Freedom of Choice

[MajestyJo]

Food for Thought
February 21

Serenity

Serenity comes when we are tuned in to our Higher Power. Serenity enables us to take external circumstances in stride, even the most difficult ones. Serenity is a gift, which we are each free to receive daily.

Turning our will and our lives over to God, as we understand Him encourages serenity. Staying in contact with our Higher Power as we go about our daily activities produces serenity. Practising abstinence from compulsive overeating maintains serenity.

In meeting after meeting, we hear people testify to the change that has come over them since they began the OA program. Circumstances which once would have sent them into a tailspin and into the refrigerator are now manageable. By the grace of God, they have been granted the serenity to accept the things they cannot change.

May I grow in serenity.

So many times we think it is okay to pick up something that is not our 'drug of choice' we justify our behavior not realizing that it all leads to the same soul sickness.

Each time we give in to our giant appetite and go off the program, it is just as hard to get back on as when we first began....

May I choose to abstain now and always.

Food For Thought!

As it says in the reading, it is about picking ourselves up and starting again and letting it go. For me it is look at what lead me to picking up and what lead me to where I felt it was necessary to use. Lots of time, it is a matter of thought and whether I follow it up by action. I have a choice, to pick up or not to pick up.

I can remember times in my life I didn't think I had an option. I didn't think there was an alternative. I had to have that next bite of food, I had to have that person in my life, I just had to go shopping and spend some money, it didn't matter if I had the money or not (if I didn't buy or have what I wanted, I obsessed about it until I got it be it Chinese Food, a purse, a dress, etc.) I remember telling my spiritual adviser when I quit smoking that it was either pick up a cigarette or go crazy! He said, "There was another option." I said, "What?" He said, "You could have turned it over." I responded with, "I forgot I had an option and a choice."

As time goes by and I stay clean and sober, I am better able to recognize when I find myself back in that obsessive thought before it becomes a behavior. As my sponsor said, "It is a program of practice, practice, practice.

[MajestyJo]

When I came into recovery, I was sick and tired of being tired and sick. I have gotten that we at different times in my recovery and I knew it was a sign of relapse.

I had to choose to live or to die. To put on weight for me was to die because my mother died at the age of 40 of a heart disease caused in part by the fact that she was overweight. My sponsor had a fear of losing weight because for her to lose weight was to die because she had been anorexic.

It was up to me to make healthy choices for me. Abusing food whether it is not eating or overeating all leads to the same soul sickness and the ends are the same, and it shows me that I am on a suicide mission.

Posted on another site in 2010

Just one, never worked for me. The concept just wasn't a part of any thinking pattern. Without my Higher Power, that freedom of choice is taken from me.