Step of the Month: 12 Big Fat Lies Compulsive Eaters Tell Themselves

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We compulsive overeaters are dishonest by nature. Really! For decades, our brains have been telling us lies about our eating to keep us eating. The truth about compulsive eating is that it is an illness. We are not like other people. We have a physical allergy to food that creates systematic cravings, a mental obsession with food, and a downward spiral of our spiritual well-being. But some of us are so wedded to our lies that we either don’t realize they are lies or are too afraid of failure to address them.

Here are 12 of the lies shared retrospectively by people who have experienced recovery. Lies that keep us stuck in our disease when we accept them as truths.

  1. I’m a bad person because I can’t stop eating compulsively.
    We’re sorry to burst this bubble, but we aren’t bad people. What we are is people with a chronic, progressive illness that we cannot control.
  2. I don’t care anymore. I might as well keep eating.
    If we truly didn’t care, we wouldn’t be preoccupied with our bodies and the pain the disease causes us. Experience shows that we eat precisely because we care desperately.
  3. If I could eat like a normal person, everything would be better.
    An insidious lie if there ever was one. What we’re really saying to ourselves is that we wish we could eat as much as we wanted and not gain weight so that we could keep eating compulsively and not face any consequences.
  4. I’m only hurting myself.
    We bury feelings with food, and in our more lucid moments, we recognize that the people who love us are deeply concerned by the slow suicide our food behaviors appear to be.
  5. All I have to do is eat in moderation.
    Sure, and while were at it, we can build a time machine, be in two places and once, and bring peace and harmony to the world with one magic word. Controlling our food is no longer possible for us. By the time we learned about OA, that ship had sailed a long time ago.
  6. Life wouldn’t be worth it if I couldn’t have my favorite foods.
    Really? And how’s life going with those favorite foods?
  7. Depriving myself of my favorite foods is just a way to punish myself.
    Perhaps abstaining from those foods is a way to give ourselves the gifts of freedom, joy, and happiness?
  8. I’m just an emotional eater.
    Maybe true. If so, try this experiment just to make sure: Put a serving of your favorite food in front of yourself, but keep the rest of the contents of its original container within arm’s reach. Now sit in front of that one serving and see if you can not eat it. Try it for 5 minutes. 10 minutes. An hour. Try it a couple days in a row. In our experience, few if any compulsive overeaters can keep themselves from not only eating that serving but from getting into the rest of the container as well. It’s because our emotions are only a trigger for our eating, not the root cause.
  9. I eat because of what someone else did to me or how they treated me. You’d eat too!
    In other words, we take the poison we intend for the other person.
  10. I know myself, and I can’t change.
    Do you really know yourself? What we find out in OA is that underneath the highly-defended face we present to the world is a person we don’t know very well. We haven’t let anyone, including ourselves, get close to that person for years, perhaps decades, because of pain and fear. We’ve discovered that our outward behaviors can indeed be changed if we let go of what we think we know about ourselves and adopt an attitude of rigorous honesty, openness, and willingness to try what millions of others have used successfully to arrest this killing disease one day at a time.
  11. I just need to get through ____, and I’ll OK.
    In our experience, addiction doesn’t care what’s going on in our lives. We can eat over a broken shoelace, a broken heart, a broken arm, or a broken home. There’s always some reason to eat.
  12. I’ve tried everything else, and OA won’t be any different.
    OA isn’t like anything else. Come in, stick around, you’ll see.

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.

Tradition of the Month: “Ever Reminding Us”

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12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to put principles before personalities.

Ever reminding us? Really? What kind of nag was Bill Wilson when he wrote this, anyway? Do we really need constant reminding that spiritual principles come before personalities? Well, all of the human history, and especially the collective Twelve Step experience, vociferously say Yes!

Human history is filled with good gone wrong. There’s the idea of “lethal mutation” where a good idea becomes popular and, like in a game of telephone, is turned into its opposite by excited people retelling and incorrectly or selfishly implementing it. Many helpful notions turn dark once other human beings discover how to leverage them for personal gain, or out of sheer ignorance of core principles.

These are lessons we OAers need to heed. If we are to overcome the killing disease of food addiction one day at a time, we must have OA to help us, and OA won’t survive if we don’t take special care to see that our spiritual principles are followed.

But “ever reminding us”?

Turns out we do need continual reminders. We addicts are prone to strange moods and twists of mind, and our disease is opportunistic. It will use our own sense of pride and our ego to kill us. We think we can sharpen up the spiritual principles that our founders presented. We’ll make them even better. Maybe discard this one in this situation to make that one better. We’ll add a little here and nip and tuck a little there to get it just right. Or maybe we’ll flout those principles all together because, hey, we got this. Next thing you know, it’s not OA anymore. Next thing you know, no one is recovering anymore, and meetings close. Next thing you know, we’re back in the food.

