Running on Fumes

You know the feeling.  Slowly, surely, your reserves have been depleting.  Every encounter saps more and more out of you.  Every demand, every injustice, every arrow life can throw at you just takes more and more out of you.

Before long, your emotional reserves aren't just getting low, they've reached the bottom of the tank and you're "running on fumes."  You know that unless you get filled up, and soon, you're going to run out of gas and possibly be stranded without anyone to help. So you start making a fill-up your top priority.  I know that feeling.  There's a desperation that sets in.  All other considerations aside, the most important thing is to get the very thing that will satisfy and bring peace.

I used to try to fill that void with all kinds of things.  Usually I would find someone to dump on, manipulate, or otherwise try to force into meeting my needs.  It never worked.  It might be a stop-gap, but it never fully satisfied. And it ultimately led to people staying away from me, avoiding me, judging me.  I was creating the very thing I feared the most: isolation.  That's when I'd look for something else to fill the empty, lonely, or angry feeling.  Most of the time it was food.

Food is one of those insidious things.  You need it to live.  You can't quit food cold turkey, it doesn't work that way.  Even the term "cold turkey" is about food (aghh!)  But a food addict uses food to change how she / he feels.  And it does do that.  Temporarily.  

It's an addiction for some people.  And I'm one of those people. It's no longer a joking matter for me.  I can't laugh this off, and more and more it annoys me when I hear people joking about how they are "full gospel preachers."  It's a very lonely, frustrating place to be.  I eat and eat and eat until it hurts, then eat some more.  The full feeling releases the body's natural endorphins, and it drives away the loneliness or the anger for a while, but it always comes back.   The inevitable result is obesity and the health problems that accompany it.  Not to mention the guilt... oh, the guilt and the shame.  Depression can set in.  This in turn just fuels the desire, the compulsion to eat.  It's a vicious cycle and I fully admit that I am a food addict.  I know that my addiction to food will kill me if I don't get mastery over it.  Yet I can't stop using food to change the way I feel.  Not by myself.


Slowly I am coming to the place where I can admit to myself that I am powerless over this. It's bigger than I am - and that's saying something!  I've tried every diet out there.  While some have worked temporarily, none have allowed me to keep the weight off.


But I've noticed something.  As I recover from my even greater compulsion to control and fix people, I find myself weighing less than I did a year ago. My therapist told me that this might happen.  

This time of year I always gain weight; most people do.  But this time last year I weighed 10 pounds more than I do now.  To me it's an indication of a deeper spiritual process.  I can feel full emotionally and this is a byproduct of recovery.  As I learn over time to look after myself, be good to my inner child and stop defining myself by what others think of me or by how successful I have been at getting them to do what I want, I fully expect that the chains of food addiction will no longer burden me and that the weight problem will take care of itself because emotionally, spiritually, I'll keep on being "filled to overflowing."

That's what I call healing from the inside out.