What is OA?

​Do You Have a Problem?

Our Invitation to You

The Twelve Steps

The Twelve Traditions

The Twelve Concepts of OA Service 

The Tools of OA
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 We in OA believe we have a threefold illness—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Tens of thousands have found that OA’s Twelve Step program brings recovery on all three levels. The Twelve Steps embody a set of actions we take. These Steps put us in touch with a Higher Power who restores us to sanity. As we work the Steps, we let go of old attitudes, and we find we are being relieved of our obsession with our eating disorder. Those of us who choose to work the Steps, one day at a time, achieve a new way of life with lasting freedom from our food obsession.

The Twelve Steps of Overeaters Anonymous      

1. We admitted we were powerless over food — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive overeaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

​(Reprinted with permission from the World Service Office of Overeaters Anonymous)

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