Fear of Fat People

What do you tell someone who says they’re afraid of fat people because they might “catch the disease” if they get too close? Read on and discuss.

Mood music for this post: “Afraid” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU-rtOouPOA&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Someone in program told me that she’s afraid of fat people. Being in the same room with obesity fills her with terror. She’s worried that if she shakes a fat person’s hand, she’ll “catch the disease.” I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. It’s for real.

Naturally, I was taken aback. For one thing, why is she willing to be in a room with me?True, I’m much lighter than I used to be. But the word “slim” doesn’t exactly fit me.

To me, the whole thing is too far off the sanity charts to comprehend. My first instinct was to tell her she’s an idiot.

Then I remembered something important: When you are trapped in the grip of an addiction or mental illness, logic and sane thinking no longer apply.

I should know. I’ve been in the grip of both. I’ve had fears that were just as whacked. I never felt anxiety around people who are heavier than me. But there have been times when I thought of them as a lower form of life than myself. Since I was thinner, I was better than them. I thought this way even when I was 285 pounds and binge eating multiple times a day.

That’s just as bad as fearing an obese person. It’s probably worse.

Long before I found recover and the 12 steps, I used to be set off by the dumbest things. If a very old woman was sitting behind me in church, I’d be afraid to shake her hand during the part of Mass where we offer each other a sign of peace. Old people spread germs, too — right? That’s what I worried about. Forget that I’m a father of two boys below the age of 10 and kids are the biggest germ factories around.

I was afraid of plastic chairs. I was afraid that if I sat in one, the chair would stay stuck to my behind when I stood up. Actually, right before I entered OA, that very thing did happen.

Crowds used to scare the life out of me, so much so that I chose to stay in my room all the time.

So, all things considered, someone’s fear of fat people doesn’t seem as far removed from reality as I first thought.

Still, it’s a bad obsession and I hope she can free herself of it.

And Then There Were Three

God has a warped way of giving you what you need. Here’s an example.

Mood music for this post: “Epic” by Faith No More:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERTT_sv8sV0&hl=en_US&fs=1]

God has a warped way of giving you what you need. Case in point: He keeps sending me people to sponsor in my 12-Step recovery program. It’s as if He knows I’ve been walking a tightrope and need other addicts around to keep me in check.

Yesterday during work the BlackBerry went off. It was another guy from Haverhill. He saw my name on an OA list and called. He announced himself as a compulsive overeater and addict, and said he was in his fifth day of abstinence.

He had been around OA before, and had a food plan ready to go. I’d barely known the guy for five minutes and he was rattling off his food plan for the day. I was impressed.

My second sponsee is doing well, too. She’s been abstinent since the day she called me and asked for help on June 21. The first sponsee, who tends to disappear for long periods of time, is at least back to sending me his daily food plan by e-mail. That’s progress.

So here I am, clean from compulsive binge eating since Oct. 1, 2008, 65 pounds lighter but going through a rather dirty period of late where I’ve had to eat meals away from home without the little scale nearby. Yesterday I spent a lot of time in the car, my back in shambles (I’m going to the chiropractor for a fix at 4:30), feeling a bit low about having to borrow money from my father, and for a few milliseconds I contemplated stopping at a drive-through for some junk.

I came to my senses pretty quickly. I have way too much going on these days to fuck it all up with a relapse. But now there’s an added motivation to keep it clean:

If I screw up, I have to let these three people down. I’d have to stop sponsoring and sharing my story at meetings until I reached 90 days of back-to-back abstinence. Then one or all of them could go into tailspins.

So, you see, God has a funny way of doing things. To help me hold my recovery together he sends me people to offer guidance to.

The three sponsees are keeping me in check without even realizing it.

How strange is that?

Dirty Recovery

The author on how his recovery enters a sort of Purgatory around summer holidays.

Mood music for this post: “Locomotive” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYWyPKZ5G4&hl=en_US&fs=1]

There’s a danger for a recovering addict around summer holidays like July 4th. It’s a rather obvious statement. But I’m feeling it from my own perch as a recovering binge eater.

