Right now, as I write this, I am tempted to hit the fridge for some of my left over Chipotle burrito. I love Chipotle. There is nothing better than my Chipotle burrito unless it is, perhaps, my Chipotle burrito left over with some extra cheese and salsa! One burrito can easily give me three meals and, perhaps, even five!
Because it is so good, I find myself — right now —Â tempted to eat before I have a clear hunger signal. My “0” hasn’t arrived, though I can sense it is close.
So how does this entire renewing of the mind and truth stuff work? For me, it changes my now.
Because I have been working so hard at rehearsing the truth and renewing my mind with God’s truth (each morning and, often, each afternoon), I have automatically sort of gone through a little process this afternoon even while considering giving in to eating my burrito before having a clear 0 signal. I have thought about the burrito and how good it will be and these truths have jumped into my head to help me be victorious over the temptation:
1. The burrito will be there when I AM hungry. It isn’t going anywhere! (I know this is obvious, but when you are in the throes of temptation, sometimes, you don’t think straight!)
2. The burrito will actually taste even better when I am hungry….truly hungry…AND when I don’t have the hindrance of my convicted heart and going against my conscience!
3. That burrito, as yummy as it is, will not taste good enough to make me glad that I ate outside of my boundaries.
4. Giving in to eating that burrito would be practicing blasting out of my boundaries. I can, instead, use this moment (or momentS) of temptation as an opportunity to grow in my strength and resolve NOT to give in when I am tempted. If I give in now, I am practicing giving in to my temptations and will be more likely to do so the next time.
5. Right NOW is the time to be faithful to God and to my resolve…right NOW is the time to show respect for my body and to honor God with my eating, drinking AND abstaining!
6. If I give in right now, I am more likely to continue to struggle with desire eating all the time and to have the confusion about my body…I will keep struggling with my size as I never know what God has in mind for me if I keep eating outside of 0 and 5 boundaries. Eating within my 0 and 5 boundaries RIGHT NOW will help me to continue to faithfully stay on the path that will provide clarity…physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
7. It is possible that there is something else going on that I should deal with that eating when I am not hungry will only serve to mask.
Ok, so these are the truths that are off the top of my head and by going over them in my mind (and typing them up here!), I have talked myself into waiting for the 0 and into being faithful to what God has called me to do!
My conscience is free!
And…by the way…I am hungry now! YAY!
How About You?
What do you do when you can’t get a certain temptation out of your mind? Would it be helpful to start telling yourself about the situation, about the food, about the choices that are before you? If you are pro-active and practice thinking truth each day—whether or not you are being tempted at the time—then it is more likely that you will use these tools automatically when you are tempted. Is doing the work worth it?
This post is from a lady I met on the Thin Within Accountability page at Facebook. When she posted this piece there earlier this week, I just had to ask her if I could share it with you all!
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I was a scale junkie. I would weigh every day and it would set off what kind of day I would have. If the numbers were high I’d eat because, what’s the point? Since the numbers were usually high, most of my days were what’s the point days.
So when I started this journey I told the Lord I would weigh once a month, on the first day of the month. That first month I could feel in the way my clothes were fitting that I’d lost weight. I was so excited that on the last day of the month I stayed up till midnight and at 12:01 I was on the scale. I was sooooo disappointed! After all my self-righteous ‘obedience’ I had shed 3 lousy little pounds!
I went to bed that night ranting and raving at God. After all, my results on previous diets were historically better in a month. I was outraged! He had told me this was the real thing, so why didn’t it live up to my expectations? How was that fair?
But God…. by this time it had been 22 days … 22 days of experiencing God’s PARDON, God’s PROVISION, God’s PRESENCE, and God’s POWER! As I lay there wallowing in my disappointment over the lousy scale, my Heavenly Daddy reviewed with me my journey so far. The freedom and the breakthroughs that I had experienced in a very short time. Then He said to me, “This has nothing to do with weight. The size of your body is none of your business.”
So I surrendered. The number on the scale is none of my business. God is the foreman of my restoration project. It will happen when it happens in His timing and His power.
My job is to love Him, to seek Him and to draw near. To trust Him and to abide in Him. To depend on Him for everything. To look to him in every trial and every joy. To recognize His gifts in everyday things…like the baby bird feather that floated in the air and landed on my shoe as I walked through the parking lot of my office, all worked up about another difficult day.
