Struggling with food? You're not alone!

Do butterflies recall caterpillar days: Green bloated bodies chewing leaves into lace, spinning themselves into shrouds of blessed invisibility? Do swans relive ugly-duckling beginnings, avoiding their own reflections in barnyard mirrors, forced into shame by the jeers of the cuter species? Frozen by familial terms of cruel endearment, a cowardly bookworm devouring fantasy stories of […]

More and more, with each passing year, I count the many blessings that have come from working the Twelve Steps of Overeaters Anonymous. Today, deep in my heart, I can really FEEL the experience of “my cup runneth over.” This feeling doesn’t come from an overflow of food (as once was the case), but from […]

I Swirling confusion spirals around me. I’m caught in a whirlpool of behavior, emotion, belief, and memory that I can’t reconcile. I fight against the current, swim away from the vortex. I’m so tired, so sad. I long to surrender to the tide, but I choke back the tears, and insomnia protects me from my […]

Saturday (9/11/21) was the 20th Anniversary of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the militant Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States of America on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I spent much of that particular weekend reading about that day’s infamous events and watching a very detailed (and amazingly thorough) documentary that […]

Tradition Eleven: Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, television and other public media of communication. “When we maintain our Tradition of anonymity, we ensure that Overeaters Anonymous remains a spiritual Fellowship, supporting all of us in our […]

“We ask a sponsor to help us through all three levels of our program of recovery: physical, emotional, and spiritual.” – Tools of Recovery Pamphlet The first time I heard about OA, I said, “Is that a group thing? Groups don’t work for me.” I thought I had all the answers and believed that self-reliance […]

Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. “Our Higher Power is the only source of help that is always available to us, always strong enough to lift us […]

My name is Fernando C and I’m a compulsive overeater. I am 42 years of age and have had problems with compulsive overeating my entire life. Growing up, I faced two distinct challenges: 1) I was born into a family where food was scarce and 2) my father was an active alcoholic. Throughout my childhood, […]

Step Seven: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. ”Each of my character defects is replaced by its opposite, and I am equipped with a new set of survival skills.” — Voices of Recovery, October 7. If I’ve done a good job at becoming willing to let go of my character defects, turning them over […]