A Journey of Discovery

Unable to stop overeating for a day, this desperate compulsive overeater found
a 70-pound weight loss and a new relationship with God through Be Totally Free!

I struggled for over twenty years with my weight—gaining and then losing, each time only to gain more weight than I had lost. Looking back at my childhood, before I even started having a problem with weight, I realize that I felt terrified and insecure most of the time. I sought solace in many forms of escape, but my main escape was food.

Both of my parents came from working-class backgrounds and worked hard to provide opportunities for my two sisters, my brother, and me that they had never had. We did a lot of things as a family. To an outsider, I’m sure we looked like a happy, well-adjusted family, but I always felt awkward, and as though I didn’t quite fit in.

My parents were very religious, especially about going to church. The answers that I received from them in response to my curiosity about God were unsatisfying. There was never any explanation of a loving, kind God who cared about us, so the feeling that God was someone to fear took root and grew within me.

There was little intimacy in my family, so I used food to ease my loneliness. No one in my family ever talked about feelings. My father didn’t know how to handle us children even having feelings. If I looked sad or troubled, he would suggest taking an aspirin and a nap to feel better. There seemed to be an insurmountable wall blocking true communication between my parents and me, and I handled the feelings of rejection, caused by extreme fear of my parents’ disapproval, by overeating.

I always liked sweets, but I didn’t really start gaining weight until I was about fifteen. Feeling the stress of adolescence, I started overeating more and then panicking because I was gaining weight. As I gained weight, my mother voiced her disapproval. I felt insecure and inferior, believing that I was unacceptable to my mother because being thin was so important to her. To compensate for overeating, I starved myself. Adding more exercise, diet pills, laxatives, and diuretics to my routine, I was able to control my weight for several years.

Overeating to push down feelings that frightened me became a dire necessity. When my binges got bigger and my weight steadily increased, I resorted to more desperate measures. After I gorged, I forced myself to vomit and exercised obsessively, but the compulsion grew progressively worse, and my weight skyrocketed out of control. When I graduated from high school, I started my first job at a restaurant and put on 25 pounds during that one summer!

The older I got, the more I lived a double life. To protect my pride, I ate healthy foods in public, but when I was alone I binged on junk food.

I lived in silent desperation, trying to relieve my angst with every new method of weight loss that emerged. I bought magazines that announced new diets and I devised diets of my own. I hired a personal trainer and worked out for hours at the gym. I devoured self-help books on codependency, overeating, and depression. Then, rejecting the religion of my childhood, I tried my own brand of spirituality. I believed that if only I could get spiritual enough, God would help me. I tried self-help groups and self-empowerment seminars. Throughout all this seeking, I regularly attended Overeaters Anonymous meetings for ten years, but could never maintain “abstinence.” Nothing worked for me and I became increasingly hopeless.

Deciding to go to graduate school for a master’s degree in counseling, I hoped that learning how to help others who were suffering from eating disorders would help me solve my own problems. Ironically, during my four years in graduate school, I actually hit my top weight and my deepest depression.

My life did not improve as I’d fantasized it would after I earned my master’s degree. After a brief stint of white-knuckled weight loss, I started rapidly gaining weight again, and was miserable. Then I met a woman who shared her experience of breaking free from the same kind of vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting and the ensuing depression that I had experienced. I was amazed when she told me that she was not following a food plan or obsessively exercising to try to manage her weight. The compulsion to overeat had been totally lifted. She offered to introduce me to her life coach, Roy, the person who had helped her. Twenty-nine years ago, this man lost over one hundred pounds (which he has kept off) and also overcame a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and a dependency on alcohol, among other things.

During the years of his own hard work and self-discovery, Roy developed a unique spiritual process called Metasteps. This process was completely different from any thing I’d ever tried before, and my results were equally as different. With the profound and revolutionary help of this man, I have experienced the healing that I’d sought in vain elsewhere.

One of the first things Roy did was to introduce me to the Truth about God. He recommended I read daily spiritual readings to help me stay immersed in these new ideas. I thought I already knew a lot about God because I had grown up with so much religion, and had tried so many forms of spirituality. In my spiritual self-examination with this life coach, I learned that my misconceptions about God were the cause of much of the pain I was experiencing. I understand now that God is a loving Presence that is within me and surrounding me—a Presence that is always guiding and helping me, not an entity that I am trying to please in order to avoid punishment. In addition, I have been guided to establish a daily practice of meditation and prayer, which has helped me greatly. Metasteps has enabled me to apply the spiritual tools I’d never been able to implement and maintain on my own before, and has given me the courage to face all my strong feelings, whether they be fear, anger, passion, or love.

Learning how to maintain the weight loss has been just as important; for without learning how to LIVE differently, gaining the weight back would be inevitable, as was the case countless times before. Roy provided the support I needed to make the changes and face the feelings necessary to bring about a productive and fulfilling life.

Thanks to God and Roy’s inspiration, I have lost over 70 pounds. I am now maintaining a weight that is far below what I ever imagined possible for me. I look back at how I used to overeat and realize that a miracle has happened. Equally miraculous is that I do not rely on diet pills, chewing gum, coffee, or diet soda to keep me from overeating. After all those years of obsession, I no longer have to fight the insatiable craving to eat sweets or excessive quantities of food.

My world is expanding in wonderful ways. Where I once felt so worthless that I was willing to work in unchallenging, low-paying jobs, I now have a career that is rewarding and fulfilling, and am the top-paid person among my peers within the company. Where I once felt so undeserving of any good, I now have a good job, a comfortable home, a new luxury car, and I receive unexpected financial blessings every day. Where I once was too afraid of people to risk love, I now am learning to love other people, and as a result I am better able to love myself.

Every time I tell another hurting person about the help I found, I feel better about myself. I want everyone to know that they too can stop hurting themselves with overeating, obsessive exercising, guilt and depression; and they don’t have to resort to surgery, liposuction, diet pills, anorexia, or bulimia to manage their weight. Just as Roy helped me, I am involved in making this help available to others by sharing my message of hope and directing people to the Be Totally Free! website. There is no greater joy than witnessing others receive the help they need and be restored to a freer, more meaningful life.