It’s said that addicts are relief-seeking missiles. We don’t like feelings: happy, mad, sad, glad; hungry, angry, lonely, tired. We’re always either disappointed in what we didn’t get or frightened that the other shoe will drop and take away what we’ve gotten.

So, we constantly search for something that will provide relief from our ongoing misery. In the front matter of the Big Book, in “The Doctor’s Opinion,” Dr. Silkworth tells us that addicts use their substance to regain “the sense of ease and comfort that comes at once” when we do our addict voodoo. We use because when we don’t, we are “restless, irritable, and discontent.”

In other words, we’re uncomfortable.

We hate it when others reminds us that “such is life.” We are human, and so we are subject to pain, uncertainty, fear. Where other, normal, eaters may have coping skills for the tribulations of life, feelings trigger the mental obsession with our substance, and soon enough we feel an overwhelming desire to eat that is beyond our control.

When we join OA, we learn that in these moments, we substitute food for God. We believe that food will bring us the serenity that only a spiritual experience will give us. It never does. It numbs us for like eight seconds, then the feelings return. In addition we now have the shame emotions associated with compulsive eating, making the situation worse. We’ve once again traded a few seconds of mental analgesic for a lifetime of compulsive-eating misery.

That’s the why the first bite is a sucker’s game. We think we will beat the odds this time. If we just do what we see normal people do, we will be OK. We’ll get our relief for a few seconds, enough to still our feelings, then go back to living like a normal person. Nope. It’s as though we’re playing poker against someone whose hand is lying face up on the table and has us beat. The truth lay right in front of us, but we keep betting on a losing hand anyway. In fact, we’ll bet it all the way down to our last dollar.

There is another way. In OA, we learn that the only way to win is not to play. We must abstain from our compulsive eating. Only by keeping troublesome foods out of our system will the physical craving for them leave us. But even with the craving gone, if we don’t learn to deal effectively with our feelings, we’ll end up taking the first sucker bite again. We have to learn how to feel, deal, and heal? But how?

Of course, we must do the 12 Steps of OA. These are the program. They bring us into meaningful contact with something more powerful than we are. Something that can do what we want food to do for us. What exactly does that mean? It’s simple, when we are faced with emotional discomfort, we can pray for what we want:

God, please give me ease and comfort.

We keep it simple. We accept that we will feel discomfort. We take solace and strength in the fact that others with our disease have faced down the most painful situations without resorting to food. But most important, we use prayer when discomfort threatens our sense of emotional well-being.

All we’ve ever wanted is to feel better. It’s only human. But until OA, all we’ve ever done is use food as a drug, in an ineffective, off-label manner. But once in OA, we learn that we can pray for ease and comfort, and that we can follow that prayer with useful actions. We learn that after a simple prayer that opens us up to redirection from our Higher Power, we can use OA’s tools and, especially, Steps 10, 11, and 12 to stay out of the food trouble that dogged us for so long.

Because there’s far more ease and comfort in abstinence than there ever was in anything that came out of a box, can, bag, jar, or wrapper.