Sticking with It

When I joined OA twenty years ago, I wasn’t interested in physical recovery. I needed help with my out-of-control emotions and relationships, but I was too scared to start from scratch in any Twelve Step fellowship for emotions and relationships. I was anorexic, so I could go every week to OA meetings (instead of once a month to “open” meetings of another fellowship). I began to learn the Twelve Steps.

As for spiritual recovery, how wonderful it was to find a use for my lifetime of learning and attempts to experience God. I put the spiritual part to work on the emotional. I started with prayer, positive affirmations, contacting wonderful OA people, and working Steps One through Three. These, plus making a determined start on Step Four by answering those awkward queries in the new OA Twelve and Twelve resulted in miracles. No more crying. No more needy clinging to inappropriate men. I found a new job in a new city. A new intergroup formed, and I did much service.

My physical side was in good shape, or so it seemed. I’d begun cycling less on an empty stomach; I ate five small meals a day, with no more stomach upsets, starvation, or pigging out. But I was still hypoglycemic, which made my behavior poor. I thought that was just an inevitable part of being female, although deep down I knew those problems would disappear if I got myself out of the red area below my healthy body size.

Next came the messy loss of my job, followed by an inevitable move to another job in another town, which was twice as far for me to cycle to get to work. There was no OA meeting, despite my desperate attempts to start one. Hypoglycemia was making my life unmanageable. My sponsee made me get a sponsor. My food intake crept up and so did my exercise because I feared putting on weight and losing control of my body.

Then disaster struck! I developed a hip problem. “Too much cycling,” said the doctor. My hip problem condemned me to taking buses and getting lifts from colleagues. I had to buy an electric bicycle upon which I just sit—no pedaling, no exercise. I tried swimming, using my arms only, but I hurt my elbow and got hypothermia. Everyone whose views I valued regarding my food said I was too thin and should gain some weight. I promised I would stick to my pre-hip-problem food plan and accept what fat might come from my lack of exercise.

This is a big, ongoing, hand-it-over job. If I hadn’t had those twenty years of emotional and spiritual recovery, I would’ve been a wreck. Even now, I’m frustrated at how slowly my hip is healing. But life without hypoglycemia is the way my HP wants it to be, so even when I’m allowed to exercise again, I will stick with my new physical recovery.

— S.P., United Kingdom