The idea for this three day challenge was inspired by something that my friend, Barb Raveling, said at her blog on her “Careless Eating” page. She issues a challenge there about staying within our boundaries for just three days. Can we do it? I know we can.
Here is what I propose:
1. Eat only when at a 0 – physical hunger
2. Stop when you are at a 5 or sooner.
3. Drink sweetened beverages only with a meal…when you are at a 0. For instance, if you drink a Chai Tea Latte in the morning on your way to work, can you plan it so that you have it when you are at a 0? Or, wait until you are at a 0 and enjoy the beverage with your breakfast?
4. Daily, select from the following to keep your focus on the Lord and exalting him: Add to your God List, have a Praise Fest, add to a Gratitude Journal. I recommend that whatever you do, do it OUT LOUD. There is something powerful about writing it, seeing it, speaking it, and hearing it as you speak it.
If you want to keep yourself accountable for each hour of the 3 – Day Challenge, you can use this pdf file: Fire the Desire 3 Day Challenge. It is a pdf that looks a bit like this:
Please PRAY about doing this! If God says YES, then let’s start tomorrow…well, officially tonight at midnight. If you feel like now may not be the time, be sure it is the leading of the Holy Spirit and not just a preference of the flesh. 😉
How About You?
So are you going to give this a shot? What questions or concerns do you have as you consider this?
This week we are investigating two things that spur us to eat outside of our primary boundary of physical hunger and satisfaction. One is our response to our weight on the bathroom scale…(I really hope you aren’t still hopping on your scale, though!) As we begin this week, I urge you to remember that your ideal size is whatever you land on when you faithfully eat according to the God given parameter of physical hunger and satisfaction. You don’t ever need to step on a scale again! So, if you haven’t yet, why not give your scale to someone else to keep for you? 🙂
Additionally, we will look at how often we can wait for physical hunger before eating. We may even be growing in our willingness and ability to process our emotions with the Lord instead of running to food instantly each time. But when we DO sit down to feed our “0” , we may zip on past our comfortable “5” or place of physical satisfaction. Let’s see what we can learn to help us stop it!
If we can take care of these two things, practically speaking, we will eliminate a bunch of our overeating!
I have broken this week’s assignments down again in the hopes that it will be helpful for you.
Monday
Visit Barb’s page: Bad Scale Eating at this link. She points out that we typically want to lose weight in a way that is fast, easy and fun and that when we have been dying to self for 8 weeks, it really is hard to get on the scale and see that we haven’t lost weight…but maybe we have even gained!
To be honest, with the Thin Within approach to landing on your God-given size, it often happens that way (sorry to break it to you now…). People may gain weight when they start off! Sometimes this happens at the beginning before the weight starts coming off.
That isn’t to say you should ignore that fact, shrug your shoulders, and just accept it. NOPE! Instead, re-evaluate and see what it is that needs to be tweaked. Instead of focusing on the man-made bathroom scale, how about focusing on the God-given HUNGER scale–that true physical “empty” or what we call “0” and that true physical SATISFIED or what Thin Within calls a “5?”
Chances are, if you aren’t feeling your clothes loosening up, you may be either deceiving yourself about eating between 0 and 5 or you may be drinking a lot of sweetened beverages throughout the day (stop it!–said with love!), or is it possible you are already at the size God intends for you?
Which do you think it is?
Barb has a section in her post about the scale called unrealistic expectations. She hits the nail on the head! We often have unrealistic expectations, but, again, I want to urge you to THROW OUT YOUR BATHROOM SCALE or, at the very least, have a friend take it and hide it. We can get so focused on it that we miss the thing that God IS doing and he promises that HE IS DOING A NEW THING!
Wouldn’t it be a “new thing” if we stopped weighing ourselves?At least it would be for many of us. Give it a try and after the typical week or so of panic, you will likely settle in to experiencing the peace and freedom that comes from refusing to let a man-made hunk of metal, plastic, springs, etc., arbitrarily assign a number to your size.
In Barb’s section called Unrealistic Expectations, can you identify with either option #1 or option #2? Which?
So how about doing what she suggests! In order to keep following your boundaries with a good attitude, take some time to renew your mind about the scale.
