Today is a good day. Why? Because, just for today, I am ‘enough.’ For as long as I can remember, I NEVER felt enough. Not enoughness, inadequacy, feelings of being a failure or a disappointment, ruminating thoughts of being ‘broken’ or ‘a mistake’ – all of this ‘head junk’ forever repeating itself between my ears […]
Category Archives: Higher Power – God
Practicing Rigorous Honesty – the Road to Recovery from Food Addiction
In Twelve Step recovery programs, the message isn’t to be occasionally honest, or to try to be honest, but to practice “rigorous honesty.” But what does this actually mean? In the rooms of OA recovery, I learned that “honesty” is defined as “devoid of all motives to deceive.” If we look more closely at Step […]
Comparing Weight Loss Drugs to OA’s Twelve Steps
You’ve likely noticed the multitude of news headlines and social media posts regarding “easy” and “dramatic” weight loss resulting from “a simple weekly injection,” along with the promise of that injection being made available “in the near future” as a simple little pill. Such a “magic pill” was once the ultimate dream for this compulsive […]
Rigorous Honesty Opens The Path to Recovery from Compulsive Eating
A Requirement for Recovery In addition to having a sincere desire to stop eating compulsively, rigorous honesty is possibly the most important factor in success in recovery. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous clearly states: Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people […]
Falling Into My Higher Power
I am sitting in the shade of a tree overlooking the water of the Niagara River as it rushes toward the American Falls. It’s the last day of my vacation, so I came back to this park to meditate for a few minutes, to connect with serenity, and capture my thoughts before I finish getting […]
Miracles of Recovery: Following Doctors’ Orders
A recent conversation with a fellow OA member had me thinking about the miracles of recovery in Overeaters Anonymous. One of those miracles enables us to follow doctors’ orders regarding changes to our food and action plans to support our health. Even after 30 years of abstinence in OA, I still can resist making changes […]
Two-Way Prayer
Two-plus years into my abstinence and recovery, I began to struggle. My food was in order, I was attending meetings and sponsoring, but something was missing. Using food to manage my emotions was pretty much a thing of the past, my life was much simpler and less stressful, and I found more possible to accept […]
Achieving Fit Spiritual Condition
OA’s 12 step program of recovery from compulsive eating promises members “a life beyond our wildest dreams.” While that promise appears in various forms in our literature, the expression “fit spiritual condition,” comes at the end of the 10th step promises on pages 84 and 85 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “And we […]
Seventh Step Plea
Oh, God of my understanding, Higher Power of my fathers,Understand my cries tonight. Hear my call to you for help.This is the first and greatest of my defects. My characterSuffers so from independence. It was once a necessaryEvil, but today I must put away the shards of glass that myChrysalis has become. It is my […]
A New Year – A Renewed Commitment to Recovery
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 […]
Hurting? Reach for your Higher Power, NOT Food!
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 […]
Improving My Relationship with My HP
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 […]