I’m in a place I’ll call dirty recovery. My abstinence is intact. I have not gone on a binge. I’ve steered clear of all things with flour and sugar. But I’ve had a lot of meals lately away from the comfort of home, where I can carefully weigh out everything I put in my body.

The last month has been crammed with cookouts. The standard fare is hamburgers and hot dogs with the usual sides. The most recent event was my friend Chris Hoff’s birthday bash.

Birthday boy and cloud security guru Chris Hoff

The man knows how to throw a party, and it was a great time with friends from the security industry and their spouses and kids.

The event is known for its abundance of pork, mojitos and a lot of other stuff. When an addict like me sees a pile of bacon on flames like the picture on the right, the demon starts to roll around in my head.

Hoff is great about making sure their are a lot of veggie options on the table, and that helped me out tremendously. He was also generous in sharing his cigars. Since that’s one of the few items I will still indulge in, that also helped a lot. I’m also lucky because many of my security friends read this blog and are well aware of my dietary restrictions. God provides is many ways.

Still, when someone like me is at an event like this without my trusty food scale, perfect abstinence becomes all the more difficult.

I’ll pile up the plate with salad and coleslaw and try to estimate what LOOKS like 10 ounces. I throw in what I think LOOKS like 4 ounces of pork. But I can never be sure I’m not taking in MORE than what I should be having.

With so many cookouts lately, I’ve been dancing on this barbed wire quite a bit. I’m feeling slightly bloated this morning, leading me to believe my measurements have been off.

It’s still a vast improvement over the days where I’d get drunk and then shovel food down my throat until I couldn’t look down and see my feet because the gut was swollen and obstructing the view.

My head is still clear, which is the most important part of my abstinence and sobriety. I pursued recovery to end the mental insanity more than the weight gain.

So in the big picture, it’s mission accomplished.

But recovery is dirty of late, and I need to clean up my act and tighten the portions.

The reason is simple: Dirty recovery, if you let it go on for too long, inevitably crashes head-on into full-blown relapse.

Things You Do When You’re a Sponsor

The phone rings. It’s one of people I’m sponsoring in OA. Here’s the conversation that followed.

Me: “So how you doing?”

Sponsee: “Not so good. There’s a bag of potato chips in the house and I want them badly.”

Me: “I see.”

Sponsee: “I’m not sure what to do.”

Me: “Get the bag of chips and do everything I say.”

Sponsee: “OK.”

Me: “Open the bag and stick it under the kitchen faucet.”

Sponsee: “Uh, OK…”

Me: “Turn the water on and fill up the bag.”

I hear the water running, so I’m pretty confident she’s doing what I suggested.

Sponsee: “OK. I did it.”

Me: “Now those chips don’t look very good to eat, now, do they?”

Sponsee: “No. Not at all.”

Me: “Now you can move on.”

Sponsee: “OK. But that really hurt.”

Me: “I’m sure it did.”

Later that night, Sponsee calls again. It’s after 10 p.m. and I was half asleep. She was hungry and wanted to know what to do.

Me: “Go to bed.”

She did.

This gal is a trooper. She’s following my lead with complete abandon. She is ready for abstinence.

She has been through a lot. She’s been through AA, Big-Book 12-Step studies, and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s been to hell and back more than once.

And she is relying on me to help her.

I wonder if she realizes she has a lot more recovery under her belt than I do — and that she’s actually a lot stronger than I am.

I hope I don’t let her down.

Mood music to end this post: “Love, Hate, Love” by Alice in Chains:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPFGsGlHeos&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Addicted to Relationships: A Cautionary Tale

The author on relationship dependency and the damage done.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/2PD7K8Lmc_U

Calling relationships an addiction may sound ridiculous on the surface. We need relationships. This post is about people who need to have a mate for their lives to have meaning.

They’re so desperate to be part of a union that they get intense about it very quickly, squeeze too tight and become a dysfunctional mess when the inevitable implosion happens.

Oh, yes. I’ve been there.

When I was in my late teens/early 20s I was absolutely obsessed with finding a girlfriend. Coveted relationships failed to take for a variety of reasons, one being that I’d be way too intense about it.

I thought I would surely rope in one girl with all my dark, brooding poetry. I think I scared her off, instead.