What other unrealistic expectations do you have? Can you find any truths in God’s Word that speak to this? Jot them down or share them with us here.
NOTE: Tomorrow, I will be posting about a “Fire the Desire: 3 Day Challenge.” We can do just about anything for three days. You may want to plan now for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — for joining the Fire the Desire 3 Day Challenge!
Tuesday
Barb includes an “Exercise for Journal” section at her Bad Scale Eating page(this is the same page as the one I had you visit yesterday). This is an OUTSTANDING exercise for us to do. Note her examples. (Again, please note that Barb uses dieting “lingo,” but you can trade the words and phrases out for ones that fit Thin Within and 0 to 5 eating.)
If you do this exercise, share with us here what the truths are that replaced any of the lies that you struggle(d) with!
Read today’s blog post about the “Fire the Desire 3 Day Challenge.” Are you going to give it a try? Do you have an accountability partner? If you haven’t connected with your accountability partner in a while, you may want to! Will you check in here? Tell us your intention if you plan to do the Challenge!
If you are like most of us, you can wait for 0 most of the time before eating, but stopping at 5 (or before) is another story altogether! What do you think? Do you find yourself continuing to eat past that place of pleasant satisfaction just because the food available is so YUMMY? Sometimes the food just is there and tastes so good that we want to keep on eating it.
Do Barb’s More is Better bible study. Summarize what God shows you.
Are there any truths you can add to your truth cards as a result of going through these two studies of Barb’s?
Barb asks “Do you need to set any secondary boundaries to protect yourself from good food eating? If so, what boundaries could you make?” As you consider this question, we rejoice hat we don’t need to have ANY food be off limits completely, but what about staying within the boundaries of 0 and 5? How can you set yourself up for success with your eating when Good Food abounds and you waited until 0? How can you plan ahead to help you succeed?
Are you joining in the Fire the Desire 3 – Day Challenge? If not, why not? 🙂 Today is Day 1! (You can start it any time, actually, but why not today?)
Thursday
Complete the Good Food Eating section included in Barb’s blog post(again, this is the same post as yesterday’s).
What insights come to you as a result of going through this material?
How are you doing on the Fire the Desire 3 – Day Challenge?
Friday
This is the last day of the Fire the Desire 3 – Day Challenge. How is it going? Stay off the scale in keeping with this week’s study. Truth journal about the scale if it will help. What about stopping at 5? Are you recognizing a 5 as it approaches? Are you eating slowly enough so that you can stop after a reasonable amount of food? What plan can you have to be proactive?
Extra Credit: 🙂 Weekends are tough for many of us. Sometimes it is because weekends signal us to let up our boundaries. Our routines are typically set aside. Can you create a plan for this weekend–a routine for yourself, some way to be proactive about experiencing success? Even if you aren’t doing the 3-day challenge, I hope you will include adding to your God List, having a Praise Fest, and adding to your Gratitudes Journal this weekend! I really believe that we will not stay in rebellion when we exalt God.
Image Source: iStockPhoto Don’tcha Just Love a Happy Eater? 🙂
The pig has nothing to do with this blog post except he made me smile. 🙂
Which is saying something. You see…I am in the middle of a tantrum.
I know. I am not supposed to have those, right?
Well, I am. So there.
Why, you may wonder? Why am I pitching a major fit? Melting down? Having a conniption?
The answer–if anything I ever teach is true–is probably wrapped up in something ridiculous like “I believe a LIE” or a whole BOATLOAD of lies. Truly, the heart of rebellion often is found in the littlest seed of a lie that was coddled, nurtured and given a chance to grow and take over.
I hate even typing those words right now because I guess that next to that little seed of a lie (lies) is the fact that I WANT to get strength from my anger, frustration…I want to OVERINDULGE in resentment and bitterness.
You see, God seems to be saying NO to me so often about all manner of things…BIG things…things that I thought were his will for my life… In fact, things that I could make a great case from God’s Word about! I wouldn’t have to take anything out of context!
And since HE is saying NO to me in BIG ways, I just don’t want to say no to me.
So, if I want to make myself feel better by eating, I don’t want to say NO to me about it.
If I want to eat “just because,” then that is a good enough reason for me as far as I am concerned.
I sure hope you can’t relate.
