"I'm not alone anymore! Such a blessed relief just to know I¹m not the only one who feels and acts this way, that there are others just like me!" These are the reactions almost all of us had when we came to Overeaters Anonymous. At last we were home! Now we no longer had to depend on our own unsteady willpower. We reached out our hands for power and strength greater than ours, and our hands were taken in love and understanding.

In the past, most of us had tried various methods of weight reduction and control. Diet doctors, shots, pills, psychiatry, hypnosis, fad diets, and health farms. For most compulsive overeaters these are only temporary solutions. Many of us would indeed lose weight, only to gain back more than ever before.

How many times we had heard it said, "If you'd only use a little willpower, you could lose all that weight." Or, "Don't you know you're asking for a heart attack with all that extra poundage?" Many times we'd eat out of frustration, resentment or self-pity, only to wake up next morning saying, "Today's the day I¹ll start my diet, and I'll never go off again!" Of course, our good resolutions never lasted very long, and we were soon back on the same old merry-go-round of diets and binges.

Now, for the first time in our lives, we have HOPE! We find that, within the Fellowship of Overeaters Anonymous, we are not alone. We meet others who have suffered as we have, and they offer love, compassion and understanding of our common problem. In OA we can bring our feelings out into the open. Here we find willing ears and sympathetic hearts, people who are not judging us and who are ready to share their strength as we make the long journey back to recovery.

We discover that we help ourselves most by helping others with the same problem. We learn that we must honestly admit to our innermost selves that we are compulsive overeaters and are powerless over food. This is the first step toward recovery. We realize we have found something we never had before: a proven, workable method by which we have been able to arrest our common illness, one day at a time.