That’s my God!! He does what He does, and by His grace, in humble obedience, I’ll do whatever He calls me to do. In every triumph there is joy… In every failure there is grace.
A few months ago, my husband was listening to something I had recorded. On my way to meeting a friend for lunch, I had recorded my conversation with God in case it could be helpful to you all. That file is found here. When Bob was listening to it, though, he stopped it for a moment and asked me, “Does anyone know just how hard you work at this?”
I wonder about that. I get asked a lot about if it ever becomes easy. I have to say…well, yes, it becomes easiER at times. Until it becomes hard again. But I have to keep investing time, energy, and effort—I have to keep up the good fight.
That is why I make such a big deal about renewing the mind with truth. Because I simply HAVE to keep working on the way I think.
So, today’s truth card, found in the picture above, is specifically about renewing my mind and why it is worth while to keep on fighting, to keep working at changing the way I think. Â Many of these statements come directly from the work I have done using Barb Raveling’s material at her website. In case you can’t read my writing, here is what it says:
Renewing My Mind:
1. God has called me to a renewing of my mind habit.
2. It is important that I do this every single day.
3. God wants me to develop this habit because it helps me to think differently…to act differently.
4. God is crazy about me. He loves me. I am His precious daughter. Â I am precious in His sight. He calls me.
5. Satan doesn’t want me to renew my mind. Â He knows it will make me a more effective witness. Â He knows I will be more victorious. Â Renewing my mind changes me permanently.
6. To develop this habit, I will have to make sacrifices.
7. If I make this sacrifice, I will be more godly, even 6 months down the road.
8. I can be thankful to God for many things in my situation.
What About You?
Have you been working on changing the way you think? About food? About life? About your body? About a person who challenges you? What are you doing, practically, to think differently? Are you committed to renewing your mind daily about this situation/problem/challenge? If not, can you make a plan today to renew your mind daily? Do you need a truth card about renewing your mind? What can you include on it?
I am preparing to go on a true vacation—one where I won’t be owned by my cell phone or email…even though these are things I love as I get to talk to wonderful people like you all! My husband and I are going to Grand Cayman on Saturday and will be gone through the 22nd of September. Â After I return from that trip, I have a lot more traveling planned before October 17th when I get to stay home for a few weeks.
What that means is this blog will reflect my absence. I will schedule posts, but some will be re-runs, some will be Truth Card suggestions, bible verse devotions, and some will be references to other posts elsewhere that I think would be incredibly valuable and I want to share them with you.
Since I am trying to get a lot done this week, I am beginning now to cut back on time I spend preparing blog posts.
Today’s recommendation is to an online magazine article, “Breaking Up With Your Ideal Self.” It is written by Allie Marie Smith who wrote the Healthy Eating Abundant Living book with Judy Halliday and who runs the Wonderfully Made ministry. I hope you will visit her article and be blessed. Then come back here and give feedback!
What About You?
Can you relate at all to Allie’s admission that her real self and ideal self have been separated by an ever increasing chasm?
How have you responded to this, if so?
Do you let your ideal self rob you of the joy that could be yours today?
What could you start to do today to stop this tendency?
Finally, Allie asked the question:Â How are you going to live your one valuable and irreplaceable life as the real, completely un-ideal you?
Hi. A friend of mine who frequents this blog, sent me an email following my post last week on Truth Cards. I asked her if she would be willing to write a blog post to share her perspective with the readers of this blog. It is incredibly valuable, but one I have little experience with. I hope you will share the link with anyone you know who may need to see this!
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I find truth cards to be extremely helpful. But my truth, as someone who has suffered from years of restrictive food plans of my own making and through various anonymous organizations, seems to be almost the flip side of your truth.
One of your truth cards, which you shared with blog readers on 9/3/13, reads, “Today I will have to give up food I want to eat in order to follow my boundaries.” When I read that I immediately thought, “that is not true for me.” For me, I MUST eat food I want in order to follow my boundaries.Â
I had so many years of telling myself the following lies:
LIE #1. I cannot handle sugar.
LIE #2. If I start eating that binge food, I will never be able to stop.