Dismantling The Lies
1. Buried in my attitude is the belief that life should be peaceful, predictable, and go the way I think it should go.
2. Buried in my attitude is a judgment of God–I have found him wanting. (Really?)
3. Buried in my attitude is short-sighted idiocy if I think that there will be no consequences to making choices about my eating ignoring God-given boundaries.
4. Buried in my attitude is a belief that eating whatever I want whenever I want will somehow offset my disappointment about other things in my life…that eating will make me happy in proportion to the heartache and frustration I feel. Or that eating that way will “get God back” or “change his mind.”
What Now?
This summer we have been studying recognizing the lies we believe and replacing them with truth.
So, let’s do look at the lies, replace them with truth, and see if we can come out the other side and call it a VICTORY.
1. The truth is that life isn’t peaceful, predictable and it often won’t go the way I think it should go. I believe this is why the bible tells me again and again things like “Set your minds on things above where Christ is seated…when Christ, who is your life, appears, you will also appear with him in glory,” “fix your eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, for what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal,” “these light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all,” fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of your faith who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross and scorned its shame.” All of these things tell me that if I focus on what I see–the heartache and pain and my interpretation of God’s Divine “NO!”–I am missing it. What is unseen is something far greater than unrestrained gluttonous indulgence in favorite foods could ever give me and far outweighs the challenges I face.
Is this true for you, too?
2. Who am I to judge God? Do I really want to “go there?” His ways are NOT my ways and while I still don’t understand how what is happening could possibly be his will, it apparently is. He has ordained it for his purposes. Maybe, as much as I don’t like it, it’s like John Piper says: God so values our wholehearted faith that he will, graciously, take away everything else in the world that we might be tempted to rely on — even life itself. His aim is that we grow deeper and stronger in our confidence that he himself will be all we need.
Is this true for you, too?
3. My choices to eat outside of boundaries God has set for me have plenty of repercussions! I have been in that place before…where I kept on eating…I got physically unhealthier, loathed myself, was emotionally and spiritually numb (which isn’t a good thing, even though being emotionally numb may sound appealing right now). It is time to STOP IT THIS INSTANT!!!
Is this true for you, too?
4. The truth is eating whatever I want whenever I want will NOT offset my disappointment about other things in my life… eating will NOT make me happy in proportion to the heartache and frustration I feel. Not only that, but the situation that causes me such horrible disappointment, grief, frustration and heartache WILL NOT CHANGE FOR THE BETTER and I will go through it not being present to God and what HE wants to accomplish in me. It will be doubly AWFUL (if that is possible).
Is this true for you, too?
Do you have anything you are facing that is causing you to be frustrated, angry, to have a temper tantrum with God over your eating? What lies are at the heart of this? What truths ca you replace the lies with?
Here we are again. At the office party or in the kitchen after bible study and NUTS if the food isn’t just TOO tantalizing. It seems to have a magnetic pull on us.
We tell ourselves NO… we WON’T give in THIS time, but nevertheless before we know it we are laughing with the others, enjoying “fellowship” while holding (and eating from) a large plate of food. And it isn’t about hunger. It is, quite simply, about I WANT IT AND I WILL EAT IT BECAUSE I WANT IT. We might even have the thought that “It isn’t fair that everyone else should get to eat and just because I am not hungry, I don’t get to…”
This week we turn our attention to two related types of eating, “Indulgent Eating” and “Social Eating.” Often, we just don’t feel like following our boundaries. Often, it may be because we are in a social situation and everyone else is laughing, having fun, so it is “only fair” that we should get to as well. Barb’s studies this week bring some very important thoughts to the forefront.
I am breaking this week’s assignment down into 5 mini-assignments. Of course, you can do it any way you choose. 🙂
2. Select at least 3 statements from the first section under “This is what I learned” to add to your truth cards. Even better if you add all 5! Share with us which three you added. If you haven’t started a deck of truth cards yet, you can see a post about it here. Evaluate if this might be a tool that could be used by God to bring victory at a level you haven’t previously known. Is it worth it to try something new?
3. Use Barb’s journaling questions about Indulgent Eating to write statements that you can add to your truth cards. Here is an example:
The first journaling question, I use to frame my answer and to develop a statement that can go in my truth cards. Barb asks, “If you were to eat ‘what you want, when you want’ 100% of the time, how much do you think you’d weigh?”
