DOs

  • Practice the Steps and Spiritual Principles daily throughout your life.
  • Include the Steps when discussing potential solutions.
  • Write/journal.
  • Maintain contact with sponsors and OA friends to receive their active listening, acceptance, and compassion.
  • Use the Serenity Prayer and other prayers and meditate.
  • Listen for others’ experience, strength, and hope—from all Twelve Steppers.
  • Have a sponsor to talk to.
  • Read sections from our literature that deal with your current problem.
  • Remember that you are not alone.
  • Write out and follow a plan of eating.
  • Make a gratitude list.
  • Remember that we do not control the world or other people.
  • Ask for help.
  • Ensure your feedback is welcome before giving it.
  • Trust Higher Power.
  • Attend meetings, face to face and/or online, to see familiar faces.
  • Let go of your perfection. Keep in mind your progress.
  • Recognize how you identify when others share their stories.
  • Let go.
  • Make a Twelfth Step outreach call to see who you can help.
  • Do service throughout your life, not only in OA.
  • Call/text immediately when you realize you are struggling.
  • Remember that food does not fix it.
  • Be patient. Remember what it was like when you were a newcomer.
  • Attend retreats, workshops, marathons, and conventions, and listen to podcasts.
  • Take responsibility for your recovery.
  • Take the First Step every day.
  • Consider taking food with you when you need to be away from home.
  • Shut the kitchen down after meals.
  • Develop and follow a plan of action.

DON’Ts

  • Take yourself and your issues too seriously.
  • Criticize.
  • Treat your commitments as optional.
  • Be inflexible or insist that your sponsees work their program exactly as you dictate. Allow for personality differences and seek out what will work.
  • Preach.
  • Psychoanalyze.
  • Expect your sponsor to save you.
  • Ignore what appears to be the truth, just to spare someone’s feelings. Ask questions, with gentle love.
  • Isolate.

Tradition Five

Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the compulsive overeater who still suffers.

OA Responsibility Pledge

Always to extend the hand and heart of OA
to all who share my compulsion;
for this I am responsible

OA Board-Approved. © 2023 Overeaters Anonymous, Inc. All rights reserved.