My friend Aaron — God Bless him because he was always by my side despite my being an absolute prick — was always trying to find me a girlfriend. He thought one girl would surely take to me because she had made a passing comment about me being “cute” the night of our high school graduation. I hounded her from that point on. She’s the one I pushed my dark and not-all-that-great poetry on.

Funny how some people think they are master poets because they can write a lot about how much they hate their parents. That was me. Of course, I was a teenager and most teenagers hate their parents for a little while.

There was another girl I thought would surely take to me because we were both avid Def Leppard fans. She spurned me — likes to joke about how she broke my little heart — but never went away, either. She went on to marry the guy she constantly complained about and had four kids. To this day, they are close friends and we always laugh about the old days.

A couple of the girls Aaron introduced me to did take to me, but THEY were the ones who squeezed too tight and scared me away.

One was borderline crazy but she had red hair, so I gave it a shot. I fled from her as if she were the house from The Amityville Horror. Not sure whatever became of her.

Another was 10 years older than me. We had an intense relationship that lasted two weeks before I decided to run for my life. The day I broke up with her, she threatened suicide and threw things at me, including a bunch of small, thin light bulbs she kept unscrewing from this lamp I called the middle-finger lamp, because all the small bulbs attached looked like they were giving the finger to all who walked by.

The second I was done with that relationship, I went off in search of another one. Because I felt like I was somehow less of a human being unless I had a mate.

Eventually I smartened up and realized this was a ridiculous hunt. I stopped looking and in the summer of 1993 was actually starting to enjoy being single.

That’s when I met Erin. The rest is history, and it just goes to show that you often find your soul-mate when you’re not looking for one.

I mention all this because I wanted to point out my own sordid history before turning to the real catalyst for this post.

I know someone who just experienced a break-up. I’ll keep the person’s name out of here to protect privacy. This person has NEEDED a relationship for as long as I can remember.

Without one this person starts to lose that sense of self worth you need to get out of bed every morning.

Past break-ups have coincided with massive episodes of depression.

Then a new relationship comes along and this person is the happiest soul on Earth. Then comes the split, followed by more depression.

It can be as vicious an addiction as drugs, alcohol and compulsive binge eating.

I really feel for those caught in its grip.

Relationships are like food. You can’t live without ’em. So when you start to approach them in an addictive fashion, it’s all the more difficult to kick.

I have no real point to make this morning. This is just something I was thinking about when I woke up.

I do pray for the person I just mentioned and hopes he/she can find some equilibrium soon. This person is pretty tough and has been though a lot of adversity, making it through stronger each time.

I’m hoping for a similar result here.

Flour and Sugar: A Tale of Slavery

The author has been asked how he gets by with no bread, pasta and all the other flour-sugar substances. Here’s his answer.

Update: A recent New York Times Magazine article on sugar as a toxin is worth reading as a companion to this post. Article summary: “That it makes us fat is something we take for granted. That it might also be making us sick is harder to accept.”

Mood music:

A reader of this blog wrote me over the weekend and asked how on Earth I’m able to exist without flour and sugar. No pasta? No bread? What else is there?

A woman in OA who I start sponsoring today asked the same question in a Saturday-night phone call. She said she’s hit rock bottom with the binge eating and is ready to do what she must to get better. But really, she asked. Does she HAVE TO give up flour and sugar?

The answer is no. Being in a 12-Step program for compulsive overeating is about one simple goal: To stop eating compulsively. There is no official OA diet.

I also tell people new to the program that sponsors are not doctors. We share the details of how we became abstinent and sober. But what works for us will probably not work for the next person.

No two addicts are the same. That goes for the substance we get addicted to, the manner in which we let it destroy our lives and how we come to the point where we realize it’s time to turn it all over to God or die by our own hands.

I know people in the program who are diabetics or who have intestinal problems that make them very sensitive to raw vegetables. Their food plans have to be different.

But it is true that most people in OA recovery abstain from all foods that have flour and sugar in the ingredients. Including me.

In my case, those ingredients were at the root of my addiction. Flour and sugar mixed together were for me what heroin was to Nikki Sixx or what vodka was to Ozzy Osbourne.

