For Family and Friends

If you are reading this, you probably care about someone who has either joined Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) or could benefit from doing so.

We hope this will help give you a basic understanding of food addiction and the FA program and will answer many of your questions. 

What is Food Addiction?

In FA we view food addiction like other addictions: as a disease of the body, mind, and spirit-an inability to achieve self-control due to mental obession and physical compulsion. Signs of food addiction are huge weight gains or health-threatening weight losses, bulimia, compulsive exercise, and mental obsession with food, weight, or exercise.

FA members have found that we are addicted to foods made with flour and sugar, and to quantities. Without the program, we are unable to make healthy choices regarding food, regardless of the incredible will power often evident in other areas of our lives. Some of our members have been obese, and some have been many pounds underweight. Still others were a healthy weight but struggled constantly with obsession and unsuccessful diets.

The FA is a program based upon the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Like AA, FA is a fellowship of individuals who help one another recover from addiction through shared experience and mutual support.  The program frees us from obsession with food, eating, and weight. It teaches us how to maintain our health and helps us change our attitudes and behaviors so that we can stop turning to food as a solution for our problems or as a means to run away from our lives.

We invite you to come to an FA meeting to see how it works and to talk with FA members.