03.15.2026 Matching Calamity with Serenity - Tonia G, Sherry S, Sharon K03.15.2026 Matching Calamity with Serenity - Tonia G, Sherry S, Sharon K
OA RISE | Recovery Inspires Shared Experiences
Three OA members share how they move from chaos to calm by working the Twelve Steps, strengthening their spiritual lives and committing to abstinent food plans. Their stories touch on childhood pain, relapse, serious health issues and bereavement, showing how serenity can coexist with very real life challenges.
2:26:19•15 Mar 2026
Matching Calamity with Serenity: Three OA Stories of Food, Faith and Emotional Sobriety
Episode Overview
- Focusing on spiritual work and step practice can allow physical recovery, including weight loss, to unfold without constant scale obsession.
- Identifying and permanently abstaining from all “alcoholic foods” and problematic ingredients is crucial for many compulsive eaters.
- Daily tools such as step‑10 and step‑11 “trains”, outreach calls and written work help interrupt distorted thinking and emotional turmoil.
- Circumstances like grief, illness or stress do not have to be reasons to eat; they can be walked through by relying on God and the OA fellowship.
- Emotional sobriety means learning to feel and express difficult emotions instead of numbing them with food, while continually cleaning house with the steps.
“God told me what I weigh is none of my business.”
What remarkable journeys have people faced head‑on against addiction? This OA RISE speaker meeting, themed “Matching Calamity with Serenity”, brings together three compulsive overeaters — Sherry S, Sharon K and Tanya G — who share how they’ve stayed abstinent through blizzards, bereavement, health scares and everyday emotional storms. Sherry opens up about a lifetime of compulsive eating, from being the “overweight child” to reaching 323 pounds and celebrating a 20‑pound loss with an entire cake.
Her turning point came when, as she puts it, “God told me what I weigh is none of my business,” and she realised that focusing on spiritual work allowed her higher power to handle the physical side. She talks honestly about giving up all her “alcoholic foods”, diet drinks and processed items, and how step work and a strong connection with God keep her from turning back to food when calamity hits.
Sharon’s story echoes that mix of chaos and growth. She describes childhood isolation, teenage anxiety and years of using diets, alcohol and relationships to manage her weight and emotions. After losing 100 pounds in OA, then relapsing and regaining, she found recovery again by embracing a stricter food plan, rapid step work and daily practices like step‑10 and step‑11 “trains”.
Her focus now is emotional sobriety — catching distorted thinking, doing written steps and remembering that circumstances alone never fix the problem. Tanya rounds things off with a deeply emotional share about losing her father to suicide, long‑term yo‑yo dieting and later becoming suicidal herself. She talks about showing up for recovery even while caring for her terminally ill mother, then walking through her mother’s death abstinently by leaning hard on fellows, phone meetings and continuous step work.
For her, serenity looks like feeling painful emotions fully, using tools instead of food, and remembering that, as she says, “I get to feel my feelings.” If you’re juggling grief, health fears or just a noisy food-obsessed mind, this meeting offers real‑life examples of how others keep choosing serenity over the next binge — one day, and one step, at a time.
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