Not only did I put on an atrocious amount of weight binging on these things — I was 280 pounds at my worst — but I started running into some serious medical problems. I was waking up in the middle of the night throwing up stomach acid, for one thing. I was also experiencing an increased frequency of migraines, chest pains and deep fatigue.

I’m not a scientist or a nutritionist but I know this — days after I stopped eating flour and sugar all these things stopped happening to me.

That’s when I realized how enslaved I was to the stuff.

I also dropped more than 50 pounds on the spot. By four months in, the weight loss was 65 pounds, and I’ve maintained my current weight for nearly two years.

The wild thing is I lost the weight and have kept it off eating way more food than I ate before I got abstinent.

Almost everything I eat goes on a little scale. Four ounces of protein. Ten ounces of vegetable. Two ounces of brown rice or potato. Ten ounces of veggie is a lot.

My goal wasn’t really to lose weight. I didn’t mind being a big man. Hard to believe, perhaps. But it’s the truth.

I sought recovery for the sake of my sanity. My grip on reality was getting looser and looser, and without action I was going to fall into the abyss.

The weight loss was a bonus. And I won’t lie: I’m much more comfortable in this body than I was before.

Do I still wish I could eat a slice of pizza or have pasta once in awhile? Well, I thought I would have to fight back those urges. But I haven’t.

In fact, the sight and smell of McDonald’s or Papa Gino’s now makes me want to puke.

I never expected that. But I’ll take it.

Others Who Fight the Stigma

This isn’t the only blog trying to poke the stigma of mental illness and addiction in the eye. Check these out:

Mood music for this post: “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E22HprMQN8M&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I’ve been lucky to run across a couple other blogs this week where others are doing their part to break the stigma of OCD and binge eating. These finds make me happy because I’d hate to be the only one out here trying to fight the good fight. This is a stigma that’s hard to kill, after all.

So let me show you three blogs. Two are stigma-fighting blogs and the third actually glorifies all the stuff food addicts can’t touch.

I include the latter because the gals who write it always give me a chuckle, and laughter is an important tool of recovery, too.

EXPOSING OCD

What’s great about this blog is the level of detail the author gets into about every aspect of her OCD. While my blog casts a wide net on OCD, addiction and all the things that go with it, the author of “Exposing OCD” focuses like a laser beam on the compulsive behavior itself. it’s also chock full of information about the coping tools and organizations that have been a valuable resource for people like us.

The author says the following about herself:

I am a 40 something woman living in the Northeastern US, who took the average 17 years to find out I have OCD and even longer to actually find someone who knows how to treat it. I am sharing what has worked for me, as well as my current challenges with Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy. I hope you find this blog helpful!

I do find it helpful, and I thank you.

PEBBLES IN THE ROAD

This one focuses specifically on the challenges of compulsive overeating. The author takes a real diary approach in this one, while my blog — though the word “diary” is in the title — usually strays from the format.

Her writing is really about taking things one day at a time, focusing on each OA meeting, each day of abstinence from compulsive overeating and how she gets through things like traveling without losing her head. She stumbles, of course, and she doesn’t shy away from that. Here’s what she says about herself:

The is the journal of my road to recovery through Overeaters Anonymous. I have been an obsessive-compulsive personality for most of my 40 years. I had lived most of that time working to cure my disease. Through the years, I have practiced and changed almost all of my OCD behaviors to a livable standard, except compulsive binging. Food was my most powerful compulsion and when I hit bottom on May 13th, 2010, I finally I decided to join Overeaters Anonymous. Little did I know then that this was the answer I had been looking for all along. I have been abstinent from my compulsions since May 15th, 2010 and I have never felt so free.

KTEBCDOG’S BLOG

The ladies who write this one are friends of mine from the IT security industry: Christen Rice Gentile and Katie Boucher. Both work for Kaspersky Lab and Threat Post. Theirs is an unlikely blog to be included here.

I can’t eat a thing that they write about. They write about wanting to eat entire rooms full of kettle corn. They have more to say about beer than I ever thought possible.

But I’m at a stage of recovery where I can read about stuff I can’t have, be OK with it and even enjoy it. Besides, I’m a sucker for this comic direction they take.

