Night Time Eating – Carrie’s Testimony and Challenge!

Pathway...
 Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.
 Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure.
Do not swerve to the right or to the left;
 turn your foot away from evil. Proverbs 4:26
Night time eating is the most recent stronghold that I am seeking to overcome, with God’s help. The Lord has delivered me from the diet mentality, afternoon snacking, over-exercising and several other habits and obsessions. However, I was still holding onto eating after leaving the dinner table. Not eating several hours later when I was hungry, but almost immediately after leaving the dinner table with a satisfied belly.
The habit was created during my years on weight watchers – I would save “points” for the end of the day. While my husband put our son to bed, I could finally rest and relax – I had earned a treat and I was going to enjoy it! Fast forward many years and it was a daily habit, largely associated with emotion, that I was just not willing to surrender. I realized recently that I had to give it up, to surrender it. So, I thought I’d share some of my strategies that have helped me continue moving forward in this journey. (These strategies are in addition to the reading of Truth cards, reading scripture, prayer, praise music, etc).
Please understand that I had to draw a line in the sand to not eat after leaving the dinner table. Some of you may need a meal closer to bedtime, but I sleep better and feel better if my stomach is empty or close to empty at bedtime.  So, I choose to close the kitchen after dinner!
1)   I start every day with a commitment, a promise, to God that I will not eat after dinner.  When I am tempted, I remember my promise and then my mind and heart turns toward my Lord. I know, too, that He provides a way out for me in temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13).
2)   I report to my accountability partner nightly on my success or failure on this point.
3)   I track on my phone with a checkmark if I have stayed in this particular boundary. It gives me an easy way to see if I am stumbling or succeeding.
4)   I review “my reasons to stay in my boundaries even when it is tough” daily. The reason that speaks to me the strongest currently is that I don’t want to be in this same place in 6 months. I want to be experiencing more and more freedom. I know that surrendering the nighttime eating is crucial to this growth.  So, when I am tempted, I often ask myself “where do I want to be in 6 months?”.
5)   I have started planning for a little sweet at the end of dinner. I will join my family in a small bowl of ice cream. And sometimes I don’t eat the ice cream. I am free to do either one!
6)   I change the direction of my feet.  TV watching is strongly related to the urge to eat after dinner. I am now watching a lot less TV at night. Now, especially when I am strongly tempted, I will take a bath. Or I might read a book or work on my Bible studies or call a friend. Or I just wait for my husband to come back downstairs.  I just do not go near the TV and I try to stay out of the kitchen.
7)   I memorize scripture so that in a tough moment, I can immediately go to the Truth. It helps me to pray my way through the tough moments.
8)   When I do slip up, I observe and correct. I make a plan for next so that I will have a better outcome. I also may truth journal about my thoughts that I had before I broke my boundary.
I underlined the two strategies that have made the biggest difference for me. As of today, I surrendered this habit to the Lord 40 days ago. Quite biblical, isn’t it 🙂?  I have had 4 nights where I slipped up and 36 nights when I was surrendered. I consider that a huge success when I look back and know that I was eating after dinner almost every night.

What About You?

What behavior of yours may be holding you back from total freedom? Pray about what steps you might take to help you overcome.  Please share that that others may learn from you!
~ Carrie

How to *Prevent* “Preventative Eating”

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What IS preventative eating?

Well, it’s what you do when you are preparing to go into a situation where you know you won’t be able to have food: a courtroom, a class, a seminar, church service, classroom situation, doctor’s appointment, DMV line, etc. Since you know you will not be able to have food for an hour or two (or longer) and you are concerned you will get hungry and not be able to eat, preventative eating is stocking up ahead of time–eating when you aren’t at a 0 or eating beyond 5 in preparation for the situation that may be ahead. It is eating so you won’t get hungry when you don’t think you will be around food.

There are some obvious problems with this. 🙂 Like there is nothing about it that respects the 0 and 5 boundary that God has asked us to respect!

We also have no idea if we will get hungry then or not. Not for certain!

This video explains a bit of what I am talking about. (If you are an email subscriber, please visit the blog if the video isn’t viewable.)

We often discover that if we are careful to give ourselves permission to eat to prevent hunger, it often leads to “I have broken my boundaries once already, so I may as well break them the rest of the day” sort of eating. Or “I have blown my boundaries” or what Barb Raveling calls “Failure Eating.”

