OA Region III assembly in Salt Lake City, UT

Hi everybody. My name is Jim Puck and I'm a compulsive overeater.

Oh, I like the sound of that. Can we, can we do that again? My name is Jim Puck and I'm a compulsive overeater.

Oh, OK, thanks. I must be in the right place.

I'm very glad to be here tonight. In fact, I'm just as tickled as I can be to be here tonight.

This is this is a privilege and the Big Book an anonymous #3

Bill and Bob are over Bobby's house,

Bill Dee's house, anonymous #3 and the wife is wondering how come you're willing to do this? You know, we're not paying you anything. And, and Bill Wilson said to Henrietta, he said, Henrietta, the Lord has been so wonderful to me, cure and me of this terrible disease that I just want to keep talking about it and telling people.

And I just want to keep talking about this and telling people and I'll chase them down the street, you know, doesn't bother me a bit.

I am anonymous at the level of press, radio and films. I'm not anonymous below that level. It wasn't too many years ago I was standing in the lobby at my office. Somebody walked up, said, Jim, aren't you one of those database programmers? And the receptionist said no, he's a compulsive overeater.

So I'm, I'm glad I'm tickled about this thing. I would like to to thank the the committee for asking me to speak tonight. I'm sure the fact that I'm on the committee had nothing to do with it.

The fact that I'm signing the checks may have had small issue there.

I'd also like to thank

you for being here. And that's all of you, but it most especially, it's the folks who are here for the service structure,

those of you who came here to do our business and to make sure that we last a little while longer. One of my favorite movies

is called Razor's Edge. It was Bill Murray's only dramatic role that I understand. He's done another one recently. I hadn't seen it, but in this movie, Bill plays a fellow who who had become disillusioned and had gone up during World War One and had gone up into the into the Himalayas and lived with the Dalai Lama and had gotten real spiritual.

And then he came back down to live among us. And he got to Paris and he found an old friend of his young lady who had wound up

drinking and smoking opium.

And Bill, with this massive amount of spiritual information and spirituality that he'd gotten from living with the Dalai Lama, was able to get this girl off the sauce and off the opium.

But there comes a scene in the movie where Bill is not there, and the girl is sitting there, and she's under some very trying circumstances. And a lady who did not have this girl's interest at heart put a bottle on the table in front of her and walked out.

And my wife and I are watching this movie and first thing we go is go to meeting.

Call your sponsor.

This was 19/28/1929.

There was number meeting. There was number sponsor. There was number literature,

There was number phone list. If you suffered at that time

from an obsession of the mind, an analogy of the body, there was absolutely no hope for you.

And so those of you who are here to do our business, those of you who are here to carry on

on the working day-to-day stuff of Overeaters Anonymous and thanks for being here. I'm glad you're here.

And the fact is, if you weren't here, we wouldn't be here.

And, and I don't know where I'd be,

but I would not have just gone for a run of the park and then gone to the gym and then stopped off for a quick absent meal and got over here to give a talk. I would be somewhere I wouldn't want to be. I would be doing something I didn't want to do

and I would be a prisoner in my own mind

and my my body and my illness would be doing things without my permission.

Knew a father once and this is the way he said it. When I told you all my name is Jim Bucket and I said that I'm a compulsive overeater that tells y'all who I am and it tells you what I am. The Who I am is Jim Puckett. The what I am is a compulsive overeater. Now Once Upon a time The Who I am would wake up in the morning and say I'm not going to binge today. And the what I am would say, Oh yes, you are.

And then The Who I am would say, no, I'm not. And the what would say Oh yes, you are. And The Who would say no, I'm not. And the what would say Oh yes, you are. And that night the what had a binge and the next morning The Who had a peanut butter hangover.

Because I could not guarantee my own behavior.

I lived in a in a prison in the back of my head and I would be screaming at the rest of my mind. Don't do that. Don't eat that. And I couldn't hear myself.

I'm here tonight. I remember this fellowship,

necessary and sufficient for that is that I have an inappropriate relationship with food. I do not remember when I developed it. I do not remember when I didn't have it,

but I do know that from a very early age I did not know what Hungary was.

