For the Anorexic / Bulimic
Many Symptoms, One Solution
The membership of Overeaters Anonymous is varied, both in its makeup and in the eating behaviors and experiences that brought each individual to OA. If you are new to Overeaters Anonymous or have yet to hear a “story” that matches your own, keep going to meetings. We OA members may not be all alike but none of us is totally unique. Remember, the only requirement for OA membership is a desire to stop eating compulsively.
In Overeaters Anonymous, you’ll find members who are:
- Extremely overweight, even morbidly obese
- Only moderately overweight
- Average weight
- Underweight
- Still maintaining periodic control over their eating behavior
- Totally unable to control their compulsive eating
OA members experience many different patterns of food behaviors. These ‘symptoms’ are as varied as our membership. Among them are:
- Obsession with body weight, size, and shape
- Eating bingers
- Grazing
- Preoccupation with reducing diets
- Starving
- Excessive exercise
- Inducing vomiting after eating
- Inappropriate and/or excessive use of diuretics and laxatives
- Chewing and spitting out food
- Use of diet pills, shots, and other medical interventions, including surgery to control weight
- Inability to stop eating certain foods after taking the first bite
- Fantasies about food
- Vulnerability to quick-weight loss schemes
- Constant preoccupation with food
- Using food as a reward or for comfort
Our symptoms may vary but we share a common bond: We are powerless over food and our lives are unmanageable. This common problem has led those in OA to seek and find a common solution in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Overeaters Anonymous. We find that no matter what our symptoms are, we all suffer from the same disease-one that can be arrested by living this program one day at a time.
If you feel you are one of us, we welcome you with open arms.
Welcome to our Anorexic and Bulimic members. You are not alone. You are HOME. If you’re not sure you’re one of us, please read, “Many Symptoms, One Solution,” and see if you identify. If you do, we have a special focus meeting list. Two are conveniently listed on our website, one on Thursday nights and the other on Sunday mornings. We suggest you attend at least six meetings. Please go.
You will be pleasantly surprised. I sure was. I remember my first meeting. I couldn’t believe the things I heard. People were sharing my story: they binged, starved for days at a time, used diuretics and laxatives, ate burned food out of the trash, etc. I thought I was the only one who did crazy shit like that.
I finally felt like I fit in somewhere.
You’ve taken a huge step in the right direction. By going to meetings, finding a sponsor, and reading the literature, you will find what you’ve been always seeking: freedom from this nightmarish disease.
Acceptance, compassion, and most of all healing can be yours. It’s a simple program, but it does require honesty, an open mind, and willingness. It took me a long time to be willing. I finally got desperate enough thirteen years ago, and I’m so glad I did. It’s not too late. This program works if you work it.
I look forward to meeting you.
Kathy H
Compulsive Overeater, Bulimic, Restrictor
Chairperson, San Diego Intergroup
An Anorexic/Bulimic/Exercise Addict’s Road to Recovery
I am Bryan V., a grateful compulsive overeater, anorexic, bulimic, and exercise addict from the Inland Empire Intergroup of OA. When I was 22, my life became unmanageable due to my anorexia and exercise addiction. I placed everyone’s priorities above my own because it gave me an excuse to neglect my own needs. Then my body forced me to stop! My university put me in contact with a member of OA who invited me to attend a meeting. However, I didn’t enter a meeting until two years later. Like others, I didn’t think that Overeaters Anonymous would work for me. In fact, at the time I entered OA, I believed that the only thing that kept me alive was my binges.
I tried to do it myself. I let go of everything but the food. I gave up my exercise addiction, the anorexic compulsion to be thin, and my lifelong demand to modify my body type, and had to welcome the anxiety of gaining weight. I did all of this without support or emotional sobriety. At the age of 24, I still struggled to meet my goal of 3 meals a day, but I had managed to gain 50 pounds with only 2 meals a day. I was improving my dangerously low weight problem because I had stopped my preferred method of purging – exercise – and resorted to binging on high-calorie and easy-to-eat foods.
I was miserable and was actively planning to purge with laxatives and exercise. So, in fear, I walked into the rooms of OA the week of Thanksgiving, 2016. I searched the online meeting list for my area and promptly decided that a 100-Pounder meeting was where I would find other anorexic bulimics like myself and attended my first meeting. I was in for a surprise.
See, I did not enter OA to lose my uncomfortable weight, and I truly had no clue what my addictive foods were at the time. I did not realize that I had already tried to diet multiple times in my life, and I couldn’t stick to it for even a day. Nor had I truly connected my heart problems to my BMI or realized that my eating habits that saved me from anorexia put me at risk of developing diabetes and following in the footsteps of my grandfather, who died of it. I came into OA adamant that I was not a compulsive overeater, and I just had to find an emotional solution to make it okay to be at a normal weight. I thank God every day that my first meeting and home group is a 100-pounder meeting because it was there that I heard and identified with the compulsive overeater in me. I also learned from them the meaning of acceptance.
I have come to see the spiritual solution in my food, and most importantly, the spiritual replacement in the steps that is sufficient for me to not have to take a compulsive bite, and find the ability to eat 3 times a day. I have had to learn the difference between abstinence, a plan of eating, and an action plan – because I could not let my abstinence be powered by anorexic food phobias and things that I don’t do. Additionally, I recognize that food has always been my solution.
I can easily rationalize diseased behavior. To navigate recovery from all my eating disorders, I have regular contact with my sponsor. I appreciate that she routinely asks me why I do what I do, and we work out the motivations behind my eating behaviors. I learn what is truly working, what I wish was working, and how to make things better. I had to learn about what abstinence was, how the term came about, and what it wasn’t through reading our OA literature and working through the steps.
A huge part of my recovery in OA is service. It is the only thing that truly puts the action in my recovery. Service gives me accountability, deepens my own recovery while I understand and live the Twelve Traditions and Twelve Concepts, and gives me a safe place to fail, surprisingly succeed when I thought I wasn’t good enough, and breaks down my judgments of others and makes me feel connected to the group.
Because of OA, I have been able to get married and keep my first full-time job. I am also teachable. I don’t know how to describe how incredible that is.
Yes, I started life as an overeater, modified it because of the familiar pressure of Binge Eating Disorder, became aware of my weight because of the messages that I internalized from the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, and began to be at war with my body type. I know that now because of the work I’ve done here in OA. I know that now because of all of you and because of my HP. I don’t have to live in that nightmare anymore. I believe in what it says on p. 83 in the Big Book: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.”
Bryan V