Their colleague and my former boss, Dennis Fisher — an avid runner who can eat all this shit and stay thin — is quoted in the tagline as saying “serious food blogs suck out loud.”

Funny… I always felt that way about serious runner blogs. Except for this one. 😉

Go figure.

You Just Wouldn’t Understand (The Liar’s Disease II)

Addicts lie because of the shame. But there’s another reason for all the sneaking around.

Mood music for this post: John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey,” as covered by Cheap Trick:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e04OBJzbvc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

My boredom-induced brush with bad behavior Saturday night led to a conversation with Erin about the things I used to do when I was deep in the haze of my binge-eating addiction. She knows I lied a lot back then. I was a world-class sneak. Some of what I did still shocks her today.

She knew back then that I was spending a lot of money on junk and then trying to cover my tracks. She often found the empty fast-food bags under the seats in my car. Guilt bags, she called them.

Yesterday, during a conversation about something completely different — a friend’s enjoyment of chocolate — more of my past leaked out. The friend told Erin that he likes Kit-Kat and Hershey chocolate bars. This didn’t fit with her idea of good chocolate. She’s more of a Godiva Chocolate fan. It’s like me being a Starbucks snob and teasing those who settle for Dunkin Donuts and Maxwell House.

“I used to like Kit-Kats,” I said. “I used to like lots of ’em at one sitting.”

Then I mentioned how I would stop at gas stations and buy a pile of them to shove down my throat on the ride home. That’s when she said she still can’t believe what I used to do. It still makes her squirm a little bit.

If she knew EXACTLY what I was doing back then, she said, it would have been very hard to take, because while she was aware of the shame factor, before all my treatment she just didn’t have the ability to understand the mind of an addict.

The comment is worth mentioning here, because it sums up another layer of the liar’s disease. Shame was the biggest part of it for me. But there was also the other part: People just don’t understand.

Recovering addicts understand. But the more “normal” among us simply don’t have the ability to grasp how our brains are wired.

That’s not a criticism. Deep-rooted stupidity is hard for smart people to swallow. Not that addiction is about being smart or stupid.

The worst addicts include some of the smartest people on Earth. But in the grip of the crazies, we become capable of grand acts of buffoonery.

The good news is that I’m deep in recovery today and I’m grateful as hell.

And if my openness can help a few people understand, it was almost worth going through it.

Boredom: An Addict’s Worst Friend

Boredom is one of the most dangerous things an addict can encounter.

Mood music for this post: “What’s It Gonna Take” by Motley Crue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHk7h-xik-E&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Last night Erin was working, the kids were in bed and I had time on my hands. It wasn’t long before I started to feel bored.

Not good for someone with an addictive personality.

Boredom means the mind is free to start spinning. I feel uneasy and can’t settle on anything. Then I’m in the kitchen, looking through the cabinets.

I see a bottle of gin and consider taking a swig. If I do, surely no one will ever know.

I see the cupcakes Erin baked for Duncan’s kindergarten graduation celebration. Surely no one will notice if one goes missing. Or two. Or five.

For about 20 minutes, I’m standing there seriously thinking about breaking both my abstinence from binge eating and my sobriety. Erin doesn’t have to know. My OA sponsor doesn’t have to know.

Then I come to my senses and leave the kitchen. Instead of doing what I used to do all the time, I make a couple calls to fellow addicts in recovery, take a shower and go to bed.

When the addict in me stirs, there are usually reasons. A wave of depression. Stress over some family or work situation. Self loathing.

Last night none of those applied. Instead it was the boredom. Pure and simple. When I get bored, I start talking to The Asshole [Read about him in “Meet My Demon“].

I’m lucky these days. When I start listening to The Asshole, I’m able to snap back to reality and think of all the things I’ve accomplished in recovery. Breaking my abstinence and/or sobriety is just not worth the risk of everything crashing down.

There’s always the chance that I’ll relapse. That’s a danger every recovering addict lives with.

But it’s not going to happen today.

Since recovery is about taking it one day at a time, that’s a huge victory for me.