We need to be endlessly reminded because our disease doesn’t take vacation days. Instead it constantly works on us. Addiction is a chronic illness that cannot be cured. Our therapy is a one-day-at-a-time spiritual toolkit that leads us to our Higher Power who helps remain free. Are we so arrogant as to think that once we’re recovered we can start calling the shots for a program we were given and asked to protect?

Who among us forgets that the first bite leads to madness? We know this like we know our names. Yet, some of us nonetheless reach for it again, even after years of recovery. We absolutely accept that we need to be reminded of our vulnerability to food all the time. The same is true of our vulnerability to the emotional aspect of our disease. The control we like to exert and the egoic thinking that leads to the first bite lurks in even more nooks and crannies than the physical compulsion to eat. We desperately need to understand that our mind, even in recovery, can be a place where what we think is our best thinking is actually our worst.

Ever reminded? We can’t hear it enough. But thanks to Tradition Twelve we can easily remember how valuable this program is to us and how to put that value into action by upholding our traditions.

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

 

Tradition 11: Anonymity on social media is more important than ever

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11. 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.

We often talk about the importance of anonymity in terms of our not misrepresenting OA. Or of OA having no spokespeople. But this election year shows us another invaluable reason: not repelling potential members.

OA’s tenth tradition tells us that we have no opinion on outside issues. We don’t want to be drawn into public controversy because it will reduce our ability to help other food addicts find recovery. Meanwhile, the 2016 election was the most heated and bitterly contested since before the dawn of the 20th century. Fear, anger, and intolerance for differing points of view exploded during our electoral process. Since the results came in, this bitterness has grown and intensified. There’s much talk around water coolers and in the media itself about how friends and family members are unfriending each other on Facebook and other social-media platforms.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a still-suffering compulsive eater who isn’t yet an OA member. You are researching OA, and a Facebook friend is expressing opinions you strongly disagree with. You’re thinking about unfriending them, and you see that they also identify as an OA member and perhaps even promote it. What would you think of OA? Would it represent the code of kindness, love, and tolerance that the Big Book recommends? Could it potentially appear to have political overtones?

Our number one job as OA members is to carry the message of hope and recovery. Our traditions tell us that everyone who wants to stop eating compulsively is welcomed in our meetings. In our lives as compulsive eaters, it doesn’t matter who is the president. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in our country. The most important facts for our survival are that we are compulsive eaters, that we need one another if we are to get better, and that helping others is the most important thing we can do in this world.

In other words, OA is more important to our survival as compulsive eaters than our political affiliations, opinions, or grievances.

We’ll have no political allegiance if we are dead.

We can’t hold an opinion if we are dead.

We cannot air our grievances if we are dead.

We cannot afford to repel anyone who wants to get better because we need them as badly as they need us. So we cannot reveal our OA membership on social media. We most certainly can talk to someone one-on-one where we can give a more complete picture of OA. Where we can tell them that our beliefs are not characteristic of OA as a whole, which has no political beliefs. One-to-one we can give them the sense of warmth and community that a political post can’t convey. But we can’t do any of that if they run from us because they associate our names with both a political doctrine they can’t abide and our OA membership.

Among our fellows, we are no longer party members. We are no longer trying to persuade anyone of our rightness (or leftness). We are only trying to be helpful to other compulsive eaters. Some must keep our anonymity on social media lest OA cease to be a place where every compulsive eater can find a solution.

Step of the Month: 11 suggestions for prayers

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11. 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.

Step 11 tells us to inquire about and listen for God’s will. The Big Book tells us that “better men than we are using [prayer] constantly.” After all, if we are turning our will and our lives over to the care of God, we need some guidance about what to do during our day. That’s what prayer and mediation does for us.

Hear are 11 prayers suggested in our program literature and that we’ve heard about at meetings. Each of them has a different purpose and can be used at any time to help us either stay away from food or to discern the next right step to take.

