Thurs. For Today

November 17th, The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. Erich Fromm If a sense of sparateness is endemic to the human condition, how much more keenly do compulsive overeaters feel their apartness? People eat occasionally for pleasure, to be sociable, to comfort themselves, to pass the time. We who are food-obsessed try long and hard to be like normal eaters, only to find that we cannot limit ourselves to the occasion; our eating goes on and on, past need, past sociability and past sanity. Recovery in OA is based on the recognition that we are not - and never can be - normal eaters. For today: Yes, I am different from those of my famly, friends and colleagues who are not compulsive overeaters. But there are thousands of people like me in Overeaters Anonymous.