Overeaters Anonymous ( OA ) is a twelve-step program for people with food-related issues including, but not limited to, compulsive overeaters, those with binge eating disorders, bulimia and anorexia sufferers. Anyone who has a problematic relationship with food is welcomed, because the Third Tradition of OA states that the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop eating compulsively.
OA was founded by Rozanne S. and two other women in January 1960. The organization's headquarters, or the World Service Office, is located in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Overeaters Anonymous estimates its membership in over 60,000 people in about 6,500 groups that meet in over 75 countries. OA has developed its own specialized literature for those who eat compulsively but also uses Alcoholics Anonymous Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions . The First Step OA begins with the recognition of helplessness over food; the next eleven steps are meant to bring members of "physical, emotional, and spiritual healing."
Video Overeaters Anonymous
Definition
OA defines compulsion as "any uncontrollable impulse or feeling for the performance of some irrational act." OA further defines compulsive overeating as a progressive and addictive disease. OA considers compulsive overeating as a chronic condition and part of efforts to reduce psychological stress.
Like other twelve-step programs, OA sees compulsive eating as a tripling disease, symbolically understanding human structure as having three dimensions: physical, mental, and spiritual. Eating compulsively manifests itself in every dimension. A book that describes itself based on the OA method states that in the mental dimension, compulsive eaters are not a feeling of "filling", but rather expressing "hunger."
To help prospective members decide whether they need a program or not, OA provides a questionnaire, asks questions such as, "Are you giving too much time and thinking about food?" Answering "yes" to three or more of these questions is considered a good indication of the problem with which OA might be able to help.
Abstinen in OA
"Abstinence in Overeaters Anonymous is an act of refraining from eating compulsive and compulsive food behaviors while working towards or maintaining a healthy weight." This not-abiding concept has been criticized for lack of specificity. While in AA abstinence means not drinking alcohol, some argue that it is impossible to set certain foods, because the experience of OA is that different people have different food triggers (ie food and food behavior that causes them to eat compulsively). Although it is often said that alcoholics do not have to drink, but compulsive eaters still have to eat, Overeaters Anonymous responds by showing that alcoholics should drink, but can not drink alcohol, like compulsive eaters who must eat, but can not eat foods that cause compulsive eating.
The OA literature specifically defines the "necessity" as follows: "By definition, 'coercion' means 'an irresistible urge or feeling driven towards the performance of some irrational act.'" Hence, "eating compulsively" and "compulsive food behavior (because these terms are used in the definition of abstinence OA means irrational eating, or irrational food behavior, taken as a result of an unbearable impulse or feeling.) So, according to Overeaters Anonymous, "abstinence" is an act of refrain from "eating compulsive "and" compulsive food behavior, "while working towards or maintaining a healthy weight.While this definition can be described as nuanced and subject to personal interpretation (eg, the definition of" healthy weight "), or requires self-search analysis ( for example, to determine the driver of a particular behavior), it is not nonspecific.
The purpose of the OA's abstinent definition is that compulsive eaters do not refrain from eating, but rather from compulsive eating and compulsive food behavior, and work toward or maintaining a healthy weight. Thus, OA calls for compulsive eaters to determine self-feeding plans that allow compulsive eaters to distance themselves from compulsive eating and compulsive food behavior, while working towards or maintaining a healthy weight.
This program shows that members identify foods that "trigger" overeating. Because individuals are responsible for setting their own meal plans, they can change their eating plans if their needs and understanding of their impulse change, without that change is a breach of abstinence. Members are encouraged to seek counsel with other individuals before making such changes, generally including members or members of an OA partnership, to validate that the reason is a vote and unintentional decision based on underlying coercion.
Maps Overeaters Anonymous
Recovery tools and strategies
The OA program is based on twelve steps and twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. Small changes have been made to make this apply to eating disorders, but such adaptations are minimal. To take twelve steps and practice twelve traditions, the OA program literature recommends using eight "Recovery Tools." These include Meal Plans, Sponsorship, Meetings, Telephones, Writing, Literature, Anonymity, and Services. These tools are considered essential to gain and maintain abstinence.
Meetings offer consensual validation and serve to reduce feelings of guilt and shame. Sponsors provide guidance through OA programs and support when needed, but gradually encourage autonomy in sponsorship. A sponsor seeks to make his work obsolete.
Food package
In Overeaters Anonymous, abstinence is "an act of refraining from compulsive eating while working towards or maintaining a healthy weight." According to the OA, "by definition, 'coercion' means 'impulse or unbearable feeling driven towards the performance of some irrational act.'" OA has a long and complicated history with "food plans" and does not endorse or recommend any special eating plans, nor exclude personal use of one. OA recommends that each member consult a qualified health care professional, such as a doctor or dietitian. OA publishes a pamphlet, Choice Dignity , which helps in the design of individual food plans and also provides six sample meal plans (reviewed and approved by licensed dietitians) with which some OA members have had success.
