I huge weight is off my shoulders. I’ve gone from talking about the changes that’ll help me preserve my sobriety and abstinence to doing what I said I’d do.
Mood music: Pearl Jam covering Mother Love Bone’s “Crown of Thorns”
I told my sponsor that hitting the reset button means I have to replace her. She said she would never do anything to get in the way of my recovery. She’s a dear friend who has helped me so much this year. It’s not about her. It’s about me needing to change things up. She gets it.
Another cherished friend, the guy I sponsor, seemed to take it well when I told him that come Jan. 1 I need to step back from sponsoring people for awhile. He gets it, but I don’t think he likes it. He’s worried that I’ll push him out of my life. That’s not going to happen. He’ll figure that out in time.
The tweaks to my food plan are underway. I moved up an ounce on the morning oatmeal. Other changes will happen, mainly in terms of adding variety to the plan. I’m not necessarily changing what I eat. It’s more about how I cook the stuff. The one constant that can never be broken: No, flour, no sugar. The two ingredients together are like heroin to my fucked up mind.
I’ve been asked a million times how I exist without flour and sugar. No pasta? No pizza? What else is there? The simple answer is plenty. But that’s not the whole story. You can have an abstinent food plan and stay away from the flour and sugar. But if you eat more than the allotted amount, you’ve still relapsed.
Having an addictive mind that revolves around food is a particularly tricky beast to tame. Quitting drugs and alcohol is painful. So is quitting an addiction to shopping or porn. The problem with food is that you need it to survive. You can’t purge it from your life like the other things.
That’s why in the Overeater’s Anonymous crowd we have to talk to our sponsor every day and tell them what we’re eating that day. Make no mistake about it: I think it can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes I don’t want to talk on the phone. But, really, I have no choice.
The alternative is to be owned by the substances I’m addicted to. Then my wife and children suffer. After that, my work suffers. And in the end, I just fill my life with the fix until God no longer has anything to do with anything. 
I’m not letting that happen without one hell of a fight. And you know what? I’m going to win. I’ve been exposed to too much of God’s Grace to turn back now.
The beauty of making changes now is that I’m not having to do it because I relapsed.
I’ve been abstinent since Oct. 1, 2008. I was lucky enough to see myself headed for trouble and have decided to take preemptive action.
Of course, I realize that in the final analysis I’m never totally safe.
No addict ever is.
We’re never more than five minutes away from relapse.