Overeaters Anonymous

[Igmum]

Hello fellow Mumsnetters [waves]. I just thought I'd start a support thread for those of us who have a dysfunctional relationship with food and would like some handholding, encouragement, experience, strength and hope. I've been in Overeaters Anonymous for nearly four years now and have found it pretty amazing as a way of finding sanity around food and working my way towards a healthy body weight. Any fellow OA'ers out there or anyone interested in swapping support?

Hi @Igmum, I am a lapsed OEA member, I found it overwhelming and the group was unfriendly but I am very interested in the principles - have you read Recovery by Russell Brand? Makes the 12 steps more accessible, but I am definitely not apologising to anyone. So hopeless case. Good idea to start a thread though, I'd like to hear from others who have found it helpful.

What is the main approach of OA? I'm sure lots of people could benefit from a support group, as it's all so psychological.

Hi @DishingOutDone, so sorry the group was unfriendly and that you had a bad experience. I haven't read the Russell Brand book but will look out for it - was he in another 12 Step programme?

@EveryDaysASchoolDayEh - OA is modelled on the same lines as Alcoholics Anonymous but for people who have a problem with food - so there are plenty of anorexics and bulimics as well as compulsive overeaters. One thing I really like about it is the emphasis on addiction as a disease rather than some sort of personal failing. For me it made it so much easier to be honest about my food.

I think that I really appreciated it because by the time I got to OA I was totally desperate. Looking back I'd always had the tendency to overeat and to binge but - apart from a brief phase in primary school - most of the time I was a pretty normal weight/slim. Not sure if that's how I would have described myself at the time mind you but I was fairly consistently a size 12 or 10 on top/12 bottom.

Then I ended up in a very very violent relationship and I think I self medicated with food to a crazy extent. I put on 8.75 stone and ballooned to a size 24. I would eat and eat and eat. In front of other people I'd eat fairly reasonably but once alone I would just binge. In the evenings, after my daughter was in bed, I'd wolf down family sized tubs of sweets and ice cream and enormous chocolate bars.

And I really couldn't stop. I absolutely couldn't. I would tell myself that I absolutely would not go to the Co-Op to buy sweet stuff to binge on - and I'd still be telling myself this when I came out of the Co-Op carrying bags and bags of binge foods. I'd even start bingeing after breakfast. I'd tell myself stupid things - like I would eat everything I might binge on today and then tomorrow I'd be fine, but, of course, the next day I'd just go out and get more.

It wasn't that I didn't know about dieting - I did, I knew about loads of diets - and I tried but I kept failing and I just got so tired of it all.

Then I joined OA and, at my first meeting I stopped eating refined sugar. I don't know how I did it - some sort of crazy miracle because I didn't even feel much withdrawal - but I did. That was the easy bit - it's taken me a long while to get properly abstinent because I'm a very slow learner but I haven't binged at all since being in OA. I now eat three moderate meals a day with nothing in between and I'm working steadily towards a healthy body weight. The really amazing thing is that, unlike diets when I'd just spend all my time thinking about food (what I was eating, what I wasn't eating) OA has given me freedom from food obsession and I've got time to think about other things - which is incredible, I seem to have a lot more time in my days!

Sorry for the long post, hope this helps explain what OA means to me!

That definitely explains it, thank you.

The hard thing is that with AA you can just say 'abstain from alcohol, we'll support you so you don't drink alcohol ever again.'

But with food, you can't say 'stop eating and we'll help you never eat again'. It must be a fair bit more complicated. I can understand if they focused on sugar and said never touch refined sugar again. What sort of other guidelines do they have about how to eat more healthily?

I know this is so true! You just can't give up food completely.

Actually OA doesn't demand one particular way of eating. It encourages abstinence and people need to define their own abstinence for themselves. Sugar is a fairly common thing to give up but there are plenty of OA members who can eat sugar in moderation. That's the acid test and I know that with sugar I can't eat moderately. I can eat none - and that's fairly easy - or I can compulsively eat all of the sugar in the city!

For the rest I have to learn as I go along. I find that weighing myself helps - if I'm moving towards a healthy body weight that's a good sign. If I stick a bit then maybe I need to think about portion sizes or particular foods so my food is fairly flexible. I know people who have to plan their meals in great detail and who weigh and measure everything and others who are much more relaxed. The emphasis on honesty, sponsorship and talking things over with other OA friends helps me when I'm kidding myself that a certain food is really OK! It means that it can work well for all sorts of people with very different food addictions and dietary needs.

Hi OP, RB's book is about ALL addictions and using 12 steps on the lot, sex, drugs, alcohol, food, co-dependency etc

My group didn't do any of the things you talk about, we went round the room saying how food was to blame for everything, but we could only use the word "food" I remember once someone said they liked Lurpak and all hell broke loose. Nearly got excommunicated. It was very secretive; I did have a sponsor and she didn't like me, told me to stop calling her as I was a lost cause. At the time I had maybe 8 stone to lose, have a lot more now - so she was right!

Hi DishingOutDone - that's pretty grim. You're not supposed to mention the names of any foodstuffs in your shares just in case someone else finds it triggering but I know I've done it a lot - mainly before I knew but I still forget now - and I've certainly been in meetings when others have done it and no-one has said anything.

I'm not sure anyone is a lost cause. There's a bit in OA which says "The only requirement for OA membership is the desire to stop eating compulsively". For the first few years I managed to kick sugar, and I stopped really bingeing in the way that I used to but that was pretty much it. I could still eat like a Trojan and I used to come to meetings feeling such a failure and then hear that and I felt so much better. I didn't need to do it perfectly, I didn't need to succeed, I just needed to keep coming back. That's about the only thing I did do, just kept turning up at meetings hoping that something would rub off on me.

And it happened this January with a new sponsor (I'd been without one for ages). It just clicked and I got abstinent and have stayed abstinent. It's still hard sometimes but there's plenty of support there when it is and now a world of Zoom meetings I can go to from home - I've not yet visited meetings in Oz and the US but I must do this - should be fun.

Interesting about the zoom aspect @Igmum, I hadn't considered that. I might have a dabble.