Breaking up with Overeater's Anonymous: Part 2
- Dec 20, 2025
- 5 min read
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 nobody in OA is qualified to lead people in recovery, and it's not based in formal, recognised, properly trialled research. An unqualified person could not act as a Dr, and so they should not act as a psychologist, either. The capacity for enduring harm is enormous. I have had a number of terrible sponsors, I still remember their words which caused me immense harm and setback:
"I have come to the end of my resources with you"
"You are still being resistant"
"You're not doing enough"
Although I can now thank these (unwittingly) terrible 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. 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 - and this outcome and detrimental sponsorship could be very dangerous for many people with eating disorders or extreme depression.
Teaching fallible concepts as truth
What’s more, in therapeutic settings, these thoughts and beliefs about the self as powerless and victim, someone who is beyond hope, would be challenged as cognitive fallacies. In cognitive behavioural therapy, a cognitive fallacy is a mistake in reasoning. It that comes from the way our minds naturally think (rather than from a lack of information).
If the OA programme itself were a person, it would need a therapist. Given the hours and hours the particular programme demanded of me, the rigid rules, keeping me exhausted, restricted, burned out, never good enough - aside from financial motives, I honestly felt after leaving that it was akin to the premises of some of the cults that I have since learned about.
I realised during one of my outreach calls that I didn't even crave food. I craved being happy. This was a turning point in my focus away from food and eating "perfectly" as the root issues in my disordered eating
Examining unhelpful thoughts
Identifying cognitive fallacies matters, because unexamined and inherently negative and 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.
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 that we can dwell, avoiding food will always demand of us a level of effort that we cannot guarantee to provide. And importantly - it acts in some ways to let us off the hook - avoiding taking ownership and responsibility for how we relate to our body. "Because I have an addiction" is far easier as a blanket rule and feeling of certainty for the future than working to eat normally, but experiencing reactive eating flare-ups, depressive episodes, messing up, and all the enormous spectrums and unknowns that we encounter along the way.
Perhaps it's because 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.
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
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, wired-in to our biology, that has a clear and well-trodden way 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. And I’ve 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.
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
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