Category Archives: Holidays

Memorial Day

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On Memorial Day, the US remembers the sacrifice of lives that freedom requires. In order to be free of tyranny, slavery, and oppression, men and women have fought and died.

As OA members, we go to the front lines and fight for freedom each day. We don’t use guns and bombs, but we fight a pitched battle nonetheless. We seek freedom from the tyranny of our illness, the slavery to the obsession with compulsive eating, and the oppression of our very souls by the ravages of food addiction.

Those of us still actively engaged with OA and the spiritual solution are the lucky ones. Even if we struggle with our food, we know that the war is winnable. We know it because we see other OA members in normal sized or shrinking bodies day after day, week after week, year after year. We hear in their stories that OA is not just some crash diet nor that they suddenly developed will power. We know that spirituality is real and it does for them what they could never do for themselves.

But we also see that many, many members come and go. We wonder what happened to them. Are they still alive? Or has our disease destroyed them fully. We can let every day be Memorial Day in OA, and turn our reflection into action. When someone has disappeared from our midst, we can call them. We can email them. We can text them. They need our loving support, and we need them just as badly. Helping others is what keeps us on the spiritual straight and narrow.

People leave OA for numerous reasons. If they return, they often find in retrospect that the reasons for their departure were trivial excuses that their illness used to keep them away from getting better. When people stay away from OA one day at a time, they suffer. If they’ve been to just a couple meetings, they may know that a solution is out there but resent the idea that they need a Higher Power to recover. If they’ve done a lot of work in OA, they may feel guilt or shame about returning after a long absence. They may also have experienced the terrible sensation of having a belly full of food and a head full of OA.

Sometimes an OA may leave the program and die. Our disease claims lives every day (whether the sufferer was an OA member or not). If we go back to compulsively eating, we can be in grave danger. Type 2 diabetes is a killing disease that is triggered by obesity and excessive weight gain. It’s end stages are not pretty: Losing toes or legs, exploding blood vessels in the eyes and potential blindness, dependence on insulin, and the frustration of a food addicted mind grappling with the need for careful dietary management. Heart disease isn’t sexy either. Difficulty breathing, inability to conduct basic activities without shortness of breath or dizzy spells, the fear that at any minute the big one could hit. Obesity increases the risk of stroke, which often results in loss of speech, movement, sight, or brain function. COPD and emphysema can also be caused by obesity, and a life of irreversible constant coughing and shortness of breath won’t make anyone’s top-ten list.

Diabetes, heart disease, stroke, COPD/emphysema, and those are just the tip of the deathblow iceberg. People with our disease die in the trenches all the time. They are fighting the food and are losing or already lost. Yet, we know that fighting the food isn’t the same as abstaining. We know a spiritual solution that works and the power of fellowship to help.

If our battle is fought on the emotional and spiritual planes, then we have the ability to bring people back from that kind of death. We do it by reaching out to those who have left OA and whose emotions and spirit have often flatlined. We let them know that they are still loved and that the solution is still out there for them. We let our Higher Power act through us so that others may have their lives saved as ours have been so saved.

The 12 threats of Christmas…and what to do about them

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On the Sunday before Christmas, many of us are in a hurry. Last minute gift buying. Parties. And of course football. In the week to come we food addicts will face a number of potential threats to our abstinence. Even if we are not religious, many of these threats and triggers will be present for us:

  1. Celebratory meals: Christmas dinner, out with friends, whatever, especially ones with specialty items we used to look forward to all year.
  2. Shopping: We don’t know what to get our assistant, so we go to the local chocolatier or liquor store to get something genial that everyone likes…but that we like too much.
  3. Parties: Office parties, open houses thrown by friends, and our own shindigs have one thing in common. There’s always a ton of food and booze, and it’s usually a prime grazing opportunity.
  4. Goodies brought in by coworkers, vendors, clients, etc: The print vendor sends their annual basket of sweets and carbs, or maybe it’s a medical supplier, or, if you teach, it’s parents. If you work in an office, or your spouse does, you’ll likely be faced with open boxes of delectables that you really want to eat but really really don’t want to eat.
  5. Stocking stuffers: Your kids want to share a chocolate Santa or two with you. Or, gee, you’re giving them your favorite candy. And, that advent calendar with the pop-out chocolates needs attending to….
  6. Holiday food and beverage gifts: Uncle Jedediah gave you another bottle of Baileys? Auntie Shinnelle signed you up for the cake-of-the-month club? At least they mean well.
  7. Family: Nothing triggers us like family. They know how to push our buttons because they put the buttons there in the first place.
  8. Old eating/drinking buddies: Seeing old school pals over the holiday? And being around them reminds you of all the times you went to the diner or the bar in your hometown?
  9. Memories of holidays when we ate compulsively: Why limit ourselves to feeling threatened by this year’s holiday when we can hammer ourselves with guilt over all the other holidays where we ate without our permission.
  10. Cooking: Whether we’re trigger by the pressure of getting a meal out on time, of a million people in the kitchen with us, or we just find ourselves suddenly drawn to the beaters of a mixer, a spoon laden with stuff, or a piece of what we’re cooking that no one will ever miss.
  11. Smells: You’re at the mall shopping and you walk within 100 feet of some cart roasting this holiday treat or that. These smells can be powerful triggers. We can almost taste them.
  12. Feelings: Of any sort, but especially ones that lead toward self-pity.

These and many other people, places, and things may call to us this coming week. What do we do about it? For one, we don’t ignore those thoughts or dismiss them. They are a danger to us. We must acknowledge them and deal with them appropriately. In the midst of all the hoohah, what do we do?

Why, we use the Steps and Tools of OA, of course!

If we have established a relationship with a Higher Power, we find a way to quickly remove ourselves from the triggering situation. Maybe feigning a pee break? We use that time to reach out to our Higher Power and ask that he/she/it/they relieve us of the obsession and give us the willingness and strength to stay away from the food. If we feel fear, we can use the fear prayer in the Big Book:

God, please remove my fear and direct my attention to what You would have me be.

If we are still new in OA and haven’t yet made spiritual contact with our Higher Power, then we can use OA’s tools. Most convenient is the telephone. We can call or text an OA pal to bring the power of the fellowship to our situation. We can excuse ourselves and quickly read a piece of OA literature we’ve brought with us just for this reason. If a meeting is available to us, online or in person, perhaps we can attend it. We can use any of the Tools we want, but we must them if they are to work for us.

But what might be most important to us in the next week is simply having a plan. If we just blithely hope for the best, we are liable to be caught off guard and highly susceptible to the first bite. So we think through what tough situations are likely to occur, and we talk to our sponsor to make a plan for dealing with them. Don’t have a sponsor? Talk to an OA friend about it. But do get a sponsor!

No matter what, however, we can take a good piece of advice from the Big Book. Wherever we go or do in the next week, we can try to bring a good time to those around us instead of sitting hangdog wishing we could chow with impunity. Because we can’t, so we might as well bring some of the joy, love, and peace that the holiday season is supposed to be about.

Step of the Month: Practicing these principles during the Holidays

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12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive eaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The holiday season is an open invitation to pig out. Christmas dinner, Hanukah festivities, New Years Eve parties, Kwanza celebrations. There’s food frickin’ everywhere. As OA members, we’re taught to use our program’s tools to support our abstinence, and this is always helpful advice. And if we need a little something extra, Step 12 provides a way.

If we recall the cycle of addiction, it always begins with a thought or feeling that we makes us uncomfortable. We obsess about food when we are mentally or emotionally activated. In recovery, we learn that to stop this cycle in its tracks, we must use the tools and Steps. But what if we could avoid this activation in the first place?

That’s what the Steps help us do. The holidays activate many of us because we spend them with the people who trigger us the most: our loved ones. They know how to get us going and which buttons to press to get us wrapped around the axel. They will assume the roles and characters they’ve always played in the family drama of our life. After all, they may not have a program, and we can’t expect them to change.

It is we who must play our part differently. If we do, we will be less prone to the mental/emotional activation that leads to the first bite.