I thought that angry was hungry,

I thought that scared was hungry, I thought that bored was hungry. And anything that I felt that I didn't like, I would put food in. And it wasn't. I don't think it really was that that made it feel better, but it seemed to make it go away, at least for a period of time. But that in itself would not have me up here.

It seems to me in my observations of, of of Earthlings

that they, in some cases it's some extent they have the same response to excess food that I do.

They have that sense of sedation and that anesthesia that comes from eating too much food. And my favorite example of that is I like to go back to my families house on Thanksgiving and watching me,

you know, and though I'm I'm the only one of us that I know in my family that has this illness, but even all of them, the ones who would never dream of, you know, binging and purging on Thanksgiving Day. They eat too much and then they go, you know, and they get the glazed eyeballs. They can't find the remote, you know, and, and the,

and the conversation level goes way down Thanksgiving afternoon because that's a that's a mammalian response to excess food is that there's a sedative effect to it. Kurt Vonnegut once said it's best to have, you know, important meetings after meals because nobody can worry if they got a full belly.

And he said nobody, He wasn't talking about us. But that's not why I'm here. Because earth people have that. They have that. But with me, it's different. Because, you see, they'll do that on Thanksgiving. And then the day after Thanksgiving, they go and they take some Alka seltzer, and then they don't want any more Turkey, you know, And for several days after Thanksgiving, they're not hungry.

That's not my response.

My response, Doctor Silkworth talks about it. In the doctor's opinion, my response to excess food is more excess food.

When I eat too much, When I pass that first compulsive bite,

when I have stopped feeding me and started feeding my disease, I need the second bite more than I needed the first one,

and I need the third bite more than I needed the second one.

That's called the phenomenon of craving. Once I put excess food into my system, I develop a physical allergy. It's a physical response. It's the phenomenon of craving. And craving, by the way, in the big book, is not what we use the term to mean in in in happy English. It is an irresistible impulse. If I am craving,

then I'm eating and I will continue to eat until something breaks the cycle.

That's what happens with me now. What usually would break the cycle was I would reach a point where I couldn't eat anymore and I'd go to sleep or whatever the next day. I'm still suffering from that toxicity of that excess food. So what happens is I wind up eating until something breaks the cycle.

Now that during this time while I was doing this, there was something up, there was a couple other things going on in my life. I'd like to tell you about it. One of them was that I married this young lady in Alabama. I was when we got married. I think it must have been 19 when I lost that weight because I was 19, she was 16.

But it was the first marriage for both of us.

Well, this was Alabama,

and part of that had to do with this. I've never been

a part of anything,

and I've never felt like I was real.

And my wife has read a book and we've talked about before the Velveteen Rabbit. It's about a little Bunny that if somebody loves it enough, it'll be real. And I reckon I thought that I was, you know, a Velveteen Pocket, that if I could find somebody to love me enough, I'd be real because I've never been real. And I just think I've been thinking about this a lot lately

because there's some places in my life where I might be real now. But if I

when I was working at McDonald's, the other guys were the real grill men, right? I was just working on the grill

when I was in the Army. The other guys were the real soldiers. I was a guy, somebody in uniform,

and it still comes on. It's still with me today. It's called the imposter syndrome. I've spent my whole life waiting for somebody to come up and tap me on the shoulder and say, excuse me, but you don't belong here, you know,

And I, I, what I did was I picked up this, this notion and I wasn't a conscious notion, but I had it that if I could do something, I, then I would be something.

And it, that actually turned out to be my salvation later on. But I kept trying to do and be the wrong things. And what I tried to do was I tried to be a husband and I tried to be a father. And I didn't have the tools to be a husband or be a father, but I was married and I did have kids. So I was trying, I was trying desperately to find some slot that I could fill to where folks would look at me and say, you're doing all right.

So I'm married this young lady

and we had some kids. Another thing that happened during this period was I was

how combating is not a good word. I was avoiding active alcoholism.

