What are your thoughts/experiences with Overeater’s Anonymous?
Question by murderondancefloor: What are your thoughts/experiences with Overeater’s Anonymous?
Anyone?
Best answer:
Answer by CuteWriter
Honestly, I think it’s a horrible, cult-like oganization that will only serve to make your problem WORSE and to put you in contact with people who are much sicker than you are.
I don’t know you, so I don’t know what your specific issue is. But here’s the deal with OA: They use the 12-steps, originally created to deal with problem drinking and apply them across the board to people who overeat or have other food control issues. The 12-steps don’t do anything for people with drinking problems and they are even LESS pertinent to people who overeat.
If you’re like me, you’ll show up at a meeting completely desperate to get your habits under control. They will lecture you about how a restrictive diet is not the answer, then hand you a piece of paper with a VERY restrictive diet on it. No nutritionists or other experts were consulted in the creation of this “diet.” It’s clearly unhealthy and very short on calories. It requires that you weigh every single thing that goes into your mouth, so you can forget about eating with friends, eating out, or otherwise living in the normal world we like to call “reality.”
Next, you’ll be assigned a sponsor and you will be expected to call that person every single day and report to them EVERY BITE of food that goes into your mouth. You will hear about being “abstinent” with regard to food, which in this case means you never eat anything that is not on your diet sheet. And this is out of control because it doesn’t just mean that you don’t eat donuts and ice cream. It means if V8 isn’t on your list and you drink a V8, you have to call and confess to your sponsor and the group about breaking your abstinance. I sat in meetings listening to people tearfully relate the horrors of eating bananas and peas. My god!
Anyway, they expect you to “work the 12-steps” which means that you have to do things like beg god to remove your craving for food and make ammends to those you’ve hurt by overeating (or not eating if that’s your problem). You’ll hear all kinds of nonsense about “food addiction” which is ridiculous because we all NEED to eat in order to stay alive. You will never get to focus on what your specific problem is and what you need to sovle it because it will be assumed that you have the problem THEY all claim to have and you will be given the same cookie cutter “solution.”
In fact, the 12-steppers believe that every single addiction or self-destructive behavior from nail biting to heroin addiction is the SAME “disease” which requires the same religious treatment. They are dogmatic religious fanatics.
The people you come into contact in these meetings are almost exclusively VISIBLY engaging in some kind of food disorder. My favorite story from OA is listening to a man who claimed to weigh 410 pounds talk about how he’d been coming to meetings for 10 years. Hello!? It’s not working! We can all see that, why can’t you!?!
My advice: spend the time you would have spent in meetings in the gym. It’s less depressing and you’ll get WAY more out of it. No one who attends OA is healthy, so there’s no sane, realistic help to be found there.
Thur8-12 – Created on August 12, 2010 using FlipShare.
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