Additionally, FA publishes several pamphlets, a periodical known as connection and produces audio recordings from successful members. The volume includes a doctor's perspective, a chapter for family and friends, and a discussion of each of the Twelve Steps. Most of the book consists of individual accounts of food addiction and FA recovery, some from members with over thirty years of sustained, one-day-at-a-time success. The book begins with a description of the experience of food addiction and its symptoms, which can include obesity, extreme thinness, bulimia, exercise compulsion, or a normal weight maintained at the expense of debilitating obsession. The FA book, Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous describes the possibility of long-term, continuous recovery from food addiction offered by Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), a program based on the Twelve Steps pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. Meetings are open to all FA members and those who are interested in learning about the program for themselves or for others whom they think might find FA helpful. Members attend three meetings each week and those with 90 days of abstinence from food addiction share at a group level. Meetings break the isolation that is part of the disease of food addiction and provide the opportunity for newcomers and members to learn from abstinent speakers who share their experience, strength, and hope. MeetingsДЇA Meetings are central to the FA program of recovery. Sponsors share their program up to the level of their own experience. Sponsors are FA members who are committed to abstinence and to living the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions to the best of their ability. FA defines abstinence as weighed and measured meals with nothing in between, no flour, no sugar and the avoidance of any individual binge foods. The problem can be arrested a day at a time by the action of weighing and measuring our food and abstaining completely from all flour and sugar. FA believes food addicts have an allergy to flour, sugar and quantities that sets up an uncontrollable craving.

Abstinence is simple and clear, but it is difficult to sustain continuously over the course of a lifetime. Abstinence is a planned, disciplined way of eating that leads to the addict's release from food cravings, obsession, and self-abuse. ДЄbstinence in FA is the parallel of sobriety in A.A. Overeating, under-eating or self-starvation, bulimia (including exercise bulimia), and extreme obsession with weight or food are among the symptoms of this addiction.

The manifestations of food addiction vary. As is the case with other addictions, food addiction involves physical craving and an ever-increasing dependence upon and struggle with a substance (food). 5 Organizational and financial structureДЇood addiction is defined in FA as 'an illness of the mind, body, and spirit for which there is no cure'.

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