By that I meant the first time I ever had unlimited access to booze. I drank unlimited booze and you know, I just got drunk and it was wonderful and I fit in with the crowd that I was with. And the next day I felt terrible remorse. I was 15 years old at the time. And what happened with me is over the next good many years, I, it was like I got drunk every six months whether I needed to or not.

And what happened was I would get drunk because anytime I drank, I got drunk

and then I would swear off that I'm not going to do that. And I was avoiding drinking. I never really got going there,

but it was obvious early on that, you know, I was bad to drink

and so I was avoiding active alcoholism and my weight was doing the yo-yo thing.

And this kept up this kept up this weight, doing the yo-yo thing and avoiding alcoholism until after I got in the army and I got to Schweinfurt, West Germany. Now, sending an incipient alcoholic to West Germany is a lot like putting a compulsive overeater in a dairy.

OK, but I got the Schweinfurt West Germany. I was over there and then my wife showed up a month later with my two kids and informed me that she'd fallen in love with the next door neighbor.

This is Alabama, it's all right. They weren't even related.

So at this point

I'm like a super saturated solution ready to just crystallize. And what happened was I started drinking without with abandoned. I just, I accepted and stopped fighting booze and I spent the next 2 1/2 years just as drunk as Cooter Brown.

During this time,

the overwhelming effects of my alcoholism completely masked by compulsive overeating. You know, it's hard to diagnose pneumonia when somebody's got lung cancer. And it was such a no, my, my drinking was so very pervasive

and such an overwhelming symptom to anybody who saw me that there was an issue about, you know, my food was an issue. I wasn't eating much. I didn't want to eat because if you ate, then,

you know, it slowed down the booze. So what I always wound up doing was getting drunk and then after I was passed out, going to the pizza parlor. But there were, you know, this is the way that I lived the next few years. And I lived that way until things got bad enough. After I come back stateside, I was in Texas. Things got bad enough

to get my attention

and

there I was. I'll never forget this. On the 3rd of May 1985, I was back in Texas. I had a period of abstinence from alcohol, but the period of alcohol, of absence from alcohol, had nothing to do with the 12 steps. And so when the drinking started up again, all I knew was I had stopped drinking and it failed

and I was, I was trying to drink myself to death and I couldn't.

I kept waking up

and one night, 3rd of May 1985, I couldn't

I, I couldn't get drunk.

I couldn't make the wheels stop going around,

I couldn't make the fears and the worries go away. I couldn't make a warm glow come over my body and I couldn't even pass out.

And that night, due to the fact that they had gone in and looked at my room and my room stank and there was whiskey poured everywhere. And I stank and they took me and they put me outside the barracks and they said that I was not fit to live with human beings.

And that was the 3rd of May 1985.

And what I remember was I'm laying outside the barracks in my sleeping bag

and I'm I'm looking at the dew on the grass

and I was quiet inside.

I've spent the whole day and the whole night trying to drink enough to make the demons go away. And all they had to do was throw me out of the barracks and say I wasn't fit to live with humans. And all of a sudden, I was quiet inside.

They're laid there. I looked at the two on the grass and I went to sleep,

and when I woke up the next morning, I was still quiet inside.

I was. I had gone into the Army with some college, so I had gone in with an advanced rank, enlisted, grade three. That's E3

and it had taken me a year and a half to make E2.

Then I'm 83, then I'm 82, then I'm 83, then I'm 82, then I made E1 and at this point I was E1. I owe you one.

My wife had married the next door neighbor. My kids were calling somebody else daddy. My car was in a city dump with all the tires pointing in different directions.

My my military career was over, and since I was going to be thrown out of the Army with a bad discharge, I wouldn't have my job, my civilian job to go back to either.

Things were pretty bad.

I my entire net worth was my uniforms, a couple of pairs of blue jeans and T-shirts,

and I had one used boom box about this big and two cassette tapes. Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and Willie Nelson Sings Kris Kristofferson's Greatest Hits.

That's that. That was it. That was all I had. And when I woke up on the morning of four, May 1985, I was at peace.

I had given up.

