Every night, Meg went out shopping for snacks. She’d come home, stuff herself, and then suffer from bad sleep caused by her compulsive eating. “I’d feel my ongoing failure as a human being,” she recalls. But after finding abstinence in OA, she now says “I feel light-hearted and excited about life. I’m blessed with so much more.”
Maddie has been abstinent in OA for one week. “It’s terrible to admit . . . a destructive obsession with food,” she says. “But until we are ready to admit defeat, our abstinence will be on shaky ground.”
“After several years of my sugar-free food plan, everyone started getting on my last nerve,” says Judith. But TWICE when she hopped into her car and set off to get a trigger food, Higher Power had a different plan.
In this poem, Jacki asks Higher Power to be with her in moments both peaceful and painful.
A bird’s repeated failures reminds an OA member of the insanity of compulsive eating behaviors and how an outside influence is essential to arrest those behaviors.
A dietitian explains how the care she delivered was improved once she understood that addictive processes can apply to problems with food. She says the addiction can be broken with the OA program and its Plan of Eating Tool.
A medical doctor asserts that compulsive eating is a disease that precedes other chronic disorders. The disease can be successfully treated by applying treatment principles similar to those used for alcoholism.
Desperate and exhausted after an all-night eating binge, Jessica wrote a letter to her food addiction, and spelled out every scary, uncomfortable, and honest thought. After two years in OA, she now sees how writing that letter made it possible to find recovery and a worthwhile life.
Terri explains what her religious friends and the strangers she has encountered don’t understand: that nothing can help her overcome her bingeing except her Higher Power, the Twelve Steps, and the Fellowship of Overeaters Anonymous.
“If I could control food the way it controls me, I wouldn’t need OA,” says one OA member. For years, she lived life “in the food” and in other addictions to cope with the echoes of childhood abuse, but now she is standing vulnerably in our loving program where she has found a path to healing.