Hi everyone! I'm 32 years old, and I currently weigh 198 lbs. I'd like to get down to 110 or 115 lbs. I don't have 100 lbs to lose, but I hope I'm still welcome here.

In the past year, my weight has really started to affect my health. I have high blood pressure, and I'm having a lot of joint pain in my knees. A few months ago, I was diagnosed with asthma. I can't walk up a flight of stairs without having an asthma attack. I feel hopeless, alone, and most of all, old. People who are twice my age can walk circles around me.

In the past few months, I've become really depressed. I've lost hope that I can lose this weight. At the same time, the thought of living the rest of my life like this is unbearable. I'm hoping to find people who understand that losing weight is not easy!

I have started attending online OA meetings, and I subscribed to several OA email lists. I want to go to a physical meeting, but the times conflict with my work schedule.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it!

I'm a 34 year old mom of one with 100lbs to lose. Email me at my user name @ gmail.com if you want an email buddy!

I am 30 and almost at my heaviest of 300 pounds, hopeless and alone in my situation feeling like surgery is my only option left.
I would love to speak with people going through same thing on a regular basis, my email is [email protected] if anyone would like to email me to chat, rant,cry, exchange meal plans and ideas,etc.

Hi davina. I've been there too. I can tell you that if compulsive eating is your problem, surgery is not going to help you. They can take out half of your stomach, but they can't remove your brain. You posted this message in the OA section, so I have to assume that you at least suspect that eating is a compulsion for you. That compulsion, I've found, is even more painful than carrying around all that weight.

If you want too explore the 12 step path to healing, I'd suggest two first steps. First, I'd suggest that you give up hope that any meal plan, diet, surgery, or pill is going to help you. Second, find a meeting so you don't have to be alone. I'm not in your head. I don't know if OA is right for you. But these two things worked for me as a first step to finding recovery, and getting my weight to a comfortable place, too.

Wow!! I can so relate to this!! You said it better than I could. (That's what I logged on to say. Your post was SO comforting & encouraging to me! THANK YOU!!)

While I'm at it, I'll add some helpful info:

I am in OA HOW & they just mentioned the other day that there is a special group called 100 pounders, so I found this thread by looking for that.

That group is here: centmassint.org/files/Hundredpoundersphone.pdf

100 Pounders OA Telephone Meeting IS 7 Days a week!

Phone number: 1-712-432-3900
Bridge Number: 4285115#

If you have lost or need to lose 100 or more pounds, then this Overeaters Anonymous meeting
is for you. Like all OA meetings, it is open to anyone who wants to stop eating compulsively.
Join us every night (Saturday through Thursday) for an OA meeting that focuses on the special
needs of those of us who have lost or need to lose 100 or more pounds. And then join us on
Friday night for the regular Friday night 9PM EST telephone step meeting.
This is a regular long-distance call, and your regulator long-distance charges (if any) or regular
cell phone charges will apply.

Monday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders
Tuesday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders
Wednesday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders
Thursday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders
Friday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Step Meeting
Saturday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders
Sunday 9PM EST /6PM Pacific: Hundred Pounders

OA HOW is wayyyy more helpful than OA. It establishes an eating plan FOR you... how else are we gonna know, but through long, painful trial & error??
No sugars, no flours. Weigh & measure everything.
4 oz protein each meal.
2 c. veggie, etc.... (You can look up OA HOW on FB... I have the food plan put up on there.)

Then there's GS. GS is Greysheeters. It has an even more specific plan, similar to OA HOW but not allowing beans or grains & adds more fat.

This is super helpful for gals like us who have a much more severe case. The disease is progressive... the health issues are worse... etc.

I avoid dairy, beans, grains, etc.... I have leaky gut/ IBS.... kidney & liver trouble currently.... among many other things... but those are the ones that have made it VERY challenging to figure out a plan that works for MY body & my needs.

-Hope this info helps someone!
GS groups are on FB too! :-)

Hold on now! I'm glad OA HOW is working for you, but it's not a more effective program. In fact, several aspects of HOW specifically go against the 12 steps as outlined in the Big Book.

Also, please be aware that OA has specifically rejected the gray sheet because it is an unhealthful diet for most members. The OA national committee specifically mentions the gray sheet as NOT OA. This is because for most of us, following the gray sheet would not be recovery but anorexia.

You can find out more by visiting OA.ORG.

Your statement is your opinion, not a fact. We are all entitled to our opinion, including myself. Factually, It has worked effectively & successfully for many suffering people.

Your stance sounds more like a lack of information/ ignorance.... let's not prevent the great possibility that these programs would be the final thing that actually works for many people. I've tried everything. And OA is not enough structure to be of enough help to me.

Let's be open to other ideas, whatever will work for each of us, so that we ALL can have a solution. ;-) The same thing does not work for every one. To each their own.

Calling it anorexia is a bit much.... it is a big change to adjust to when we're used to piggin out for so many years is all. Takes time... one day at a time.

God bless you!!

No. I'm reporting facts as facts. Don't go pretending to be nice and then spreading mis-information that hurts our program as a whole.

The grey sheet is NOT OA. You can read a list of OA literature here: http://www.oa.org/pdfs/oa%20approved...ure%20list.pdf

Note that there are no diets on this list, including the suggestions of OA HOW. If you dig a little with OA HOW, you'll notice that they do include some wiggle room for the advice from a registered nutritionist. (And avoiding sugar and white flour are two things that harm almost no-one. The only exception I can think of is people who require a FODMAP diet.)

If you want more information on the grey sheet, how it came to be confused with OA literature, the best place to look it "Beyond Our Wildest Dreams." It was written by one of the founders. This is also OA approved literature, so you can know that its been "vetted" by many people with opposing viewpoints. Here's a excerpt explaining that the grey sheet is NOT OA: http://www.oasandiego.org/foodplan.htm

The grey sheet proposes a diet that does not provide adequate nutrition for the many people. There are very small numbers of people for whom this is a safe and healthy diet. The reason why OA specifically forbids enforcing any one diet on all members is that we all have different nutritional needs.

If you are new to OA, you might not know this yet, but there are many, many members who START with a normal weight or like my first sponsor, underweight. This is because they manage to control their weight by rotating binge dieting with binge eating, or they are bulimic or anorexic. We have members that fit all of these categories. If you talk like OA is a fatties-only club, you will be creating a wedge between yourself and them that does not belong.

Yes, for a person already too thin, eating under 1000 calories a day, which is perfectly likely on the grey sheet, might cause them to become gravely ill with anorexia. I'm not exaggerating. I'm talking about a life and death illness. Also, for those of us with a history of restricted eating, having a diet which restricts our eating again is likely to spin us into control issues and worsening mental health - a far cry from the recovery promised in the Big Book.

The Big Book promises that "We have ceased fighting anything or anyone—even alcohol. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality”

Excerpt From: The Anonymous Press. “Alcoholics Anonymous.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/vsH7z.l

This is the promise of OA. Not that we will be able to starve ourselves down into an "acceptable" body-size, but that we can develop a new relationship with food that is sane and healthy. If working the HOW restrictions feels healthy to you, that's OK. But please broaden your thinking a bit to understand that OA is not a diet program (and its not a lifestyle change either, lol.) If you do use OA for the diet, I suppose that's fine, too, but it makes me sad because there is so much richness that you miss when you do that.

I hope I'm not too late to join in. I am 31, a mother to a 7 month old baby with 100lbs to loose. I have issues with food which I'm hoping I can iron out with your support.

My email address is my username at outlook dot com.