But how do we do it? Step 12 suggests we apply the principles we’ve learned in the Steps. For example, the Big Book shares many important ideas, including the following:

  • resentment is the number one offender
  • fear is a corrosive thread in the fabric of our lives
  • kindless, love, and tolerance are our code
  • when we are wrong, we promptly admit it
  • our job now is to be of service to God and others
  • our only defense against the first bite is our Higher Power.

Even if we haven’t yet completed the Steps, we can put these principles into immediate practice. Here’s some examples:

Resentment is the number one offender
If we retain resentment against those we will celebrate with we have choices. We can not go. Or before going, we can work those resentments out using the 10th Step. At the very least, we need to acknowledge our hurts and be honest with someone about them so they don’t own us.

Fear is a corrosive thread in the fabric of our lives
Fear breeds resentment. Fear also breeds compulsive eating. If we are afraid of the situation in our holiday celebrations, we must ask our Higher Power for courage. Courage is the willingness to go forward despite our fear. We’ve been afraid all our lives, so we’ve eaten. Now is not the time to deny our fear and cross our fingers that we won’t be tempted to eat.

Kindness, love, and tolerance is our code
It’s easy to be fun and gentle around our easy-going loved ones. But what about the coarse, bigoted uncle who shouts his opinions at everyone else at the table? Or the bratty teenager who only cares about their phone? Or the sibling you’ve always butted heads with? We can ask ourselves a simple question: Do I want to be right, or do I want to be happy? Nothing we say will change Uncle’s mind. Nothing we do will make that adolescent grow up. The more we try to control a sibling relationship, the more strained it gets. Instead of loading for bear, we can remember that we are as flawed as they are, if not more so and give them the same respect we ask in return.

When we are wrong, promptly admitted it
We addicts are prideful by nature. Our disease uses pride to generate resentments and keep us eating. So if we find ourselves arguing for argument’s sake, or if we find ourselves taking an invitation to a family fight, or if we are too snarky with someone, we can just admit it. Experience shows that we’ll be surprised and delighted by the results.

Our job now is to be of service to God and to others
Even if you don’t yet have a Higher Power, you can easily practice being of service to others. If you are visiting somewhere, ask to set or clear the table. Help with preparing food. Volunteer to go to the store to grab a missing ingredient. Pick up a baby or play with a little one to give a parent a break. Wash or dry the dishes. If you are hosting, mingle and talk with everyone one-to-one to help them enjoy the occasion. Be extra helpful to your spouse or cohost. Don’t try to control the day, just ask people to enjoy it with you.

Our only defense against the first bite is our Higher Power
This most of all. We can’t do it ourselves, but we are never alone if we invite the God of our understanding to show us the way to an abstinent holiday season. We don’t need stocking stuffers, holiday treats, or boozy drinks to feel aglow during the holidays. We only need to ask God to remind us of our gratitude for the blessings we have and to strengthen us in our times of temptation and need. Experience says God will be happy to do so.

Have a joyous and abstinent holiday season!

9 ways to turn Black Friday into Cyber Monday

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For us compulsive eaters, “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” can have very different meanings than for everyone else. One that we don’t like, and one that can really help us.

Thanksgiving might be better termed Amateur Day. All those normal eaters out there have their big turkey feast then fall asleep on the couch while watching the Lions or Cowboys. These normal eaters have seconds and feel as stuffed as the bird they were just consuming. Meanwhile, we compulsive eaters are just getting started. Actually, we probably primed the pump well before company arrived or before we got to our feast destination. Once there, we graze on appetizers, pick at the turkey to get the choicest pieces of skin, take extra helpings of everything, then pile in the pie. By 5:00 while everyone else is groaning about their bloated bellies, we’re thinking about turkey sandwiches.

Then comes our Black Friday. It might begin in the wee hours of the morning, with a sudden awakening to acid reflux. Or maybe we’re so full we never got to sleep in the first place and stayed up berating ourselves for gluttony once again. We get up in the morning feeling lethargic, burping, and wondering whether we’ll ever be able to control our eating. All the while, we know deep inside that we’ll never gain control, but our pride tells us to fight anyway. In this way, Thanksgiving is no different than many other days except in the volume of food at the dining room table.