I had absolutely no idea. I'd try drinking. I'd tried not drinking. I'd tried exercise. I'd I'd you know, I'd been. I was wore out and I was at peace

and it came up to me and they said, Private Puckett, you need to erect a pup tent right here, 90° off of this sidewalk. Dress right dress. And and I didn't say you can't do that to me. I want to see the Sergeant major. I want to see the Judge Advocate General. I want to talk to my chaplain. I'm going to write the congressman. I didn't go through all of the stuff that I had always gone through. I just said, yes, Sir. And I put up the pup tent and I sat down the pup tent.

And I didn't have anything to do. I had no pressure in social obligations,

nothing in my Franklin planet.

I sat down in the pup tent and then the captain came up and he said, Private Puckett, this pup tent will be your AO. That's area of operations. You will be in the pup tent unless you need to go inside to the to, to the latrine or to do laundry, to shower, change clothes or you go to duty. And I didn't go through all the stuff. I didn't say you got to give me an Article 15 or you have to give me a court martial. You can't simply restrict. I didn't go through all that stuff. I just said yes Sir.

And a man walked up behind the captain and said Sir, you can't restrict him to that pup tent. I need to take him to an A a meeting

and that was the 4th of May 1985 and I haven't had a drink since then.

I got quiet and God moved

and that is right there. That is without a doubt, that's the single most important moment in my life was when I gave up

and I came. I came into Alcoholics Anonymous and I did Alcoholics Anonymous things and I did them

when I when I'd given up. I'd given up and I was so grateful to know that there were people out there who actually wanted me to show up.

I didn't have the rebellion that some of us have. I don't want some old fool telling me what to do. I, I couldn't believe that I deserved that much consideration from somebody. And when there was a, a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous who was willing to sponsor me and tell me what to do, I was, I was stupidly grateful and I did whatever I was told to do. And I worked 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and I had a spiritual awakening

and I carried the message of Alcoholics Anonymous and, and, and I believe that I did it well.

First thing in my life I'd ever done. Well,

without a doubt the first thing in my life I'd ever done for the right reason. And it was the first thing in my life that I'd ever kept doing.

I'd never kept doing anything at all before

and I So for the next five years

I lived a good life and spiritual life and Alcoholics Anonymous. However,

my compulsive overeating continued.

That's an important point for me.

It really is important for me, because the fact is that in Alcoholics Anonymous I did indeed have a spiritual awakening. The book says you cannot transmit what you don't have. I was able to sponsor people, help them get sober, help them carry this message. God was acting in my life and he was acting through me for others, and that was able to happen even with me compulsively overeating.

So it seems to me that God can solve one problem and leave others for their time.

So. And that's one. And it wasn't

it wasn't, you know, like a little bit of compulsive overeating. This was Central Texas. And I remember going with other young a as we have Epsom salts parties, we go overeat and take Epsom salts and line up in the bathroom. That was one of the amazing things to me when I I had gone my way to, you know, been doing the yo-yo thing. And the last time that I got before I got sober that I got down around 150, somebody said, Chi Jim, you look terrible. And I thought that was a compliment.

You know, when you're trying to lose weight and people say you look unhealthy, that's good.

But they were worried. This was about the time that Karen Carpenter had died. And they said they wanted me to know if I had an eating disorder. And so they suggested to do some reading. And I read some magazines and I determined that no, anorexia is not a problem.

But what amazed me was that in that magazine they were talking, they talked about bulimia. This was educational.

I'd never had that idea. I thought that you ate or you starved. And here this thing is saying why? You know you can eat and then you can go throw up. Well-being an alcoholic, I'd already done all the throwing up I cared to do

that wasn't the sort of thing I considered recreation. You know oh boy, this go out Saturday night throw up. I don't had that, but it mentioned laxatives. So I started taking ex lax. I overeat and take ex lax and this carrot. And so we were doing this in my early sobriety and one of the things that I learned was it's real difficult to maintain a life of rigorous honesty and

binge and take ex lax,

especially when one of somebody told somebody else to meet, you know, sees you going to the bathroom. What's wrong, Jim? Oh, I have to tell him.