As I shared in the video, there are a couple of ways of handling a situation like this.

  1. Plan your hunger so that you are at a 0 with time before the event to have a meal that will be likely to sustain you for the period of time you won’t have access to food.
  2. Carry a small bag of nuts with you to “shave the edge” off the 0 if you do land there during your class, appointment, or flight. A few cashews or almonds can go a long way and then you will have the pleasure of enjoying a meal at 0 after your class, appointment or flight.
  3. Renew your mind about being hungry before you actually are and then allow yourself to pray your way through “0” to the “other side” and enjoy that while you are hungry, your body is likely using its very efficient stores to fuel you!

When you are tempted to stock up and eat before you head off to a situation where you may not have access to food for a few hours, consider using these questions:

Preventative Eating Questions

1. Why do you feel like you should eat now?

2. Would you break your boundaries if you chose to eat now?

3. Are you willing not to eat right now?

If yes, consider what God’s solution might be to this situation. What do you think HE wants you to do?

If no, consider doing the justification or entitlement questions. It sounds like this is more about having an excuse to eat than it is about a legitimate concern to eat.

3. Should this be an exception to your 0 to 5 eating boundaries?

Yes – Why?

If the answer is YES, then how will you know when you are justifying eating and when you have a legitimate reason to eat? What will be the standard?

Given what you know about yourself and your history, do you think you can trust yourself to be honest about breaking a boundary?

No, if not, then do you really need to consider this option any further? What options are available to you instead? Are you willing to do one of them?

4.  Are you afraid of being hungry? Why?

Where does fear come from?

What would God want you to do to deal with this situation?

5. What options can you consider to avoid being hungry during the class, appointment, or seminar without breaking your 0 to 5 boundaries?

6. Is avoiding hunger during your appointment, flight or class a need or a desire?

If a need then what possible solutions are there that you can use while respecting your boundaries?

If a desire, consider doing the justification or entitlement questions.

  1. Are you willing to experience discomfort if doing so means honoring the boundaries that God has established for you?
  2. Is alleviating your hunger or the possibility of being hungry worth the spiritual, emotional, and physical consequences that you will face if you break your boundary and eat to prevent hunger?

FEAR BIBLE STUDY

Much of my “preventative” eating has been rooted in fear. Maybe you can relate! We may be afraid of being uncomfortable …hungry… and not able to get to food. When we dismantle this fear and evaluate it, it really helps to diffuse the emotional volatility that is a part of it.

For me, I feared being hungry and without food because of abuse related to my childhood.

God wanted me to allow myself to get hungry…and to experience his presence in the midst of my fear and my physical hunger. He wanted me to see that there was nothing to fear. That my fear was rooted in lies that I believed.

Renewing my mind about this was vital to break free from “preventative eating” and so I have to review truths such as these when I am tempted to eat to prevent hunger ahead of time:

  1. Being hungry is not so painful that I can’t manage it.
  2. When I am hungry there is nothing terrible that will happen to me.
  3. It is TRUE that I will have food sometime relatively soon.
  4. The comfort that I need and that I sometimes turn to food to give me is only found in the Lord (and he sometimes uses people).
  5. No alleviating of my potential discomfort is worth the violating of my boundaries.
  6. Who knows? Maybe I won’t even BE hungry before the event is over with. I just don’t know!
  7. Food will be available when the event is over. If I am at a 0 I will be free to get food.
  8. If I am hungry for a while, I will be ok.

Look up the following bible verses and write down what you learn about the need for preventative eating:

  1. Psalm 37:25
  2. Psalm 81:10
  3. Psalm 73:23-26
  4. Isaiah 41:10, 13

Can you find any others? If so, share them with me so I can add them to this list.

What blessings are in store for you if you stand against the temptation for “preventative eating?”

Do you have any events this week, any appointments, errands to run, meetings to attend where you might be likely to engage in “preventative eating?” What strategy will you prayerfully employ so that you don’t break your boundaries?

Time for the Brownie :-)

Well, after all the anticipation of last night, today it was pretty uneventful. I think I ate it merely because I planned on eating it. To be truthful, something else sounded better, but that seemed just too weird. So, I prepared the brownie and some ice cream. In the picture, all you really have for scale is the tines of the fork.
I tell ya…if you take four times as long to eat half as much, you feel like you have twice as much as you used to! Or so the theory goes! LOL!