Over the rest of the weekend we might tell a spouse or friend that we’re going on a diet on Monday. Or maybe after Christmas. Or in the New Year. We just need to get through the holidays. As Friday, Saturday, and Sunday roll by, we feel that familiar sense of failure and remorse, and our misery continues. Thanksgiving dinner didn’t fix it.

Luckily for us, however, we can interpret Cyber Monday in a different way as well. We can see it as an opportunity to look for the solution. We can go online to locate all kinds of OA resources that will guide us toward recovery from compulsive eating! Here’s a few examples for people in different parts of their OA journey.

Prospective members

  • Not sure if you’re a compulsive eater? Take this quiz and find out.
  • Visit this page for newcomers at OA.org to see what happens at meetings and hear podcasts of member’s experiences.
  • Read OA’s FAQ to learn the answers to questions commonly asked by newcomers.

Newcomers and returning members

Members who struggled on Thanksgiving

 

3 ways out of dangerously sentimental food thoughts

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“We will not regret the past,” says the Promises that many meetings close with each week. Usually we think of this as referring to the stuff in our backgrounds that we’d rather not remember. But we also need to keep careful watch for sentimentalism, a gateway to self-pity.

Of course there’s nothing wrong for reflecting gladly on bygone days of glee. We rightly and naturally cherish the memories of our loved ones, special moments, successes, happy surprises, challenges overcome. But the disease of addiction is cunning and baffling, and so we must be on guard and monitor our thinking. Instead of keeping it in the day, our illness can turn our thoughts toward matters of food, weight, and body image quickly and almost imperceptibly.

What begins as a pleasant trip down memory lane can turn into lingering thoughts about certain foods or meals. Once our minds reach a place such as this, we can easily slip into self-pity over the foods we can no longer eat. Our disease can begin to tell us that those meals of yore were worth more than our abstinence. The cycle of addiction always beings with a thought or feeling.

So how do we recognize when we’re in danger of romancing the foods of yesterday? And what do we do if we enter that mindspace?

These are some warning signs heard from OA members that signal when we’ve crossed over from sentimental remembrance into self-pity:

  1. “I wish I could eat that again.”
  2. “Ooh, I remember that [holiday or special event]. The [food] was soooooo good.”
  3. “Wow, I can taste that right now.”
  4. “I wonder if that would taste as good to me now as it did back then?”
  5. “Maybe I could have a bite of that? It’s been so long.”
  6. “That food reminds me of my parent/sibling/friend who I miss so much.”

If thoughts such as these rattle through our mind, we’ve got to act quickly and decisively. The longer we polish this turd, the more it looks to us like a jewel. How do we get ourselves out of this tight spot?

  1. Pick up OA’s Tools: The Tools which will turn our thinking back toward our solution quickly.
    1. A plan of eating: Review our food plan to help remember why we don’t eat what we’ve been thinking about
    2. Sponsorship: Call our sponsor to talk about this slide into food-romance or call a sponsee to see how they’re doing to move our thoughts in a more productive direction
    3. Meetings: Get to a meeting quickly to hear about the solution and to be reminded of the hellishness of being in the problem
    4. Telephone: Talking to someone right away about the dishonesty our illness is trying to perpetrate on us is a sure way to be reminded of the solution
    5. Literature: Read any piece of program literature to remind us of the importance of maintaining our abstinence
    6. Writing: Journaling about our thoughts drifting foodward, writing a letter to our Higher Power asking for help, or continuing our 4th Step inventory will support sanity around food
    7. Service: What’s better for redirecting our thoughts than seeing how we can be of service to OA or any group that needs a helping hand?
    8. Plan of Action: Any other action that we regularly take as part of our program can help us keep our OA foundation strong.
  2. Do a 10th Step: Page 84 of the Big Book tells us to watch for selfishness, dishonest, resentment, and fear then gives us specific actions to take when these crop us:
    1. Ask our HP to remove the issue: Go straight to the spiritual source of our recovery!
    2. Discuss the issue with someone immediately: A sponsor or trusted OA friend is the ideal someone who understands how food addiction plays tricks our minds
    3. Make amends if necessary: Especially if our thinking is causing us to neglect other important responsibilities
    4. Turn our thoughts to someone we can help: Getting out of our own heads requires us to put ourselves second
  3. Remind ourselves of the nature of our illness: Our addiction always lies to us, and it even uses truths to deceive us. For example, it reminds us of the fleeting pleasure of food, but blocks out recollections of the daily torture of compulsive eating.

