The FA solution is "abstinence" – the AA equivalent to sobriety – where three meals each day are planned, weighed and measured, and the entire diet is free of flour, sugar, snacking and "individual binge foods".Įxercise is not discouraged but nor is it emphasised, because so many members have used excessive workouts to offset unhealthy eating habits in the past. I had a hole in my soul, this yearning, and all I could fill it with was food, food, food."īut how did she reach this point? The answer lies in the FA definition of food addiction, which they see as an "allergy" to flour, sugar and "quantities that set up an uncontrollable craving". I had no idea that my whole life, even in that time, had been dictated by the need to be thin. Years later she read a diary from the trip and was shocked every single entry began with anxiety around food. She went backpacking for a year to escape the cycle – a wonderful time she remembers fondly. "I managed my entire life according to a number on a scale – that's how I would experience that day, that week, the world." "My world became small and smaller," she says. There was a period in her late teens when a daily regimen of diet pills and Diet Coke left her with a sugary amphetamine-like buzz and an inability to concentrate or sleep.
The binges grew in parallel with advancing years and the unmet desire to be thin. Each was marred by the same pattern – when approaching her goal weight there was "this tension and despair", and she failed. Today she can place her age by the diet she was on at the time. She was a chubby child who sought solace in food. "You define it yourself, however you want. "I'm not religious at all but we hand over control to a higher power," he says. As one man points out, it is something they "feel in the soul". The group has no formal religious affiliation but the "disease", they say, is threefold: physical, mental and spiritual. As with AA, god and/or a "higher power" are called upon to assist in the fight. Members describe themselves as being "in recovery" – locked in a lifelong battle. This meeting begins with a serenity prayer and an explanation of the program, in which members admit their "powerlessness" over food. One member notes that when he travels interstate and can't find an FA meeting, he attends AA meetings instead. Indeed, on the table by the pamphlets rests a copy of the AA "Big Book". "FA" has existed for 27 years and its members subscribe to the same 12 step recovery process as those in AA – Alcoholics Anonymous. There are no humiliating weigh-ins, or fees.
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