FAQs

Overeaters Anonymous Preamble:
Overeaters Anonymous is a Fellowship of individuals who, through shared experience, strength, and hope, are recovering from compulsive overeating. We welcome everyone who wants to stop eating compulsively.

There are no dues or fees for members; we are self-supporting through our own contributions, neither soliciting nor accepting outside donations. OA is not affiliated with any public or private organization, political movement, ideology, or religious doctrine; we take no position on outside issues.

Our primary purpose is to abstain from compulsive eating and compulsive food behaviors and to carry the message of recovery through the Twelve Steps of OA to those who still suffer.

In Overeaters Anonymous, you’ll find members who are extremely overweight, even morbidly obese; moderately overweight; average weight; underweight; still maintaining periodic control over their eating behavior; or 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 binges or grazing
• preoccupation with reducing diets
• starving
• laxative or diuretic abuse
• excessive exercise
• inducing vomiting after eating
• chewing and spitting out food
• use of diet pills, shots and other medical interventions 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 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, the Twelve Traditions and the Tools of Overeaters Anonymous.

Abstinence helps us deal with the physical aspects of our disease and achieve physical recovery. From this vantage point, we can more effectively follow OA’s Twelve-Step program of recovery and move beyond the food to a happier, healthier and more spiritual life.

Abstinence is the act of refraining from compulsive eating and compulsive food behaviors while working towards or maintaining a healthy body weight.

We use a plan of eating to help guide us in our dietary decisions and define what, when, how, where and why we eat.

A plan of eating is one of the nine tools we use to help us in our recovery. For more information see the tab under Tools of Recovery.

Recovery is the removal of the need to engage in compulsive eating behaviors.

Spiritual, emotional, and physical recovery is achieved through working and living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve Step Program.

We offer unconditional acceptance and support through readily available OA meetings, which are self-supported through voluntary contributions.

We in OA believe we have a threefold illness—physical, emotional and spiritual. Tens of thousands have found that OA’s Twelve-Step program affects recovery on all three levels.

The Twelve Steps embody a set of principles which, when followed, promote inner change. Sponsors help us understand and apply these principles. As old attitudes are discarded, we often find there is no longer a need for excess food.

Those of us who choose to recover one day at a time practice the Twelve Steps. In so doing, we achieve a new way of life and lasting freedom from our food obsession.

For more, please read Our Invitation to You, which summarizes what OA offers and how it can help the still suffering compulsive eater find recovery.

Anonymity is a Tool as well as a Tradition. Within the Fellowship, anonymity means that whatever we share with another OA member will be held in respect and confidence. What we hear at meetings should remain there. As a Tradition, anonymity at the level of press, radio, films, television and other public media of communication means that we never allow our faces or last names to be used once we identify ourselves as OA members. This protects both the individual and the Fellowship.

Overeaters Anonymous has no dues or fees for membership. It is entirely self-supporting through literature sales and member contributions.  OA does not solicit or accept outside contributions.

OA is not a religious society, since it requires no definite religious belief as a condition of membership. OA has among its membership people of many religious faiths as well as atheists and agnostics.

The OA recovery program is based on acceptance of certain spiritual values. Members are free to interpret these values as they think best, or not to think about them at all if they so choose.

Many individuals who come to OA have reservations about accepting any concept of a power greater than themselves. OA experience has shown that those who keep an open mind on this subject and continue coming to OA meetings will not find it too difficult to work out their own solution to this very personal matter.

The idea of OA came to founder Rozanne S. at a Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meeting she attended with a compulsive gambling friend in 1958. As GA members shared their stories, she heard her story—not of gambling, but of compulsive overeating. She knew then that the Twelve-Step and Twelve-Tradition program founded by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and modeled by GA offered her a chance to change her life and reduce her 152-pound (69-kg) body to a size that would fit her 5-foot-2-inch (157-cm) frame. Not until 1960, when her weight had increased to 161 pounds (73 kg), could she find other people who shared her convictions.

Her chance meeting with a new neighbor, Jo S., gave Rozanne strength in numbers, even if it was only one person. Together they found another compulsive overeater, Bernice S., and convened the first OA meeting in Los Angeles, California, January 19, 1960.

Today, about 6,500 OA groups meet each week in over 75 countries. With OA divided into 10 regions worldwide and over 60,000 members worldwide, it helps thousands of compulsive eaters find new life in recovery.

For more on OA’s history, read Beyond Our Wildest Dreams. Available for purchase on OA.org.