As a child, Bianca tried weight gain as a defense against her abuser’s desires. “Unfortunately, it did not work,” she says. But as an adult, she was able to overcome her trauma and emerge into a hopeful and healthy life with OA and therapy.
A.F.S. from Illinois USA was a “revolving door member, joining and dropping out, for decades, and during that time she continued cycles of binge eating and restricting. It was not until she was given the gift of desperation that she committed to truly working the program. “And I hated it,” she says, “but the freedom tastes much better than any food I could eat.”
The sexual abuse that Blanca suffered as a child led her to gain weight in an attempt to make herself less attractive, and led later to multiple suicide attempts. Thankfully, her desperate attempts to outrun her pain were soothed and solved in Overeaters Anonymous. “My practice of the Twelve Steps leaves me with some very empowering ways of seeing life,” she says. “My smiles . . . . are coming from a place of inner peace, confidence, and happiness.
Thanks to recovery in OA, Jacki from Connecticut will spend the holidays in a state of abstinence and abundance. “In recovery, I no longer seek my thrills from the holiday goodies,” she says.
“I am learning,” says Liz, ”that if I review my emotions and my behavior daily, then responding to and resolving issues becomes easier and fewer matters build up over time.”
“When I first came to OA thirty-three years ago, I was a bundle of resentments, says Carrie. Today? “I can honestly say that I no longer have resentments . . . I marvel every day in this program how the Steps really work.”
Stephanie, a compulsive overeating, and Nancy, a gratefully recovering compulsive overeater, host this workshop on OA’s Fifth Step: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
Stephanie, an abstinent compulsive overeater, and Nancy, a gratefully recovering and abstinent compulsive eater, host this workshop on OA’s Fourth Step: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”
When an anonymous OA member started working Step Two and needed to contain his skepticism with some logic, he found a bedrock of truth in the ideas he had accepted in Step One. “If I practice honesty, the Principle of Step One, then I cannot wiggle out of these truths.”
Kathleen’s binge eating and low self-esteem made her ill and unable to hold a job. She was in the midst of bingeing and counting calories when she heard on the radio a public service announcement about Overeaters Anonymous. When she attended her first meeting, someone told her “You’re not alone anymore,” and that was enough to give her hope and start her on her recovery journey.