AA verses OA

Hi All

My name is Dave, and I have the progressive and possibly fatal disease of compulsive overeating and Binge Eating Disorder (BED). I am so very grateful today, that my prognosis for a full and rewarding life is at least average because there is a way to keep my eating disorder in remission. As always, the following is only my personal thoughts and opinions. Yours may vary considerably and that’s just fine. Take what you want and leave the rest.

Since I am also in recovery from alcoholism with a couple decades of sobriety achieved one day at a time, I have been considering the similarities and differences of these two diseases from the very personal perspective of my own experiences with both. It is remarkable to me that Overeaters Anonymous (OA) uses the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Steps and Big Book for a program of recovery by simply exchanging references to alcohol and alcoholism with compulsive overeating.

In AA, the general thought is that until an alcoholic is sober there is not much practical reason to talk “program” to them even when they have expressed a desire to stop drinking. An inebriated person often won’t remember anything you or they said the next day anyway. What they said while drunk has little bearing on their best intentions while sober. A drunk person is not “teachable”. They need to get a clear head first. In fact, recovery doesn’t really start for the alcoholic until they put down the bottle and begin staying perfectly abstinent one day at a time. Most AA members count their recovery by how many days they are sober. This makes a certain amount of sense for the disease of alcoholism.

I don’t believe in that model when it comes to eating disorders. While abstinence is certainly a desirable part of recovery for the compulsive overeater—it is not mandatory before recovery begins. Though food and binging may allow us to escape our feelings it does little to change our cognitive abilities in the manner that alcohol does. Overeating does not impair our abilities to drive or operate machinery, read, write, speak clearly, or think, to any measurable degree. Certainly, it is fun for OA members to count the days of continuous abstinence but—is it necessarily the same as days of recovery? I’m not so sure. The greater majority of people in OA that I talk to started taking very small recovery steps long before they were ever able to maintain any degree of abstinence. It did not happen overnight. They usually did a lot of footwork first. Abstinence is a goal and we can't start out at the finish line.

Waiting until we are perfectly abstinent to start working the Steps or attend meetings is an easy trap to fall into. This is a most insidious form of denial. The self-talk usually goes something like this: “I blew it, I’m not abstinent today. If I’m not abstinent, I am not in recovery. I’ll start my food plan tomorrow. Today, I’ll be as ‘bad’ as I wanna be. I’ll begin using my recovery tools—tomorrow.” As most of us know from experience, tomorrow never comes.

In practice, the program of recovery possible with the 12 Steps teaches us how live without binging or overeating… with the emphasis on making health promoting self-loving food choices. Few have much problem not binging for one hour. Staying that way over time is another thing. It took most of us a lifetime to develop the thinking, feeling, coping, and eating patterns, that lead us to our top weight. I think waiting for perfect abstinence is putting the cart before the horse. That one is not "abstinent" does not equate with wholesale failure. It does not mean you are not in the recovery process. It means that you don’t yet know how to not binge or overeat. You can’t graduate without first taking the classes and doing the homework.

Eating is one of the most natural things we do besides breathing. The same cannot be said for drinking alcohol. We can give up alcohol completely and never touch another drop. Over time our bodies, minds, and spirit, heal and the craving leaves us. For an alcoholic, this is usually a most difficult process but it is doable. Tens of thousands of recovering men and woman have proved that. We can’t give up eating though. Even the healthiest person will eventually be driven to consume food with the same instinctive drive one feels to breath after holding their breath for an extended period. There always comes a point where we simply cannot overcome our basic instinct for survival. For people with a compulsive eating disorder, this survival mechanism seems to be out of whack somehow. We are driven to food with an intensity very much like the person who tries to hold his breath for to long—very soon, he MUST gasp for air. Probably some of the same brain functions are at play. It can take some time to begin correcting this “driving force” —whatever it is.

For the person recovering from alcoholism, a single sip of beer is a very dangerous relapse. Of course that relapse is always preceded by some complacency in their program of recovery. I can’t explain it but after not drinking for so many years, I ‘KNOW’ that one drink is too many and a thousand would never be enough. The thought of taking even one sip scares the hell out of me to this day. I pray I always feel that fear. It is simply a matter of life and death. I don’t know that I would be able to get back into recovery before the disease process won out by taking my life. I’ve seen to many dear AA friends die from the disease—all by thinking they could get away with that first sip. In that sense, recovery from alcoholism is about the substance, alcohol. Not taking that first drink is a sort of firewall where success and failure are defined. There is a distinct and obvious line between living in the solution—or not. There is a lot more to recovery than just not drinking so this is a huge oversimplification of course. Nonetheless it is clear that an alcoholic who is drinking is not in recovery. They are mutually exclusive conditions.

The lines are a lot fuzzier for my eating disorder. I don’t fear any foods like I do a single first drink and it would probably be an unreasonable fear if I did. I think compulsive overeating is no less devastating, dangerous, or deadly, but a single first bite of any particular food has much less power over my life in the short term—even if it leads to a binge. In a very real sense, this difference leaves a lot more room for the element of denial to wreak havoc in my recovery. Consequently, my recovery from Binge Eating Disorder is making me reach for ever greater levels of self-honesty. I have to bash down a near constant plague of a thousand forms of subtle and overt denial. I don’t and can’t define my recovery only in the black and white terms of abstinence, though I feel much better when I don’t eat junk or binge. When I am making health promoting food choices I feel a lot more self-accepting and it seems that my spiritual connections are more alive and real. I feel more passionately alive. I think not eating compulsively or dieting compulsively greases the wheels of recovery on all levels, but it doesn’t necessarily define recovery.

I believe that we can be working very hard on recovery and be growing and gaining in health even before we are able to refrain from all compulsive overeating. We can gain real spiritual insights, be studying recovery literature, working the first few Steps with a sponsor, beginning to substitute healthier food choices in our meals a bit at a time. We can begin walking more, and learning to reach out for support. We can be meditating and praying for the willingness to get willing. We can be journaling our feelings and thoughts and foods to begin identifying patterns, binge triggers, and what feelings we are trying to escape or attenuate. Unlike the alcoholic, there are countless little steps we can begin taking on the pathway to recovery before abstinence. Abstinence will come when we have done the preliminary work to pave the way. The lack of it need not be considered a roadblock to recovery work and personal healing.

Love, Dave Sometime in 2003