First of all, I looked again at what Motorcycle Gene had said about what had worked for him. It was brief advice.
1) He said he had a daily limit of 2000 calories.
2) Gene also said that many people go wrong in OA because they don't have any such hard and concrete limits on how much they eat. Instead, for some reason, they expect that managing their feelings will somehow lead to success.
So I pondered this, and reflected on whether or not it was true, and how it was true.
On point one, I knew it was true that Gene had truly found a way to stop overeating on a consistent basis. He had truly found success. I didn't have to take Gene's word on this (though I could have, as he was an exceedingly honest man). I just had to look at him. Gene was about 5' 6" and probably weighed 150, tops. In other words, he was extremely trim and fit looking for his size.
On point two, I could see that what Gene was suggesting about the lack of success by most people in OA was true as well. From attending a good many OA meetings, I saw that hardly anyone was successful. Group members were constantly talking about bingeing, or eating something with sugar in it. Most disturbingly, many there seemed to believe some kind of magic would someday happen that would cause them to stop overeating and lose weight.
So fine. Others in OA weren't successful in overcoming their problem with food, But neither was I.
The burning question then was: if recovery from overeating WAS possible, where had these people gone wrong? Where had I gone wrong?
I knew that I had recovered from the obsession and compulsion to drink alcohol. And I have also recovered from a serious addiction to cigarettes. These recoveries weren't flukes, they were genuine. This meant that consciously or unconsciously, I had done certain things right that produced success.
Adding to that, I knew of my friend Gene's genuine success with overcoming overeating. Gene seemed to be one of the very few, maybe the only person I'd met in OA who actually had authentic long term recovery from our common compulsion to eat as if it was our last day on earth.
I suspected that whatever Gene had done to conquer overeating had something very much in common with what I had done to conquer drinking and smoking. Could it be that I already knew the path to success with food, but hadn't realized that I knew it?
Could it be that I had failed with food, because I simply ignored certain principles of success that were essential to my recovery from drinking and smoking? In other words, was I actually deliberately flouting these proven principles of success in trying to overcome overeating?
This was a radical hypothesis!
What if I simply applied WHAT HAD ALREADY WORKED for me with drinking and smoking recovery directly to eating?
