Introduction to the 12 Steps
Part 2, Updated 2005

The Twelve Steps offer a simple plan for recovery, growth, and permanent lifestyle change. The plan is divided into twelve parts or steps. Each Step laying the foundation for the processes involved in the next.

The Twelve Steps of Overeater's Anonymous are specifically designed to help people stop overeating; develop a healthy relationship to food, themselves, and others; and maintain their recovery for a lifetime. The Steps encourage us to develop healthy and constructive coping mechanisms so we no longer need to eat for emotional reasons. By practicing the Twelve Steps and incorporating their principles into our daily lives, we find that we are able to consistently and substantially improve the overall quality of our lives. We learn to fully participate in life and experience it authentically.

Everyone is free to develop their own beliefs and lifestyle to support their personal recovery from compulsive overeating or Binge Eating Disorder. Each Step is open to personal interpretation. I encourage people to personalize the Twelve Steps in any way that meets their unique recovery needs and to work them at their own pace.

The Twelve Steps of Overeater's Anonymous are designed to help members in several ways:

Acceptance: Learn to accept our eating disorder and to accept the need to develop and practice a personal program for recovery that focuses on lifestyle change and wellness, not just weight loss.

Believable Hope: Come to believe that with help, personal recovery, growth, and healing, is possible.

Getting Help and Support: Identify specific sources of help and decide to use that help for recovery.

Identity Assets and Liabilities: Identify the personal attitudes, actions, and experiences, that can strengthen recovery. Identify the personal liabilities, attitudes, actions, and experiences that pose a risk for recovery and well-being.

Sharing and Trust: Break down the walls that imprison our ability to trust and that isolate us emotionally from others. Learn by experience that we are not as bad or unique as we sometimes have felt.

Change: Work with a personal source of help (higher and/or helping power(s)) to strengthen our assets for recovery and remove the personal liabilities that pose a risk to recovery.

Mend Relationships: Identify people who have been negatively affected by our eating disorder and through the process of recovery, work to mend those relationships. Mend the relationship we have with our selves.

Act Not React: Learn to monitor our feelings and respond to difficult situations in healthy and constructive ways (without reverting to overeating, binging, or other self-defeating behaviors).

Maintain Recovery and Prevent Relapse: Continue to strengthen personal assets for recovery, healing, and growth by continuing to work with our personal sources of help (higher and/or helping power(s)).

Helping Others: Share with others who experience a compulsive eating disorder that recovery is possible. Experience the positive benefits of belonging, community, and helping others.

The Goals of Recovery

The goals for recovery are probably similar for each of us whether we are seeking help for the first time or coming back to try again. We want to:

• Stop the pain and confusion caused by our eating disorder.
• Stop the consequences and problems our compulsive overeating created in our lives.
• Stop our self-defeating behavior.
• Prevent a return to binging and our old ways of eating.
• Improve the quality of our lives.

Those goals are the focus of the Twelve Steps of Overeater's Anonymous and are quite achievable for anyone willing to grow along spiritual and emotional lines.

What is this, Step Work?

Step Work is like a workbook that helps one to understand and work the Steps. Step work can be used by individuals at home, online in support groups, and even by counselors and professionals in the helping fields to help their clients understand and use the Steps.

This step work is based on my personal understanding and recovery experiences. I draw on 20 years of recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, the experiences I've had learning to manage a chronic psychiatric illness in a healthy and constructive way, and my recovery from binge eating disorder. The Steps were an important component in all of those things, however, my interpretations and this step work are not always congruous with traditional interpretations. I'm only trying to share what has, and has not, worked for me. Take what you want and leave the rest.