat uncontrollably, my triggers. I had to create new ways of managing my anxiety. I also had to own the fact the I was using my weight to hide from the world – from being seen, from being vulnerable. As I worked through these aspects, I was able to make peace with my past, and finally set myself free, trusting myself and the world
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