So that had to go. Active, active bulimia, conscious bulimia had to go. It couldn't sustain the scrutiny of honesty, but that didn't matter. I'm I, I got plenty of room in this brain for all kinds of things to keep secret for myself. And I was able to continue to compulsively overeat for good many years, went through a couple more marriages and finally I got one that took

and

she's she's up at the house now with our 12 year old.

We've been married now coming up on 17 years. She's been sober two years longer than I have. She mentions it daily.

I thought the same way when I had 18 years.

But she noticed something was strange about me.

She did. And folks noticed that something was strange about my eating. But The funny thing was that when I mentioned the AAS that maybe I should go to OA, see my weight was down. So they, they said you can't go, you're skinny, they won't let you in.

OK, well, So what happened was now before this, I gained 80 lbs and lose 80 lbs, you know, gain 80 lbs and lose 80. Hard to do that. Live in a spiritual way of life. What happened over the next five or six years of my my sobriety was I'd gained 10, lose 9,

gained 10, lose 9 and you do that 20 times, you've gained 20 lbs. That's about what what what happened. I gained about 20 lbs. And also here's the way that I was maintaining

the weight that I was. Here's the way that I wasn't going where my weight would go is I learned

that gunman. I learned without ever even being able to say it out loud, that once I started eating during the day, I kept eating.

So what happened was I learned to put off my first meal later and later and later to where finally I wasn't eating anything at all until supper.

And then I'd take my big bowl of popcorn and my big bowl of, you know, low fat frozen yogurt or ice cream or whatever and go off into the bedroom. And that's when I took the bed. But the way that I was able to maintain that weight was I knew once I started eating, I would keep eating. So I had to just not eat until bedtime. And Even so, still would gain the weight and lose the weight and gain the weight and lose the weight. But things came to a head one night

in late 1990

because we were playing spades late at my house and I was eating. I had my bowl of popcorn.

You know marble popcorn?

Dogbert says that the happiness, the secret to happiness, is World Peace in your own bag of chips.

I had my bowl of popcorn and my AA sponsor stuck his hand in my bowl of popcorn and I slapped it.

The next day I was presented with the chocolate book Overeaters Anonymous by my A A sponsor

and that was November 30th of 1990. And the next day after that, I read that book that night.

I read that book that night

and the next day I went to my first meeting of Overreason Anonymous in Huntsville, AL and I date my recovery from that day, December 1st, 1990.

And that that's why I'm here is because

it didn't matter that God was working in my life.

It didn't matter that I was praying every day that I was doing steps out the Hoo ha that I was carrying the message that I was doing all this great stuff. It didn't matter because my food problem could not be solved until I addressed it in the company of others who had the same problem.

There's a line in UMM

and there is a solution, and it talks about the fact that we feel a bond, a kinship with others who have the same problem.

But that is not enough in itself. You know, I don't have to come to the Region 30, a convention, to find other folks with the same problem. They're over to Chuck a Rama right now.

The thing is, they've got the same problem. They do not have a common solution

and I found, like I said, I was with other people and Alcoholics Anonymous who had the same problem. We had Epsom salts parties.

Sickies don't make a welly

and six sickies have an Epsom salts party.

It was not until I reached a point where I was willing to address my problem with others who had the same problem and at that moment, at that moment found a solution. And my life has not been the same since December 1st, 1990. I'm so grateful those folks in Huntsville, AL put up with me. They, they, they didn't understand though, 'cause they were all busy talking about abstinence and they wouldn't let, they wouldn't explain to me what it was,

you know, no, talk to me after the meeting. No, I'm sitting here now. What is it? They wouldn't tell me. But after the meeting we did, we did have a talk. And I took on this way of life and I read the book and I and that book told me to read the other book.

And so my recovery, the directions from our recovery are still found in the 1st 164 pages of the big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. That's my text.

In the text on page 60, right above AB and C, it says our description of the compulsive overeater, The chapter the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear 3 pertinent ideas. So my, the personal adventures before and after for me are found in our literature

and Overeaters Anonymous in the book Overeaters Anonymous in the Lifeline and in what I hear you people say at meetings.

That's so the instructions are there. I come to you for that first most important thing, identification,

and I also come to you for inspiration.

You're it. Do you know, don't know who you are?

