Abstinence Makes Recovery Possible.

DOs

• Practice the Steps and Spiritual Principles daily throughout your life.
• Include the Steps when discussing potential solutions.
• Write/journal.
• Maintain contact with sponsors and OA friends to receive their active listening, acceptance, and compassion.
• Use the Serenity Prayer and other prayers and meditate.
• Listen for others’ experience, strength, and hope—from all Twelve Steppers.
• Have a sponsor to talk to.
• Read sections from our literature that deal with your current problem.
• Remember that you are not alone.
• Write out and follow a plan of eating.
• Make a gratitude list.
• Remember that we do not control the world or other people.
• Ask for help.
• Ensure your feedback is welcome before giving it.
• Trust Higher Power.
• Attend meetings, face to face and/or online, to see familiar faces.
• Let go of your perfection. Keep in mind your progress.
• Recognize how you identify when others share their stories.
• Let go.
• Make a Twelfth Step outreach call to see who you can help.
• Do service throughout your life, not only in OA.
• Call/text immediately when you realize you are struggling.
• Remember that food does not fix it.
• Be patient. Remember what it was like when you were a newcomer.
• Attend retreats, workshops, marathons, and conventions, and listen to podcasts.
• Take responsibility for your recovery.
• Take the First Step every day.
• Consider taking food with you when you need to be away from home.
• Shut the kitchen down after meals.
• Develop and follow a plan of action.

DON’Ts

• Take yourself and your issues too seriously.
• Criticize.
• Treat your commitments as optional.
• Be inflexible or insist that your sponsees work their program exactly as you dictate. Allow for personality differences and seek out what will work.
• Preach.
• Psychoanalyze.
• Expect your sponsor to save you.
• Ignore what appears to be the truth, just to spare someone’s feelings. Ask questions, with gentle love.
• Isolate.

Tradition Five

Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the compulsive overeater who still suffers.

OA Responsibility Pledge

Always to extend the hand and heart of OA
to all who share my compulsion;
for this I am responsible.

This is an action plan for reclaiming and retaining our abstinence.

This inventory and the actions that we take are the most loving things we can do right now for ourselves, our abstinence, and our recovery.

There are three parts to this action plan.

1. An inventory of what happened. Here, we will assess what we have been doing.
2. Determine actions we are willing to take to renew our commitment to abstinence first—as the most important thing in our lives, without exception.
3. An action plan to keep us going forward into recovery, including using the Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions, the Tools of Recovery, and other resources.

Upon completion, it is vital to share each part with an abstinent and recovering member of our Fellowship.

This may be our sponsor or another OA fellow. Accept no excuses for delay. Remember, we are as sick as our secrets. Rigorous honesty is a must.

This plan will help us put fear, denial, perfection, guilt, and procrastination behind us as we take an honest look back and develop an action plan that will foster freedom from food obsession.

Part One: Inventory of What Happened

• Write down exactly what happened as though a video camera was rolling.
• List the foods we ate during our slip or relapse.
• Were we eating any of our trigger, binge, or other foods that are or may be a problem or that we have not gotten honest about yet?
• If we are not sure, try looking at food ingredients. Look for patterns: Do the foods we eat most often, or the foods we look forward to the most, have common ingredients?
• Do we still have trigger or binge foods in the house?

Relapse generally occurs in the reverse order of recovery: First, we lose our spiritual connection (consciously or unconsciously), then our mental or emotional abstinence falters, and finally we lose our physical abstinence, picking up the fork or the behavior with food. We are at the end of the slip when we pick up the fork or the behavior with food, not the beginning.

Therefore, it is important to inventory our feelings, thoughts, and spiritual connection and identify things that may have contributed to our relapse. The following questions, answered honestly and thoroughly, will help.

• Do we see anything in our eating behaviors that may be causing problems, such as eating in the car, sneaking food, eating standing up, eating in front of the TV, skipping meals, allowing too much flexibility in our plan, or anything else from which we need to be abstain?
• What feelings were we having before the relapse?
• What were we thinking before the relapse?
• What secrets were we keeping or are we still keeping that need to be shared with our sponsor or another abstinent, recovering compulsive eater?
• What lies did our disease tell us that we believed?
• How did we decide it was okay to go outside food boundaries that were working?
• Are we hanging around slippery people among our family and friends, or in slippery places, such as restaurants or grocery stores?
• Where was Higher Power?
• Were we meditating and praying consistently?
• Were we keeping honest, accountable, and current in a daily Tenth Step inventory?
• Were we making people, places, or things our Higher Power?
• Were the highest priorities in our life our Higher Power, our abstinence, and the program, or were there other things?

Part Two: Moving from Slip or Relapse to Recovery

In this section, we will decide actions to take to move into recovery.

Answer the following questions with the Part One inventory in mind. Ask a sponsor or another recovering member for guidance if in doubt about any questions or responses.

• Do we need to change our plan of eating?
• Do we need to change our eating behaviors?
• Are there other actions regarding our food and eating that we need to take?
• How should we change our thinking?
• Do we need to change spiritually regarding our program?

Remember: We need to go to any length for victory over food and compulsive eating.

Part Three: Action Plan for Commitment to Recovery

The following actions are necessary to achieve and maintain abstinence.

1. Write an action plan for each item listed below.
2. Share it with our sponsor or a fellow abstinent OA member.
3. Ours is a program of action; we act ourselves into recovery. Remember that “half measures availed us nothing” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed., p. 59).
4. Commit and start now.

How do we plan to use each of the nine Tools with our Step work?

• a plan of eating
• sponsorship
• meetings
• telephone
• writing
• literature
• action plan
• anonymity
• service

REMEMBER: One day at a time, one moment at a time, and one meal at a time. May our Higher Power bless us, our recovery, and our abstinence.