Many Symptoms, One Solution
Introduction
As we engage in Overeaters Anonymous’ Twelve-Step recovery program for compulsive overeating, we discover several beneficial tools that aid us in our journey. Consistently utilizing these tools has helped us achieve and maintain abstinence as well as overcome our illness.
For many of us, the key to abstaining from compulsive eating lies in adopting one or more of OA’s nine recovery tools. These tools enable us to integrate the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions into our lives more effectively.
In OA, you’ll find members who:
- Struggle with severe weight issues, possibly even reaching morbid obesity
- Deal with moderate overweight problems
- Maintain an average weight
- Struggle with being underweight
- Experience intermittent success in controlling their eating behaviors
- Have complete inability to manage their compulsive eating
OA members exhibit diverse food behaviours, such as:
- Obsession with body weight, shape, and size
- Binge eating and grazing
- Preoccupation with reducing diets, starvation, and excessive exercise
- Misuse of diuretics, laxatives, and other weight control methods
- Chewing and spitting out food, and use of diet pills and medical interventions
- Inability to stop eating certain foods after starting
- Constant preoccupation with food and fantasies about it
- Vulnerability to quick-weight loss schemes and using food as a reward or comfort
We have different symptoms, but a common bond.
As we cannot control our relationship with food and our lives have become unmanageable, members of OA seek and find a solution in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Despite the diversity of our symptoms, we share a common disease that can be overcome by living this program one day at a time.
If you feel you are one of us, we welcome you with open arms.
