One of my favorite expressions that I hear in L.A. meetings is:  “It’s not about the weight, unless it’s about the weight; then it’s all about the weight until it’s not about the weight.”

For some, that statement might seem cryptic, but in essence it means that we need to not forget why we came to program.  Very few people showed up because they knew that they had a spiritual void in their life (even though they had).  They didn’t arrive because they thought their lives were unmanageable and thought the program could give them a design for living (although it could).  They came because they wanted to lose weight.

I have often said that it’s not about the weight in a food program just like it’s not about your breath in AA.  Of course, it’s not about your breath in AA – unless you come into a meeting with the smell of whiskey on your breath, and then proceed to tell everyone you have ten years of sobriety.  In food programs, the weight is “the whiskey on our breath.”

In Overeaters Anonymous, the “Statement on Abstinence and Recovery” is “Abstinence is the action of refraining from compulsive eating and compulsive food behaviors while working towards or maintaining a healthy body weight.  Spiritual, emotional and physical recovery is the result of living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve-Step program.” 

The “while working towards or maintaining a healthy body weight” was added by the World Service Conference a few years back in hopes it might break the denial of many in OA as to the subject of weight.  Almost all of the representatives that attend the OA World Service Conference fall into that weight category, with the majority of them being at a “healthy body weight.”  We’re not talking a size 0 mind you, but a healthy body weight.

There was a point in my relapse where my delusional brain (a compulsive eater whose brain had been taken over by the disease) told me that it was more important to be “abstinent” than to be at a healthy body weight.  As a result, my abstinence at that time had a definition that Henry VIII could follow – on his worst day.  Yes, I was very overweight – and not going down – but I could tell myself I was abstinent!

I was also an example of a perverse logic that sometimes permeates the rooms of various food programs.  A person who comes in severely overweight and loses half of their weight, but is maintaining a significantly overweight condition (let’s say 50 pounds) is better thought of than someone who comes in at 50 pounds overweight and loses it all!  The first person can get up and brag about being a “100 pounder,” while still being classified as morbidly obese.  Not only that, this person might be taking candles for years of “abstinence,” and trumpeting that news to the meeting.

What kind of message does that give a newcomer?

Rozanne S., the founder of Overeaters Anonymous, said repeatedly “I did not start OA to make it a ‘fat and happy’ club.”  It is true that we must lose the shame about our bodies and start to love ourselves.  To truly love myself, however, means I have to stop repeating self-destructive habits like eating the amount of food that maintains an overweight condition.  The key to this failing is maintaining an overweight condition, not being overweight.  Someone in program might be 100 pounds overweight, but was 110 pounds overweight last month.  This is someone on the “glide path” towards a healthy body weight – exactly what OA’s definition of abstinence includes.

Another flaw in scientific logic that I’ve seen in sponsees from time to time is not having a food plan that is congruent with the weight towards which they are striving.  If your plan is to get to 185 pounds, and you’re currently at 320 pounds, the plan is very simple.  To get to 185, you need to eat the amount of food that a 185 pound person needs to maintain that weight.  If you do that, you will continue to lose a significant amount of weight until you approach that goal – then you will lose less and less until you reach that weight.

I have had 320 pound sponsees that have had 185 as a goal, but who are only losing a few pounds a month.  I tell them that if they are only losing a few pounds a month, they will never get to 185, as they are still eating too much food for that goal.  I do not tell them they cannot continue to eat what they are eating, but they’re going to have to realize they will probably plateau out at about 300.  And then I ask them, “Is being a 300 pound person what you came to program to become?”  I think not.

I have the classic compulsive overeater’s brain – and as such can easily complicate a one-step process.  There is so much information and so many layers to this disease and its recovery, that it is easy to lose the forest for the trees.  We can talk all day about the Steps, the Big Book, our inner selves, our childhood trauma, enlarging our spiritual condition, whilst at the same time missing one crucial step:  don’t overeat!

Denial is not something that miraculously vanishes the day we walk through the doors of a food program.  Our disease begins immediately to adjust our denial mechanism any way it can to get us to continue to overeat.  It will do it with perfectly good program phrases and ideas – or anything else it can find.  Its goal – as always – is to get us to continue eating in an unhealthy way.  We need to be educated by the program – and our fellows – as to exactly how this denial works, and to have it pointed out to us when we are in it.

In the end, it’s not to say we don’t love the people in program who are overweight and maintaining that weight.  At the same time, we need to speak up as to what the program says about recovery, overeating and weight – in an honest and non-judgmental way.  We can – and should – continue to love them, just not collude in their denial.