Individual OA meetings and sponsors can make more detailed suggestions. Some warnings against foods containing excessive sugar, caffeine, and white flour. A qualitative analysis of bulimia found in OA finds bulimic OA members with too rigid plans likely to remain abstinent. The researchers who conducted the analysis suggested that new members start with a rather rigid plan that becomes more flexible by the end of the year in the program.
Individual meal plans may request exceptions to certain trigger behaviors. For example, someone who knows that eating after a certain time at night triggers a compulsive eating behavior may be included in their plans to eat a commitment to distance themselves from eating after that night's time; A person who knows that snacking between meals leads to compulsive food behavior may be included in their plans to eat a commitment to distance themselves from chewing (or sucking) between meals.
Demographics
In 2002 a dissertation compared the results of a survey of 231 OA members in the Washington, DC area of ​​North America conducted in 2001 with findings from a survey of OA members taken in 1981, twenty years earlier. Surveys in 2001 showed that 84% of OA members were identified as party eaters, 15% as bulimia, and 1% as anorexic sufferers. The 1981 survey found that 44.5% of OA members were identified as party eaters, 40.7% as bulimia, and 14.8% as anorexia sufferers. The survey also found an increase in the percentage of men in OA from 9% in 1981 to 16% in 2001. Both figures are generally in line with estimates made by the American Psychological Association that men and women ratio them to eating disorders range from 1: 6 to 1:10. Researchers state that typical OA members in Washington are white and highly educated. OA members surveyed in 2001 worked in full-time capacity and housewives comprised only 6% of the 2001 OA population, in contrast to 30% of those surveyed in 1981. This reflects a growing trend in the number of women employed outside the home. Furthermore, 80% of participants in 2001 had achieved a bachelor's degree, compared with 59% of those surveyed in 1981. The percentage of divorced or separated OA members increased from 10% in 1981 to 21% in 2001, also reflecting trends among the general population.
Correlation by maintaining abstinence
Research has identified a number of OA practices that are significantly correlated with maintaining abstinence in OA: adherence to food plans (including weighing and measuring food), communication with other members (especially sponsors), spending time in prayer and meditation, doing service work, completing steps fourth, complete the ninth step, write down thoughts and feelings, attend meetings, read OA/AA literature, and educational status of participants. Therefore, researchers have concluded that the application of OA practices may directly help promote abstinence and reduce the frequency of relapse in those with overeating disorders and bulimia nervosa.
Honesty
Although not found in research to be significant, a number of OA members answered that honesty is a very important practice of OA. Researchers have noted a high degree of honesty at OA meetings and demonstrated that working the Twelve Steps reinforces this quality.
Spirituality
Some researchers have found that despite their high interest in program spirituality is not correlated with measures of weight loss; others have found a rather contradictory conclusion. In particular, increased sense of spirituality correlates with improvements in eating attitudes, less attention to body shape, and better psychological and social functions. However, a certain measure of religiosity and religious affiliation was never found to correlate with treatment outcomes.
Differences in demographic instability
Several studies have found the average length of abstinence for bulimia in OA is significantly higher than the average length for party eaters. Paradoxically, bulimics are also found to attend fewer meetings, and are less committed to writing their thoughts and feelings on a daily basis. However, the frequency of relapses for bulimia and party eaters did not differ significantly. The difference can be explained by the predictable nature of the bulimia cycle. Other studies have found party eaters in OA have better success than bulimia. Most OA members who have reported negative experiences in the program are anorexic patients. This can be caused by OA focus on eating too much than too little. Some OA practices, such as refraining from eating certain types of food, conflict with anorexia cases.
Results
The average weight loss of participants in OA has been found to be 21.8 pounds (9.9 kg). Survey results show that 90 percent of OA have responded that they have improved "somewhat, much, or very much" in their emotional, spiritual, career and social life. OA's emphasis on group commitment and psychological and spiritual development provides a framework for developing positive, adaptive and independent treatment opportunities.
Changes in world view
Changes in world views are considered important for individuals in the recovery process, as they are generally accompanied by significant behavioral changes. Thus, some researchers have identified the transformation of the worldview in members of various self-help groups dealing with addiction problems. Such studies describe the "world view" as four domains: self-experience, universal order (God), relationships with others and perceptions of problems. In OA, members change their belief that "it is bad to eat" for "someone should eat to stay alive and not have to feel guilty about it"; "a person is just overweight and needs to lose weight" for "someone has an underlying psychological and interpersonal problem"; "One must be self-deprecating, robbing oneself, help others" to "it's okay to express positive feelings about yourself and take care of one's needs"; "Food is the answer to all problems, the source of entertainment" to "psychological and emotional needs must be fulfilled in relationships with people"; "I am a person who eats uncontrollably" to "I am someone who has limitations and does not eat what is harmful to me."