  1. Help!
    The simplest of all possible prayers. Useful in any situation!
  2. Please keep me away from the first bite.
    Cutting right to the chase, and asking HP to relieve us of the obsession with food and from unthinking eating.
  3. The Serenity Prayer
    God, grant me the serenity
    to accept the things I cannot change
    courage to change the things I can,
    and wisdom to know the difference.
    Probably the first prayer we learn in OA, and one that’s especially useful when we feel ourselves ramping up emotionally into the fugue state that has always led us to the food.
  4. The Angry Man’s Prayer (Big Book, p 67)
    This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.
    Resentment is one of the chief emotions that lead us to eating compulsively. Dealing with anger is hard, and many of us eat to escape it. But when we eat, we take the poison that we intend for someone else. This prayer can help defuse and diffuse our anger.
  5. The Fear Prayer (Big Book, p 68)
    Remove my fear and direct my attention toward what You would have me be.
    If we aren’t angry, then we’re afraid, and usually one comes with the other anyhow. This simple, fast prayer helps us pivot away from our down-sucking fear response to a situation and toward something more useful around us.
  6. The Third Step Prayer (Big Book, p 63)
    God, I offer myself to Thee–
    to build with me and do with me as Thou wilt.
    Relieve me of the bondage of self,
    that I may better do Thy will.
    Take away my difficulties,
    that victory over them may bear witness
    to those I would help of Thy Power,
    Thy Love and Thy Way of Life.
    May I do Thy will always!
    All twisted up inside? Don’t know what to do, but feel like everything’s going wrong? This prayer’s a gift in those situations. It reminds us of spiritual truths, of Who’s running the show, and that our job is to be of service to others, not ourselves.
  7. The Seventh Step Prayer (Big Book, p 76)
    I am now willing that You should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that You now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do Your bidding. 
    When character defects rear their ugly heads, this is the place to turn. In this prayer, we’re telling God that we want and ready to be changed by God. We’ve proven a million times over that we can’t change ourselves, and that’s why this prayer is vital to us.
  8. St. Francis’ Prayer (AA Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p 99)
    Lord, make me a channel of Your peace;
    that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
    that where there is injury, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
    that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
    that where there is error, I may bring truth;
    that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
    that where there is despair, I may bring hope
    that where there are shadows I may bring light;
    that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

    Lord, grant that I may seek rather
    to comfort rather than to be comforted 
    to understand rather than to be understood
    to be love rather than to be loved.
    For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
    It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
    It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

    A great one to start the day with because it helps guide us toward an altruistic helpfulness that we addicts don’t come by naturally. There are many different versions of this prayer floating around. Use the one that best helps you.

  9. God, I don’t know how you’re going to fix this one, but how can I be helpful?
    When things are getting complicated, this one keeps it simple. A great prayer for contentious business meetings….
  10. Please give me restraint of pen and tongue. (adapted from the AA’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p 91)
    The chief rule of getting out of holes is to not start digging in the first place. That’s where this prayer comes in handy. Thinking you might be about to blow your stack at someone? Or maybe you’ve rapped out an angrygram but haven’t yet hit send? That’s where this prayer is most needed. It’ll save you from making amends later.
  11. Thy will, not mine, be done. (Big Book, p 85)
    Your mind tells you that you really want to do something. Your spirit is telling you otherwise, and you feel that tension keenly. Try this prayer, wait one minute, and see if things don’t clear up a bit.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of prayers that work in the morning, at night, or anytime during the day. The key is to use them! Try these or any others that can help you in a pinch. Also, many of these prayers have alternative wordings, and you can adapt a prayer to your own situation or needs. The key is to use prayer in the first place. Try it, and it will soon become a habit you’re glad you picked up.

Are our feelings killing us?

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Feelings are…complicated. On one hand, they help us relate to the world and to others. On the other hand, as OA members we are emotional eaters. On one hand, we can’t undo our feelings or ignore them. On the other hand, we often hear in meetings that “feelings aren’t facts.” So what are we supposed to do with all this contradictory information?

For one thing, what are feelings and emotions? Ultimately, they are responses to stimuli whether internal or external. They can be subtle social cues, and they can be knee-bucklingly powerful. They arise naturally from our bodies and minds. Our many shades of emotion help differentiate us from all other animals, and they provide the basis for art, music, and literature, as well as the drive to compete and excel in sports or business.

The trouble for people like us isn’t that we have emotions, or that they are strong emotions. It’s that our conscious minds don’t know how to deal with them. As emotional eaters, we’ve always responded to feelings with food. Our first thought is to take the edge off a feeling. That’s why we hear phrases such as “Happy, mad, sad, glad” and “Hungry, angry, lonely, tired” during meetings. Those are all states of mind in which we eat. Either we don’t want to feel powerful negativity, or we don’t want to get too happy and have our bubble burst when the other foot comes down on it. Either we resent others for treating us unfairly, or we feel rotten for treating others unfairly. And we just can’t let any emotion linger because they are too powerful for us.

Things get even more complicated by the disease of addiction. Our addiction takes over our brain, and it uses our own minds to lie to us and poison us. We discover through our Fourth-Step inventory that we have been amazingly dishonest, even if we didn’t realize it. Our illness warped our thinking so that we saw slights or provocations all over the place. We saw danger and despair everywhere. Over time, this led us down deep wells of self-pity. It was all too much, so we had to numb out rather than face our feelings with maturity.

This is why “Our Invitation to You” describes OA as helping us with “acting on life rather than reacting to it.” If the issue isn’t that we have feelings but rather that our mind magnifies them and drives us to soothe them with inappropriately, then the problem is with our thinking. We need new ways to understand and respond to our feelings.

Luckily, that’s exactly what the 12 Steps are for!

When we do our moral inventory, we discover exactly how our brains turned our thinking against us—its modus operandi. Many of us, for example, will find out that we take personally things that were never meant for us. Another common lie our diseased brains tell us is that we can read someone else’s thoughts, and, not so shockingly, those thoughts are bad. Another is that we aren’t good enough. This lie allows us to interpret any behavior, words, or events as titled against us. Yet another lie is that bad things that happened before will happen to us again. Still another is that exerting control over a situation will help us feel better. And, of course, the big whopper: We can’t possibly live through these feelings, so we must take the edge off with food.

We find out through the steps that we are, indeed, powerless over our feelings coming up, but that we are not powerless over our response to them. When we develop a relationship with a Higher Power, we have the one resource we’ve never had: courage. We need a lot of this courage stuff. We’ve lived in fear of our feelings, of the past, of pain for all our lives. Left to our own devices, we would continue running scared to the food. But with a Higher Power to lean on, we can face our fears. We know that we can call upon God, whatever that means to us, for the strength and support we’ve never mustered on our own. We can get through our most difficult feelings with dignity and grace. We can feel some pain while we discover that it will not kill us.

The 12 Steps show us that when we give our feelings power over us, we end up in the murky depths of self-pity, a place where no human being can help us. Feelings in this way have the power to kill us. They can lead us to never-ever land, where we’ll die the death of compulsive eating, chained to the food with links of iron forged in the black furnace of self-centeredness. Sounds great, huh? But when we embrace the 12 Steps, we are shown a way out of this deadly place, a path toward the sunshine of the spirit, and a freedom from the obsession with food.

We are not what our feelings say we are. We are not doomed by them. In fact, we will ultimately use them to help others gain freedom from compulsive eating. But we can’t do that until we ourselves are free. And to do that, we must first do the 12 Steps.

 

 

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.

 

Tradition of the Month: God is an outside issue

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10. Overeaters Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the OA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.

 

Believe it or not, OA does not have an opinion on the nature of God, even though we practice a program of spiritual recovery. To be effective, OA can’t have a stance on God, and Tradition 10 assures that we won’t, as a fellowship, tread that dangerous path.

To be accurate, OA does take certain positions on God. They are very few, very specific, and address as little as possible the question of the nature or identity of God:

A) Each member needs a conception of an HP to recover
B) To be effective, a Higher Power must be more powerful than the member him- or herself
C) Each member can have their own conception, and no one can tell them what the specific conception must be
D) The conception must be one whose will they are willing to surrender to then to trust and rely on for daily living.

OA only talks about God in relation to recovery. It only takes positions on what it knows: How a Higher Power enables us to get better. That’s because God is an outside issue.

How can God be an outside issue in a spiritual program? Here the previous traditions guide us:

Tradition 1 tells us that “personal recovery depends upon OA Unity.” Imagine trying to achieve OA unity on the question of what God is or isn’t. Millions, probably billions, of people worldwide have been killed across history over the question Which is the one true God? How could we each recover if we busy fighting amongst ourselves about the nature of our Higher Powers?

Tradition 2 tells us that God is the source of our group conscience. How many My God can beat up your god arguments would arise if OA took even a simple and vague position on God?

Tradition 3 denies us the right to exclude anyone who wants to stop eating compulsively. Religious and spiritual tests are, therefore, disallowed. We’re having a hard enough time with our own food trials to be putting anyone else’s beliefs on trial.

Tradition 4 reminds us that groups are all autonomous except in matters affecting the entire fellowship. If OA took a position on God, every meeting would have to accept that stance.

Tradition 5 clearly states that OA’s primary purpose is carrying the message of recovery. We are not evangelists, but if OA took a position on the nature of God we would be. That would ultimately prove exclusionary, which would severely limit our ability to carry the message to all sufferers from this killing disease.

We could go on, but we needn’t. By taking a position on the nature of God, which is, perhaps, the most controversial question ever asked, OA would sabotage itself completely. There are programs sponsored by churches that attempt to use the 12 Steps in a specific religious setting, and those programs are not affiliated in any way with OA or any other 12 Step group. They can’t be if OA is to survive and thrive.

So when our members remind themselves and other members to trust and rely on God, we must always remember that while they may experience a Higher Power in a certain way, we each interpret that suggestion through the lens of our own concept of an HP. And even though the Big Book has a chapter devoted to the question of whether there is reason to believe in God, we are free to disagree with it always remembering the words we find in the famous promises: “This book is meant to be suggestive only.” No one can tell us that our HP must be a supernatural being. No one can tell us that our HP must have a personality of any sort. Or have a name. Only that we’d better something more powerful than we are that works for us. Because in the end, even God is an outside issue.