LIE #3. There is something wrong with me at a cellular level.
LIE #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that I can’t handle them.
LIE #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is one step on the path to sinning.
Maybe these lies don’t ring a bell with you. If they do, if you have been like me and felt like you were evil for wanting things, and then denied yourself those very things in order to be “good,” then you can place yourself firmly in the “restrictor” camp.
I have been underweight, at my ideal weight, and overweight. I don’t think all restrictors are underweight. When I was overweight, I felt like a hypocritical restrictor. But wasn’t it inevitable? As I grew and matured physically and spiritually, I began to recognize the lies inherent in my beliefs. But that recognition was at a somewhat unconscious or perhaps semi-conscious level, and that’s when I transitioned from full-time restriction to binge eating. For me, binge eating is best described as intermittent restriction. It was restriction on the path to healing. But it was a very hard place to be, and it didn’t feel at all transitional. It felt permanent, and in fact it seemed like direct evidence that there was something very wrong with me. I told myself the lies, shouted them to myself sometimes, until eventually the unconscious or semi-conscious part of me said “NO!” and I ate every item of sugar that I could possibly stuff into myself in a short period of time. Bingeing seemed to confirm the lies, “see, I REALLY can’t handle sugar,” and “see, there REALLY is something terribly wrong with me.”
When I was finally able to see that the binges were actually created by the restriction and by my belief in lies, and I started to let myself eat the things I actually wanted, I was amazed and full of awe at the truths that God revealed:
TRUTH #1. I can eat sweets in moderation.
TRUTH #2. I can eat what I truly want and be satisfied.
TRUTH #3. There is nothing wrong with me (other than the fact that I believed a bunch of lies for years and years).
TRUTH #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that either I have overdone it in the sugar department and need some protein to balance out my overindulgence, or more likely, that I have not been eating enough carbohydrates and my body needs some sugar or complex carbohydrates to operate effectively.
TRUTH #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is a way of God communicating with me through my body. I can listen to God, honor my bodily signals, and take loving and nurturing action. Craving sleep, craving a hug, all my other cravings signal real needs that can be simply met. I do not need to be afraid. Cravings can be satisfied.
It all seems like a lot and as a person who is recovering from perfectionism, I tend to want to get it all right and find it overwhelming and want to retreat into a food plan that someone else has constructed because I still sometimes believe the lie that I am incompetent in the food department. When this happens, then I try to center on just one concept: My one goal for eating today is SATISFACTION.
When I am satisfied, I have no desire to binge. When I eat to satisfaction, I forget about food until next time I am hungry. In all those years of restriction, I was almost never satisfied, which is why I thought about food all the time.
Satisfaction is scary. It takes me to the next level. It solves my food problem and opens up new possibilities for me. I have been eating to satisfaction consistently for almost four months now. I have been eating to satisfaction and have been binge free for that entire time. This is coming from someone who five months ago and for the past 10 years before that was bingeing on average at least three times per week, with brief forays of binge free living that lasted at most six weeks at a time. It’s both a miracle and an incredibly simple answer to what seemed like a hugely complex problem.
It takes a lot of trusting in God to eat to satisfaction. But God is faithful, as always. If weight is a concern for you, then take heart. I had been bingeing heavily when I started, so I lost five pounds within the first week or two, of what for me has come to be known as “binge weight.” Over the subsequent few months, I’ve lost another five pounds. I am now at what I would consider an ideal weight for myself, a weight that I have not been at for over 10 years. And I got there by eating to satisfaction? Yup. Praise God!
Post by – Name withheld by request
How About You?
Prayerfully consider if you are someone who needs to write a different kind of truth in your truth cards. What does God’s Spirit testify to your heart? Are you, like my friend, in need of pressing on all the way to satisfaction? Are you restricting your eating in a way that is not trusting the body that God has given you? What is true for you? Are you willing to step out in faith and trust Him today?
Today’s post is another snapshot from my truth card deck.
Have you added to your truth cards just how great 0 to 5 eating is yet?
What truths will you add to your truth cards today about the blessings in 0 to 5 eating?
Take some time to review your truth cards today. Ask the Lord to show you if you BELIEVE what is written on them! If not, what will you need to do in order to truly renew your mind and be transformed?