Additionally, we must remember that whatever direction our life in recovery takes, it’s an unfolding adventure that we get to live fully one day at a time. Rather than worry that tomorrow won’t be like yesteryear, we can instead rejoice that today isn’t as painful as our old way of living was. Rather than pining for the “good” old days, we can be grateful for this moment in recovery.

 

Memorial Day

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Tomorrow we celebrate the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have given their life in service to our country. It’s a day of parades, wreath laying, and, of course, eating.

Many of us will attend picnics and parties where a spread of every salty, fatty, sugary, and floury food will be on display. And lots of it, free for the taking. We will be tempted, lured, attracted, and even admonished to eat things not on our food plans and in quantities no longer appropriate for our life in recovery. In our meetings this coming week, we will celebrate along with those who made it through cleanly, and we will encourage those who didn’t to get back on the horse.

Of course, the answer to how to get through Memorial Day is best talked about with a sponsor, but the same general guidelines apply to any similar occasion.

  • Ask God for help before, during, and after the event
  • Use the tools: have a food plan, use the phone if tempted, get to a meeting afterward if you still feel the compulsion.
  • Don’t go if you will be unsafe around the food.
  • Treat the day just as you would any other, not as an excuse to go off the wagon.
  • One day at a time!

But let’s take the conceit of Memorial Day and think of it in OA terms. We in OA have witnessed many who have died from this disease and its complications. In our own area, we know OA members who have died from heart maladies exacerbated by their physical condition as well as those who have taken their own lives from the desperation this disease causes. Among us now are those who count themselves as absolutely certain that without the benefits of our program, they would no longer be alive. Outside OA examples of the ravages of this disease show in the obituaries each day.

We have a life and death illness. It doesn’t go away, but it responds to the treatment known as OA. We survivors, however, are left with reminders. Those reminders might even help us get through Memorial Day weekend without eating compulsively. In OA our defects are turned into assets for helping us and our fellows recover. Our Higher Power uses these reminders of our disease when we remember how miserable our life as compulsive eaters was. Here’s some examples of those reminders:

  • loose skin
  • stretch marks
  • pitting in our skin from weight-related edema
  • limping caused by damage to our hips, knees, or ankles
  • surgical scars from joint replacements, organ surgeries, and other procedures
  • missing toes due to type 2 diabetes
  • dental work caused by eating too much sugary food or by throwing up
  • chronic acid-reflux or heartburn
  • breathing issues
  • sleeping issues
  • clothes we can no longer fit into—too big or too small
  • photos from the bad old days
  • wedding rings we no longer can wear because our marriage dissolved before the food problem was solved.

For us overeaters, it’s not a question of whether we are scarred by this disease, only where. Even if we can’t see or feel the scars on or inside our bodies, we probably also have many, many emotional scars in our psyches related to this disease. Shame, guilt, a feeling of unworthiness, depression, anxiety, remorse, regret, and loneliness, run rampant among us food addicts. Our disease may try to trigger us with flashbacks to traumatic, embarrassing, or merely difficult events in our lives. Like picking at an infected scab.

Instead of seeing all of this as pain to number with food, we have an opportunity to see them as the reason not to eat. Reminders of how lousy life can be when we eat compulsively and don’t stay in touch with God.

Unlike a war in the conventional, real-world sense, we OA members don’t get leave time, and our war never ends. The good news, however, is that we don’t have to fight the battle. In fact, when we surrender, we win! So on Memorial Day, we can enjoy peace by letting God do the fighting for us and by using what we know about the fellowship, the Steps, and the Tools to keep this disease from turning us into another casualty statistic in the war for our bodies, minds, and spirits.