“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
I will divide the next posts into two sections: Sanity and Higher Power.
Sanity: noun; the ability to think and behave in a normal and rational manner; sound mental health.
When I think of sanity or the lack thereof, I often look it as two extremes, the “normal” and the “crazies.” This is dualist thinking at its worst. I have areas of my life where I am normal to the point of being boring. I have some eccentricities, the spice of life. And I have some areas where I am downright dysfunctional.
One of the areas in which I am dysfunctional and/or insane is around the area off food and nutrition. Normal eating I would characterize as eating when you are hungry and stopping when you are full, on occasion indulging on some delicious but not necessarily nutritious food.
That is not how I typically ate. My typical eating pattern was skipping breakfast, but drinking 4-6 cups of coffee with hundreds of calories of powdered creamer in each cup. For lunch, I would go out to eat and have a full restaurant meal or fast food. I would liberally snack on treats and vending machine foods in the afternoon. When I got home, I ate dinner. Dinner was more-or-less an appetizer for the rest of the evenings eating. I would watch 3-4 hours of TV and graze the whole time. Weekends, I would eat out many times and binge on cookies, cake or ice cream. I was never hungry. I never allowed enough time to lapse between eating to ever develop hunger.
In addition to these awful eating habits, I would with some regularity have problems sleeping. I would go downstairs and binge. I was fully aware of what I was doing. I consciously thought this is bad for my body, but I would continue eating anyway. Whole packages of snacks and cookies would be devoured right before going to bed.
Consciously knowing what I was doing was wrong and bad for me and yet doing it anyway is my definition of insanity. The fact that I was fully aware of what I was doing, didn’t want to do it and doing it anyway made me realize that I was beyond helping myself. I need a power greater than myself to stop.
