Woe is me!

Consider Romans 7:21-24.

I'm an intelligent person, a successful professional, a competent leader, a resourceful individual. I can do most things I set out to do. Why, then, can I not control my eating? Like Paul, I do what I don't want to do, have full intentions of doing exactly what I know is not only right but best for me. I understand the rules when it comes to eating as well as I do all the other areas of my life where I function rather well. So what's wrong with me????

Others are able to decide to lose weight and do it. I'm not. Sure, it's hard for everybody who feels the need to lose, but it's not impossible! For me, obviously, it is. I know that because I really tried hard -- time after time -- for all those years. And I was a miserable failure at it.

There is a reason, and it's one that sounds preposterous at first, but when you finally accept it, not just in your head but in your heart, it's absolutely liberating! The reason is that for a compulsive overeater like me, it's not a personality flaw, it's a physical illness. I'm as much allergic to sugar and similar carbohydrates as other people are to nuts or bee stings or alfalfa. I cannot tolerate the carbs I crave. When I give into the craving, I'm like an alcoholic driven to madness by the overwhelming need for alcohol or the drug addict for the drug. Sugar is my drug of choice. When I give into the craving, I give in head over heels, a snowball barrelling for the bottom of a precipice.

You know, in some ways the problem for a compulsive eater can be even more difficult than the alcoholic's. Why? Two reasons.

1. An alcoholic can avoid drinking alcohol forever, once the physical craving is past. Unless the compulsive eater has intravenous feeding forever, though, it's necessary to continue to eat food.
2. An alcoholic is an angry person, angry at the world and mad at the face in the mirror. A food addict tends to be a person who follows the rules, who turns to food because it's proper, unlike alcohol which for many of us from the Bible Belt at least was always suspect. Our rage is just as real as the alcoholic's, but instead of expressing our anger, we deny it, stuff it inside, and tamp it down with food.

Woe is me!

But wait. There's hope. Read Romans 7:25.

There's hope. Thanks be to God.

Write down the ways you've hidden your eating from others. Have you stashed food in secret? Stolen it? Gone from one place to another so you don't buy so much in one place the clerk thinks badly of you? Have you eaten from the garbage pail or spoiled food? Do you clean the plates into yourself when you clear the table? Do you buy a dozen donuts so it looks like you're taking them to the office then eat the evidence before you arrive there? What behaviors make you feel like a hopeless sinner?