The Northern New Mexico OA Intergroup voted to provide space on our website in which area members can share their stories of recovery with other compulsive overeaters. To submit your testimonial of how OA is helping you, email me at lizoannm@gmail.com, And watch this page in the coming months!

 

The Importance of Consistency To Long Term Recovery

by Terry Blessed, Santa Fe OA Morning Meeting

 

In my experience working my program on a consistent basis has avoided the many pitfalls of being up one day and down the next, in one day and out the next. etc. This has required my doing the same things consistently that maintain and add to my recovery, no matter whether I feellike doing them or not.

 

And I believe that because I do them consistently, they become much easier to do.

 

So consistency for me is about forming habits as the result of doing the same things necessary to recover over and over and over every day. I don't need to make a new decision every day whether to do them or not; I merely need to renew my choices of yesterday and ask always that H.P. empower my choices. So for me, consistency is about repetition, about practice and about structure.

 

I often have heard others say at meetings how helpful it is to them to see others attending meetings consistently and working their programs consistently. So when we attend meetings consistently and work our programs consistently, we are helping others and not just ourselves.

 

I believe that indecision about doing the things we need to do to maintain our recovery on a consistent basis causes stress, and leads to difficulty in working the program. Just as many children who do not go to school consistently every day end up dropping out, so do many of us drop out of our program because of not doing it consistently.

 

So what are the things I do consistently to maintain my recovery? Here are some:

 

• The Three P's: Pray, Plan, Play. Praying is having daily conscious awareness of a loving power greater than myself. Planning is removing the area of indecision of what I am going to eat each day by not making those decisions at the time I am about to eat, but making them in advance. Playing is spending quality time with my dog, listening to music I love, hiking, dancing, working out and making a game of challenges that I face each day rather than seeing them as hurdles to overcome.

 

• Not Taking Myself Too Seriously: The ability to laugh at and sometimes learn from my mistakes rather than berate myself about them.

 

• Gratitude: Maintaining an attitude of gratitude and giving expression to that gratitude in how I live my life eacy day.

 

• Passing It On: Passing on what I have so generously received in recovery. •