Overeaters Anonymous

December 2007, I attended a meeting in Manhattan of the OA, an organization of self diagnosed women participating that evening in order to work towards healing their illnesses. OA is not limited to women, but the problem is most often that of a woman. OA stands for Overeaters Anonymous, but of the 30 or so in the room that night, only one or two were over-weight. OA in Manhattan has little to do with obesity. It is about an obsession with food. Everyone in the room had disordered eating to varying extents, most people diagnosing themselves or having been diagnosed by a doctor with Anorexia or Bulimia.
The friend who had agreed to come with me and I arrived a little after 7pm. When we entered the large fluorescent-lit meeting room, a woman had already begun to recount her story. She was pale-skinned, in her late 20s with black shoulder length hair. She looked worn, but not unhealthy, thin but not skinny. I remember noticing that I liked her boots and the knee height striped socks she wore underneath them.
“I would spend days in my room, too ashamed to go out,” she said, “I would numb my emotional pain by eating. I would eat an entire tub of ice cream, than throw it up back into its tub. There were times when, after I had thrown it up, I would eat it again.”
Another girl who was there I recognized. She had been a yoga student of mine. I had been teaching yoga for just over a year and still thought I could maintain an image of super humanness with my students. Now I was embarrassed, belittled and flawed. But I had tried attending this meeting to fix that.
Traditionally, after the meetings, the attendees go out to eat together. I remember the anxiety I felt about having to order and eat in front of these people. What will they order? Most importantly, what will they think of what I order? I felt they were watching me and judging me. After having talked about and analyzed food compulsions and habits so closely, the idea of eating felt unnatural. Was I even hungry? I didn’t know. What I ended up ordering, I don’t remember. I do remember a feeling of abnormality that accompanied every bight.
The girls at the dinner table closest to me knew each other.
“ I didn’t see you on Tuesday night.”
“No, I couldn’t go to the NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meeting this week. But I went to the DA (Debtors Anonymous) meeting on Wednesday.”
“Oh yeah, I should start going to that one! I can’t stop buying new clothes I can’t afford.”
One of the girls turned to me and asked, “Do you go to meetings?”
“First time.” I said… Meetings? Some of the girls had compulsive behaviors besides their eating habits: The addiction to meetings, AA, OA, NA, DA, you name it, there’s a meeting for it.
I came to realize why my problem was even more complex than the complicated mess it had already seemed.
It is a problem of the Media, the skinny girls on television and in magazines, then wanting to… needing to… be thin like them. But not only.
It is a problem of Discomfort, turning to sugar and fat like drugs for momentary relief. But not only.
It is a problem of Control, eating hardly anything to watch the number on the scale descend and feel a complete and artificial control over something in our lives, and then experiencing the total loss of control when we become too afraid to eat at all, or eat everything we’ve been depriving ourselves of. But not only.
It is a problem of Attention, feeling no one, or the most important person doesn’t notice us, and wondering if they’d notice if we disappeared. But not only.
It is a problem of a PROBLEM; this way humans have, especially in the United States, of diagnosing everything. So, we take the first step. We say, “I have a problem.” We feel good because we are no longer living in denial. We say, “I’m bulimic/alcoholic/addict/insert your problem here!” and we feel better because we know what we are. We own it. It works its way into the marrow of our bones. So after a while, when we’ve had enough, redefining ourselves as someone without a problem is like not knowing who we are anymore.
“Hello, my name is Hilary and I… I…” The words escape me. I have to learn, instead of being something, to just be.

Coffee and yoga

The two things that will undoubtedly make me feel happy regardless of what state I was in before are yoga and coffee. And listening to Frank Sinatra, but Frank's voice got me through high school, so these days when I listen, I feel happy but also think that maybe I should move on, as I kept thinking all four years between 1996 and 2000.

For most yoga teachers that I have had that strive to apply yoga to their daily lives, coffee is bad for your health and should be stopped. I respect these teachers, and perhaps one day I will be ready to test their theory, but I strongly believe at this time health is simply moderation. There is nothing that is purely evil or good in this world and mixing the two achieves a ballance.

One of my yoga influences, Mark Twain, suggested that even moderation should be taken in moderation. This means forgiving ourselves for eating an entire box of cookies if such a rare incident is to occur, and enjoying it, because what's the point of eating a box of cookies if not to enjoy? This means throwing yourself fully into yoga, try practicing every day for 30 days, then twice a day if you have the opportunity... But recognize when you've become obsessed. Take a break for a day, or two, or even three. But then get off your lazy butt and jump back into the regular yoga practice you found sustainable.

We are constantly drifting between circumstances in which we have a pattern and a sense of control over our lives, or in which our paths are irregular and not of our choosing or of our choosing by pure coincidence. Strive to be consistent when the world around you is haphazard but also to let in spontaneity when the grind of the day to day is numbing your senses.

How? In the summer of '95 before I discovered Frank, I was a miserable and maladjusted adolecent. With a group of girls from summer camp, I took to writing a "happiness list". Every day we would add an item or several to our own lists. Sometimes they were names of people at camp(though that was never consistent and I found the very person that made me happy one day made me miserable the next), sometimes descriptions of occurences. All in all, the happiness list, which counted about six-hundred items at the end of the summer, was a good idea, but I would get lost in fantasies of places I had never seen and people I was unlikely to meet, (#42, Johnny Depp). Today, I propose the idea of the happiness list to be aware of the present and remind ourselves what we appreciate in our lives.

Here's a very abreviated and spur of the moment list of what wakes me up, reminds me what I love about what I have:

Yoga (sometimes only after I've finished)
One cup of rich coffee
Frank Sinatra, "Fly Me to the Moon"
Fresh basil
Lying on the ground and gazing at the night sky
Jumping in freezing cold water (and climbing out again immediately)
Living with an artist
The constant existance of the moon (this might be a bit obtuse, so I'll blog about it next time)

How would you start your list?