“In working Overeaters Anonymous’ Twelve-Step program of recovery from compulsive overeating, we have found that a number of tools are available to assist us. We use these tools … on a regular basis, to help us achieve and maintain abstinence and recover from our disease.” – The Tools of Recovery p.1
A Plan of Eating
A plan of eating helps us abstain from compulsive eating. (See the pamphlet A New Plan of Eating: A Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Journey for more information.) This tool helps us deal with the physical aspects of our disease and achieve physical recovery.
Sponsorship
We ask a sponsor to help us through our program of recovery on all three levels, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Find a sponsor who has what you want and ask that person how they are achieving it.
Meetings
Meetings give us an opportunity to identify our common problems, confirm our common solution, and share the gifts we receive through this Twelve Step program. In addition to face-to-face meetings, OA offers telephone and other types of virtual meetings that are useful in breaking through the deadly isolation caused by distance, illness, or physical challenges.
Telephone
Many members call, text, or email their sponsors and other OA members daily. Telephone or electronic contact also provides an immediate outlet for those hard-to-handle highs and lows we may experience.
Writing
Putting our thoughts and feelings down on paper helps us to better understand our actions and reactions in a way that is often not revealed to us by simply thinking or talking about them.
Literature
We read OA-approved literature, which includes numerous books, study guides, pamphlets, wallet cards, and selected Alcoholics Anonymous texts. All this material provides insight into our disease and the experience, strength, and hope that there is a solution for us.
Action Plan
Creating an action plan is the process of identifying and implementing attainable actions to support our individual abstinence and emotional, spiritual, and physical recovery. This Tool, like our plan of eating, may vary widely among members and may need to be adjusted as we progress in our recovery.
Anonymity
Anonymity guarantees we will place principles before personalities and assures us that only we have the right to make our membership known within our community. 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. 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.
Service
Any form of service that helps reach a fellow sufferer adds to the quality of our own recovery. Members can give service by getting to meetings, putting away chairs, putting out literature, and talking to newcomers. Beyond the group level, a member can serve as intergroup representative, committee chair, region representative, or Conference delegate. As OA’s responsibility pledge states, “Always to extend the hand and heart of OA to all who share my compulsion; for this, I am responsible.”
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