I mean, do you? Do you get it?

The Big Book says that those of us who recovered from serious compulsive overeating are modern miracles of mental health. Never mind what my second wife says,

I am a modern miracle of mental health. I mean,

think about just who and what we are,

OK? We're not a self help program. If we were a self help program, you wouldn't need Step 2.

What we are is hundreds of thousands of channels of God operating in this world.

We are people who had a complete breakdown of our own resources and faculties,

and in our weakness is His strength made perfect.

So when I say I come to you for inspiration, my Home group is Friday night big book study. Commitment to abstinence meets up on Foothill Drive here in in Salt Lake. And when I go into that room, I can look around the room and I see people who have been drugged through the mud

with no sign of it on them.

I see people who've damaged themselves beyond repair and been lifted

to a state of living beyond anything they ever imagined, and they're all looking at each other and they're all smiling.

I was pretty tickled. Asked to be the the after dinner speaker at an OA convention because that implies that dinner will be over.

That's amazing right there. That's a miracle. These folks are going to stop eating and they'll still be able to listen.

And I'm one of you,

you know, like I smitch that Velveteen Rabbit. You know, I'm not any of those things. I'm still not any of those things. Now today, for just a moment, I was skiing some bumps today. And for just a minute I thought they should have had the camera on me. I mean, it was just, and it was. And then illusion was over,

you know. But I really am a recovered compulsive overeater. I really do do the things that I was told to do. And the book tells me that in doing them I will not do them perfect and I will not maintain perfect adherence to these principles. If I did maintain the perfect adherence to these principles, then I would be one of us, because it says none of us do that.

But I am one, and you gave that to me.

When I came in here, you were here.

That's one of the most important things. When I said thank you for being here, you're here.

When I got to that meeting on the 1st of December 1990, those people weren't out busy chasing their wonderful new life.

They weren't out being busy, you know, being physically fit and trying on new clothes.

They were at a meeting when I walked in and needed them.

There's a story about Jesus healing 10 lepers

and he said y'all, I got some stuff to do, y'all going over there and meet me later on. And when he got to the place where the lepers were, there was only one leper. And he said where then or the other nine?

Now, if it had been some of the LA groups I've been to, it would have been, oh, they're trying Weight Watchers, you know, they're doing something else. They're busy, They've got lives now. They're. But what you people were doing. And it's the kind of people who are in this room tonight

was you were being where you were supposed to be for the next leper.

And that was me

movie

I saw when I was a kid, I was on my parents were bad to drink and there were lots of noises and fights and breaking things late at night. When I was about eight or nine years old, I was watching a movie with

I'll Cry Tomorrow, I think was the name of it. In that movie,

the actress who's drinking was getting worse and worse and worse. You know, I, I didn't, I, I, I didn't know much about the topic, but I knew the sounds that I was hearing in the movie

and I knew the faces that I was seeing in the movie. And the movie kept getting worse and nastier and louder and uglier until that the lady in the movie walked in to a room. And in that room was Eddie Albert. Oliver Wendell Douglas on Green Acres is all I knew.

And Oliver Wendell Douglas gave the lady a cup of coffee. And the rest of the movie was better and better. After she found that place, the rest of the movie was better and better. And I remember thinking that, you know, I wish my mother would find that place.

And she never did. She found her own answer. She never found that place. But now I found that place. And now I'm the man handing the new guy a cup of coffee. I'm the man handing the new guy a meeting list.

You made me a hero.

I could never do the right thing for two weeks in a row and you made me a hero.

You made me a good guy,

and you did it by telling me to do what you did.

If you do, if you do what we do, you'll get what we got.

I couldn't listen to the other fellers tell me to do what they did because they didn't have my problem. They didn't eat like I did. They didn't. They'd never gotten mad and stormed through the house and suddenly were standing in front of the refrigerator.

They didn't know what that was like.

You folks told my story

and then you took it on past the end of where I was. You told me what it was going to be like. I can't tell you what my life is like now,

what I can, but I don't get nervous. And they, you know, folks would be wanting to talk later.

