I know I’m a compulsive overeater,
that diets don’t work…for me.
They work fine as a plan of eating
but the diet idea, the willpower,
the weigh-in-front-of-people-for-maximum-humiliation,
the attagirls, the rewards you can add back in
that for me start the spiral all over again…
I know they don’t work.

I know my life is totally unmanageable
and that has nothing to do with weight or food,
that it’s how I look at things, how I react,
how I think of myself, how I view myself
in relationship to everybody else,
that stops me from being able to manage it.

I know that there is something out there,
some power greater than I am great,
some power with real power that can.
Can manage my life, can stop the compulsive eating,
can make things make sense, can teach me
what the problems are by simply writing down
who I think screwed me around and then figuring out
that I had at least as much to do with it, by admitting it
to that higher power and to a, gulp, human being
preferably who understands the language in which I speak…

I know that trying to manage my life by myself
is a mound of excrement from a male bovine.
I know that I belong in Overeaters Anonymous
and by the grace of that Power one day at a time
I’ll stay.