Day Six My Body, God’s Temple
2. “Fat Machinery” is introduced and defined in this day’s reading. What is fat machinery? (See page 58.) What are the four kinds of fat machinery? Do you recognize any of these patterns in your own life? If you feel comfortable doing so, share an example from your life. Someone else might learn from what you share!
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I have an old example to share. It is no longer current. As a kid growing up, my mother became quite abusive around meal time.
As an adult, whenever I went to her house I would inhale any and every snack possible…much of it when she wasn’t looking (she would be in the other room with my kids).
When I was first doing Thin Within and working through the Fat Machinery material, I realized that this was an example of that. There was a lot of “Past Stories” going on and also it became a conditioned or habitual response.It was a combination of #1 and #3.
Another example of Fat Machinery came from my years of dieting. I lost 100 pounds with Weight Watchers and then plunged into the zone diet. I got very thin….and resumed the life of an athlete that I had known as a younger person, training for marathons and being quite involved in strength training. With the Zone Diet, I learned some things about my body that were legitimate, while at the same time became further in bondage to food and obsession with counting grams of fat, carbohydrates, and proteins. I may have looked thin, but my heart was heavier than ever.
Years later when I had weight to lose once again (an injury derailed my marathon training and the weight piled back on very quickly), I was applying myself to 0-5 eating. I noticed a subtle behavior I had adopted…it was that if I was feeling off just slightly in every way, even if I wasn’t hungry, I “needed” protein. This wasn’t true. Yes, I do best when I have protein at each meal, but if I attribute every bit of tiredness or headache to “needing” protein, I would be eating constantly…which I think was the point! LOL!
So for me, my previous experience dieting definitely brought some fat machinery into my 0-5 eating experience that I didn’t recognize at first. It seemed “so healthy.” It wasn’t like I was justifying eating a candy bar, after all. 🙂
Nevertheless, it was food my body did NOT need. God used this of course to teach me that when I *am* at a 0, I do best feeding that hunger with foods that my entire body responds well to…not just a “taste bud pleaser.”
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3. Prayerfully evaluate the place the bathroom scale has in your life. If you are getting on it each day, please consider that it may have mastery over you. You may want to eliminate it for a while by putting it in storage. How do you feel about doing this?
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I think I need to put the scale in the garage for a bit. I do not want to return to being in bondage to it and I can see the tendency.
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All for now!
Heidi
