Recovery Relationships Friends and Family—Reframed Recovery has allowed me to enjoy the pleasures of friendship, really for the first time since childhood. Now I can truly say that I am a friend and I have friends, both in and out of the rooms. When I was in the food, I was so unhappy I couldn’t be open to the often-subtle pleasures of friendship, such as … Read More
Meetings First-Meeting Gifts I went to my first OA meeting on a Saturday in March 1979. I was coming off a food binge of almost two years; it had started when my fiancée told me she didn’t want to marry me. The next day I’d gone off to the races. I gained over 100 pounds (45 kg) in a year, and didn’t see … Read More
Recovery Relationships A Gift from Grace Before I returned to OA in 1999, my life was a prison of my own making, and I had no visitors. It was a world of isolation because all I trusted was food and how good it made me feel in the moments I was consuming it. My compulsive overeating began when I was 5 and a half years old. … Read More