Unwrapping

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For me, being a compulsive overeater is a gift. It came wrapped in ugly, grimy paper, but it’s still a gift. The ugly paper represents how my illness treated me: It made me eat so much I got really fat, made it so that even if did lose weight I gained it back, and it made a glutton of me. I would eat not for sustenance but for a kind of maniacal pleasure; food itself had control over my eating, instead of me choosing to eat the kinds and amounts of food that would support my health.

The part inside the wrapping, being a compulsive overeater, isn’t pretty, and no one likes it, but without it, who among us would have been drawn to the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve Step program? Who among us would have sought a way out of the disease if the symptoms of the disease were absent? It was when we got so sick and tired of being active compulsive overeaters—after we had tried every diet method in the book, and failed—it was then that we tore the wrapping paper off the gift. We tore it off and began to discover the wonder of what’s inside this disease when it’s married to the Twelve Step program of recovery.

Many gifts are inside: the gift of an understanding Fellowship and friends, the gift of abstinence, the gift of the Twelve Steps, and the gift of recovery itself. To me, the gift of recovery is immeasurably valuable because it offers a new path in life. It offers a way to put God first, to learn how to let God guide one’s life; it’s a path that leads to service to others.

So, for me, being a compulsive overeater is indeed a gift, the true value of which can only be understood when the grotesque outer wrapping is discarded and the gift inside is discovered, a discovery made by working the OA Twelve Step program of recovery.

The gift inside is life and learning about life—the way it really works.

— Michael B., San Mateo, California USA

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