Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous (ABA) is a fellowship of individuals whose primary purpose is to find and maintain recovery in their eating practices, and to help others gain recovery. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop unhealthy eating practices.
ABA uses the Twelve-Step Program adapted from Alcoholics Anonymous to address the mental, emotional, and spiritual components of the disorders of anorexia and bulimia. Many people who identify compulsive overeating as the primary component of their eating disorder have been able to relate to their program and have found recovery through it.
By following the Twelve Steps they have come to a deep level of freedom from our deadly obsessions with body weight and shape and with food, obsessions that once dominated their minds and dictated the course of their lives. They learn in ABA that their eating disorders are a form of addiction, that the key to recovery is to find sobriety in their eating and exercise patterns, and that none of them can do that alone.
In ABA they find the guidance and compassionate support of other anorexics and bulimics who have gone before them in recovery, and they receive the courage to surrender their unhealthy behavior patterns. Each of them comes to connect with a Higher Power of their own understanding, who heals their minds as they stay sober physically.