Breaking up with Overeater's Anonymous: Part 2

Dec 20, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Feb 1

In Part 1, we explored why Overeaters Anonymous (OA) can feel comforting at first — offering structure, certainty, and a sense of belonging — and why, for many people, it ultimately reinforces shame, rigidity, and a sense of personal failure rather than real healing.

If you’ve ever wondered why “trying harder” hasn’t worked - or why you feel worse, not better, despite doing everything you were told - this article is for you.

Moving forward

This article isn’t about attacking Overeaters Anonymous or the individuals within it. Many people enter OA genuinely wanting relief, support, and understanding — and many sponsors are doing what they believe is helpful.

What matters here is not intent, but impact. When vulnerable people are guided by an unregulated model that prioritises ideology over psychology, harm can occur — even when everyone involved means well. This piece is about naming that risk, and reclaiming agency where it has been lost.

First, do no harm

Let's not forget that the majority of participants in OA are not formally qualified to lead people in recovery, and the food programme is not based in formal, recognised, properly trialled research. The capacity for enduring harm is extremely concerning. I have had a number of very unhelpful sponsors, I still remember their words which caused me immense harm and setback.

"You're not doing enough"

Although I can now thank the less-than-helpful sponsors for teaching me that unconditional and endless patience is one of my core values in my work… at the time I just felt like I was the worst case scenario for not being "cured" by the OA programme. Like everyone could be fixed but me.

It didn’t matter how many hours I put in, or how badly I wanted to be better. I was putting in everything I had, but barely scraping by. I was in a pit of despair about my "non-compliant" behaviour. This outcome could be very dangerous for many people with eating disorders or extreme depression — it certainly led me to a very dark place.

Teaching fallible concepts as truth

In therapeutic settings, thoughts and beliefs about the self as powerless over something, or beyond hope of finding balance, would be challenged as It that comes from the way our minds naturally think — which is often distorted and designed to protect us in ways that don't actually help!

I gradually came to the conclusion that if the OA programme itself were a person, it would need a therapist.

OA's own programme is built on black-and-white rules, or, "cognitive fallacies" (a mistake in reasoning) which don't hold up to interrogation.

For example, OA premises such as: "You can never eat X again", or, "Your addictive behaviour is due to character flaws" - simply don't stand up to the nuance, and greyness of the human experience and condition - let alone the extreme complexity around behaviour and lack of evidence around food "addiction". Given that the programme was created in around 1935 — I am not surprised that the inherited language needs an update.

Learning to identifying cognitive fallacies matters. Any unexamined and inherently negative/labelling thoughts lead to flawed decisions, misunderstandings, or persistent false beliefs — even in intelligent, well-informed people.

In therapy, the way out is reframing how we think about ourselves in negative and victimised ways so that we begin to grow our agency. The opposite of mental illness is detaching from the identity stories that we repeatedly form which hold very little meaning, but rather act to expose the core, human fears that we are clinging to in that moment of time. Often this can signal abandonment fears, or childhood trauma. Ultimately, we deserve to lay these to rest - not perpetuate and pander to our secondary food problems.

Take back your agency

Just like in my eating disorder, I was giving food way too much power

OA leaves people missing out on the chance to go deeper beyond the label of “defective addict”… Relenting all of our agency, constructive self-talk, and opportunity to rediscover the relationship we have with our own thoughts and feelings - is entering into a life long war and relentless identity struggle.

It's lifelong because life is very much arranged around food — we need to eat and drink very regularly, and social gatherings usually involve food. OA's restrictive approach overemphasises and overestimates the importance of focusing on food in trying to ensure the cessation of our obsession with it.

Going deeper

In reality, the only place we ever truly live is the real world. Avoiding certain foods will always require a level of effort and control that we cannot guarantee we’ll have forever. We can’t promise we’ll never be caught short at a service station, a special occasion, or a moment when we simply have to eat what’s available. And we can’t promise we’ll always have the capacity, resilience, or emotional bandwidth to resist what’s in front of us. That isn’t a moral failing — it’s part of being human.

Instead of learning to respond, adapt, and self-regulate, we attempt to enforce control.

When we rely on rigid avoidance rules, we also sidestep the deeper work of taking responsibility for how we relate to our bodies. Saying “I don’t eat that because I have an addiction” is far easier than engaging with the messy, uncertain, real-world task of eating in a balanced way — one that inevitably includes reactive eating flare-ups, depressive episodes, mistakes, and periods of struggle.

Learning to live with food means accepting uncertainty, variability, and imperfection. It means developing skills to navigate life as it actually unfolds, rather than trying to protect ourselves from it with rules that can’t hold under real conditions.

One thing is for sure, if we demand black and white rules and conditions in a world of greys, we'll always be set us up for failure.

Knowledge is power

Perhaps we truly believe that we could never achieve a normal way of eating, because we have tried without having any of the tools. But the truth is that we can always strive to become more aligned with the precious, inbuilt signals of our body — rather than retreating further into the riddles and sagas of the mind.

The body, and all of its stress signals, becomes calm when it feels safe. There is great safety in understanding that we are going through something normal when we binge-eat or overeat — it can become wired-in to our physiology, but it has a clear and well-trodden pathway out.

I’ve not had a client who hasn’t felt relieved, seen, heard, and understood once they have understood why they eat like they do. The chains fall off immediately once they realise that it was due to maladaptive behaviours designed to control their intake.

I’ve also had incredible results from simply holding constant and unconditional acceptance for clients that take some time to build up the self-trust (and trust in me), to put their aims into action.

There's hope for you

If you’re here because OA wasn’t right for you, please know that there is healing on the other side. And if it didn’t help, it’s good that you know what doesn’t work for you.

Who knows, perhaps just like me, OA might be the best - worst thing, that ever happened to you.

If you need support, reach out.

Lizzie x