Still, last night was a good reminder that boredom can be lethal for someone like me. That’s why I write so much. That’s why I chose a demanding profession. That’s why I fill up all the remaining time in my days with activity, whether it’s something at church or various security industry meet-ups. It’s why I traveled 10 hours to and from Washington DC in a cramped RV with nine other people last February for the ShmooCon security conference instead of taking a 90-minute flight.

I don’t ever want to be bored.

That’s when the bad stuff happens.

Writing to Save My Life

The author on why he became a writer and how it shaped his recovery from mental illness and addiction.

People often ask me how the hell I do so much writing every week, between the three-to-four pieces I do for my employer, CSO Magazine, this blog and a book I’m writing on the side. They also ask how I’m able to write so fast, especially during security conferences.

At the Security B-Sides event in San Francisco in March, one friend marveled that I was able to write and post an article on a talk she had just given within minutes of the presentation ending. My friend Jennifer Jabbusch explained it well when she said, “That’s his job. It’s what he does.”

So, I figured it’s time I wrote something about writing.

When I was a kid, everyone expected me to become an artist because I was constantly drawing. In fact, I went to Northeast Metro Tech for high school to study architecture and was well on my way to settling on that for a career. Then, as my passion for metal music deepened, I became obsessed about poetry and the lyrics people like Nikki Sixx, Phil Lynott and James Hetfield were writing. So I started trying to BE them. I do still use the architectural skills when I write, so it wasn’t a waste of studies. When I write security articles, I usually approach it the way an architect approaches each new blueprint.

In hindsight, I wasn’t very good at it. But I persisted. The more music I listened to — and as an employee of Rockit Records, I had access to an endless supply — the more lyrics I wrote.

A lot of what I wrote became the lyrics for songs I would write with the band Skeptic Slang. The lyrics were mostly negative reactions to life at the time. In fact, if I were at a party with the me of the late 1980s-early 1990s, I probably wouldn’t like the younger me very much. I would dismiss him as a whiny little punk. But I was just a product of my experiences up to that point. Those who have read this blog from the beginning will understand. Those who don’t can get the back story here.

Finding those old notebooks full of Skeptic Slang lyrics has become a mini obsession of mine.

As I was ramping up the music writing, I was pursuing a parallel passion for journalism. In college, I dove into it relentlessly, writing for the Salem State Log and slowly earning myself a degree in English (the major) and Communications (the minor). I also helped edit submissions for Sounding’s East, the college literary magazine edited by a beautiful redhead who I eventually married. If you really want to know how to write effectively, check out her blog here.

I had my first reporter job  before I graduated, covering the Swampscott, Mass. school district. From there I got a full-time reporting gig  in Stoneham, then started editing for papers in Lynn, Billerica, Chelmsford and Westford. I was not a fast writer back then. Thanks to the OCD, I would slowly outline each story and, after writing the first draft, I’d read it back aloud, again and again, polishing one paragraph at a time. I would annoy many a colleague doing that, especially when I became night editor at The Eagle-Tribune.

Things started to go wrong in the latter job, because that’s when the surface cracks of my OCD started to appear and I started falling apart. One of the lessons, in hindsight, was that it was a mistake to go into all editing with no writing. I lost sight of why I got into the business when I became a full-on editor.

My entrance onto the information security scene was a result of my craving to write again. The security beat at TechTarget was my way back in, and I haven’t stopped since.

Some things have changed, though.

My writing is much faster today. I don’t do outlines of each story and I don’t read ’em back to myself aloud. I just do it and send them off to an editor. That’s partly the result of experience and partly the result of bringing the OCD under control, since the over polishing was an obsessive-compulsive action.

The result is that I don’t mind having several projects in play at once. In fact, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I need to write every day for mental exercise. The action of typing is now a soothing action for me. I love the sound and feel of my fingers pounding away on each key. It’s like the music I listen to while I write.

I am a two-fingered typist, by the way. I’m proud of that fact.

When I started this blog it was because I was ready to share my experiences so others might be compelled to come out of the shadows of mental illness and addiction. Hopefully I’ve had some success there. But regardless, this particular writing has become a critical tool of my own recovery.

By writing about the experience, I get them out of my head and can move on.

It’s no embellishment to say I’m literally writing to save my life. Writing HAS saved my life.