But it's beyond anything I ever imagined now. Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life, gave me a life. I didn't even have one before then. For that, I'm truly grateful, absolutely grateful. But the amount, the overwhelming response to life that I have now came out of Overeaters Anonymous. After I came in here, I had, I found that my consciousness expanded. I had to address everything that went in my body.

You know, I couldn't get away with stuff anymore after I'd been in here about, oh God, I'm good. I'm good to go after I've been in here about five months.

My

my wife. I try not to say my current wife.

Released. So I was told if I sit there I'm going to smoke, get out and run and get that stuff flushed out of your system. So I went out and run. Now I don't know about you. I'm a compulsive overeater. A normal person would go out and run and then come back. I went out and ran and ran a marathon.

It was, you know, 14 months later or 18 months later, I ran the Rocket City Marathon in Huntsville, AL and I ran two more after that. And then I swore off forever with without a solemn oath,

the life I live now. You know how it is. The people at the office, they say, oh, you're so good. No, you don't understand. I was so bad

and the life that I live now, that book, we were talking earlier about 8687 and 88 in the big book right there at the end there, it says we compulsive overeaters are undisciplined,

but we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined living this life with you folks.

You know what?

I'm pretty darn disciplined,

you know, I make an average of a certain number of meetings a week. I do.

I run a certain number of miles a week. I work. I show up at work. They're glad to see me. You know, I do stuff for them.

I the life I've been given is, is beyond my wildest dreams after I've been in this program. Oh, a few more months. It was the next winter after that young fellow that I was sponsoring. You know, I said, Gee, Jim, you're all healthy now. Let's go skiing. Now. You see, this was Alabama

and it was February, so he didn't really want to go skiing. Who's got a boat?

But no, he was a Yankee. He wanted to go ski on snow,

and I'm like, well, why would we do that?

And so he said, no, no, Jim, we'll go up to North Carolina. They got some Baja mountains up there. We'll go up there and we'll go skiing. And I said, well, you know,

contempt prior to investigation. So I got in the car with this fellow and we drove to North Carolina and I skied

that first day on North Carolina. Snow. This is this is Jim. Quality snow, you know? Yeah. I mean, you know, you take your, take your diamond, you won't you won't scratch it. And at the end of the day, I said, boy, Brian, that was fun. Gee, I'm sure glad I did that.

Let's go home

now I can say I've gone snow ski and let's go home. He said. No. We came and said we were going to ski 2 days,

so we skied 2 days because that's what we said we were going to do. Schlotzsky the second day.

I now live in Park City, UT. I spent the last three years on the ski patrol.

You know,

I remember I told you I lived in AI was staying my my my lodgings when I got introduced for the 12 steps was a was a pup tent. I now have a ski house in Park City, UT. You're all welcome. We got a futon you ever can come up there. I have a profession now

where they pay me to have fun

and then they give me extra money when I have more fun. And I say you don't understand. I don't deserve this. And they thank me for sharing and give me another check

because

what you made of me is worthwhile.

App is worthwhile.

I'm so grateful.

I'm just so grateful for the life that I've been given now and I don't ever want to stop talking about it and telling people. I have a funny feeling that as long as I keep talking about it and giving you and him the credit, I'm going to keep getting the blessings.

And they keep getting bigger and they keep becoming more

in my face. And it wasn't long ago that my youngest son, 12 years old, came into Overeaters Anonymous. In fact, while I was here last night playing banjo, he was chairing his first meeting.

I couldn't be there. I've been, you know, I've been to a lot of alcohol 9 but I can't keep my mouth shut while my 12 year old's trying to jar a meeting. But

and you know, and last night when we got ready to go to bed, he said Daddy, I'm done eating

because that's what he sees me do and that's what he's when my phone rings and he hears people calling me up and they say Jim, I'm done eating. I say I'm through eating too. And just so y'all know,

I've had my dinner now with the level of activity I've had today. I'll either have a pair of pretzels before I go to bed,

but other than that, I'm done eating.

And like I said, the after dinner speaker, we're done. You know,

this isn't going to carry on. We're not all going to move from here out there for dessert.

What this is like

what's happened? What happened to me was you,