Understand control
The act of binging and cleaning gives a bulimic with the illusion that they can regain a sense of control. The feast has been described as "a futile attempt to replenish depleted emotional stocks, when the attempt to do everything perfectly has failed." Self-destructive behavior from injecting intoxicating drugs parallel to overeating; it allows the user to experience comfort, and feel punished afterwards.
In relationships, many OA members are proven trying to control their own lives and others. Paradoxically, the experience of an OA member is also characterized by a strong sense of personal failure, dependency, despair, stress, nervousness, low self-esteem, helplessness, lack of control, self-pity, frustration and loneliness. As part of this feeling, the self is regarded as a victim of circumstances and victims of the attitude of others. Many members view this lack of self-esteem as coming from their outward appearance. Strong self-criticism is a characteristic characteristic, accompanied by a feeling of "I do not deserve it" and "I am more precious than others." Such feelings are found to have a dominant influence on relationships with others.
The members describe their sense of relaxation and liberation, and the increased value of control and decency in their lives. Their testimony shows that, paradoxically, is by realizing their helplessness and accepting the basic limitations of self that they begin to feel the power of the resurrected self. At the same time, personal responsibility replaces self-pity and the hope that others will act for the good of the individual. With the old attitude, egocentricity and exaggeration, false confidence perpetuates the problems that make them join the OA. While their eating disorder is active, many OA members claim that their experience of themselves consists of obsessive aspirations for perfection that hide their worthlessness.
Comparison
Significant differences between the work of the Twelve Steps and the cognitive behavioral therapy are the acceptance of Higher Power and provide peer support. A major study, known as Matching Project, compares two approaches as well as motivational therapy in improving alcoholics. The Twelve Step Program was found to be more effective in promoting abstinence. However, some researchers have found that cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most effective treatment for bulimia. Both approaches are not mutually exclusive.
OA is most appropriate for patients who need intensive emotional support in losing weight. Each OA group has its own character and prospective members should be encouraged to sample multiple groups.
Criticism
OA differs from group therapy because it does not allow participants to express their feelings about (and to) each other during the meeting. OA meetings are intended to provide a forum for the expression of experience, strength and hope in a safe and simple environment. But every member is encouraged to get sponsors to help them with their feelings, etc. One by one.
Feminist
OA has been the object of feminist criticism to encourage bulimic women and banquets to accept helplessness over food. Feminists insist that the perception of powerlessness is bad for women's struggle for empowerment; teaching their helpless people push passively and preventing party eaters and bulimics from developing coping skills. These effects will be very damaging to women who have experienced oppression, distress and self-hatred. The twelve-step program is described as a male-dominated organization that forces female members to accept self-abasement, powerlessness and external focus, and deny responsibility. Deliveries are portrayed as women who passively surrender their lives to doctors, teachers, and men's ministers; The feminist view shows that women focus on pride rather than humility.
OA argues that the context of powerlessness in the program does not refer to the lack of individuals, but only with the acceptance that they have problems with food that they can not defeat with will without their help. The slogan "We are helpless, helpless," is an example of this difference. By accepting that they are powerless over certain things and thus handing over the illusions of control, they can then make honest judgments and make clearer decisions about what they really control.
Fanaticism
The Twelve Opponents program argues that members become cult as in their compliance to the program, which can have a destructive influence, isolating them in the program. In addition, this kind of fanaticism can lead to the perception that other treatment modalities are not necessary. Surveys of OA members have found that they exercise regularly, attend religious services, engage in individual psychotherapy and are being prescribed antidepressants. This is evidence that the participants did not avoid other useful therapeutic interventions beyond the Twelve Step program.
Literature
[1]
Further reading
-
Johnson, C. L., & amp; Taylor, C. (December 1996). "Working with difficult-to-treat eating disorders using the traditional and twelve-step integration of psychotherapy". North American Psychiatric Clinic . 19 (4): 829-41. doi: 10.1016/S0193-953X (05) 70384-1. PMIDÃ, 8933611. CS1 maint : Many names: list of authors (links) - Goldberg, Lina "The History of Overeaters Anonymous and Its Food Plan" [2]
External links
- Anonymous Overeaters
- Works by or about Overeaters Anonymous in the library (WorldCat catalog)
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments