Overeaters Anonymous (OA) is a community of people who support each other in order to recover from compulsive eating and food behaviors.
What does working the program mean?
OA is a Twelve-Step Fellowship much like Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s their one-day-at-a-time approach plus their members that make them different from other solutions you may have tried.
At OA there’s …
- No weigh-in
- No membership fee
- No judgment
- No religion (we’re a spiritual group)
- A safe place for everyone (all genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, sizes)
- A program that works
- Hope
- …and there are people who will understand
Their website includes the following features.
- Explanations of the group - its background, principles and methods
- Meeting Finder (In Person, Telephone, Online)
- Free Pamphlets and Posters
- Organization Information
- Podcasts
OA was founded by Rozanne S. and two other women in January 1960. The organization's headquarters, or World Service Office, is located in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.Overeaters Anonymous estimates its membership at over 60,000 people in about 6,500 groups meeting in over 75 countries. OA has developed its own literature specifically for those who eat compulsively but also uses the Alcoholics Anonymous books Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. The First Step of OA begins with the admission of powerlessness over food; the next eleven steps are intended to bring members "physical, emotional, and spiritual healing".
The Overeaters Anonymous website has an extensive list of PDF files in their document library. These cover numerous different areas, including posters about eating and the OA group, the A Step Ahead newsletters, guidelines for meetings and website development as well as a host of other topics. There are over 240 documents as of Fall 2020. Found at https://oa.org/document-library/.
OA has a sophisticated search engine for finding a face to face OA meeting in the USA, Canada or around the world. They also have search engines for telephone meetings and online meetings as well as a list of "non real-time meetings" like emails, Whatsapp messages and online Yahoo groups. The online meetings are in a variety of formats, including Zoom, Skype, and other dedicated apps that need to be downloaded.
OA has numerous audio files or podcasts which explain the basics of the OA program, the traditions and virtual workshops. Found at https://oa.org/podcasts/.