My response:
“If I were to eat what I want when I want (in the quantities I want) 100% of the time, I would be at least 100 pounds overweight. I have been there before and I could get there easily again.”
Continue to use Barb’s Indulgent Eating material to frame statements for your truth cards. Share with us in the comments what you added to your truth cards today.
Tuesday:
Complete the rest of the journaling questions, including looking up the Scriptures that Barb supplied. Which verse means the most to you or did God use to encourage or challenge you? Share with us.
Answer Barb’s question: Is your life better or worse with boundaries?
What percentage of the time do you feel like you live as if you don’t have boundaries? Why do you think this is the case?
Complete Barb’s Indulgence Eating questions. Again, use any of your answers that fit to create new truth cards. Share here any truths that you feel led to share so that others can be encouraged as well.
Respond to Barb’s question: Do you think your best chance for happiness is to do what you want when you want? Why or why not?
Wednesday
Visit Barb’s social eating bible study page found here. Please don’t be put off by the “salad vs pizza” dieting scenario. Instead, imagine the more likely situation for you, as a Thin Within participant, to be in a situation where everyone else at a party or get-together is eating four pieces of pizza when you either aren’t at a “0” yet and have to wait to eat or you are at a “0” but it takes only one piece of pizza to get to a “5.” The rest of the scenario she paints for us plays out. The situation is totally ripe for overindulging. You finally get this feeling of being “ripped off” and give in and eat along with and as much as everyone else.
What is the lie that Barb says is present in the back of our minds?
What is true about the notion that “Life should be fair”?
Respond to Barb’s discussion of “The Fairness Line.” What do you think about what she says?
Thursday
I want to join Barb in encouraging you to recognize the lies that our society feeds us. The lie that “Life should be fair” saturates everything! What are ways that you know you have bought this lie? Can you persevere in renewing your mind with truth about this today? This week? How will you do this?
How are things going on your renewing of the mind plan? Maybe it’s time to recommit to your plan established in week 2! If you don’t have an accountability partner yet, please consider getting one today by visiting the Accountability Page and posting there. If you have had a partner, but haven’t been in touch, consider getting in touch with your partner and evaluating what you will do going forward or dissolve your partnership and let one another loose to find another partner.
Complete Barb’s “Social Eating Bible Study” section at the bottom of the page.
Friday
At the end of the Social Eating Bible Study, Barb asks: Think of an upcoming social gathering where you’ll have to control the way you eat if you want to follow your boundaries. If life is about indulging your desires, will you have much to be thankful for in that situation? Explain.
If life is about loving God and others, will you have much to be thankful for in that situation? Why or why not? Explain.
What is God laying on your heart today about Indulgent and Social eating? Are you happier when you live by design or desire?
Follow Up Comments
I know that the summer is filled with opportunities to enjoy friends, family, times in the sun, lots of fun! You can recommit to spending 15 minutes a day allowing God to change your thinking–even now in the middle of the summer. What do you think? I know lots of us started this study filled with promises to ourselves. If your heart is kindled to want to let the fire flare up again, why not just dive back in this week–today, even? There’s no need to throw in the towel until a new study starts. Don’t buy Satan’s big lie!
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.
– Psalm 150:6 NIV
Have you ever known someone who, no matter what wonderful things were going on, they found the dark clouds amidst all the silver linings of life? A”Christian Eeyore” has that “There’s not a cloud in the sky, but that’s because a terrible storm is brewing and it is sure to take us by surprise” approach to life. You know the type, right? I hope you aren’t that type, though!
This week, we are going to choose NOT to be like that. We are going to CELEBRATE and count the many ways that God has been at work in our lives.
The nature of this journey we are on, requires that we prayerfully scrutinize our choices. We “observe and correct” and find there is SO much to “correct.” We tell ourselves repeatedly how we could/should have done this or that better. I don’t know about you, but after I have just inhaled an extra piece of pizza beyond satisfied, I can “overlook” the previous three days of wonderful choices, honoring God, walking with him, and submitting to his leadership!
We have been doing some HARD work this summer! Rather than weighing our bodies and comparing notes and results, let’s invite God to weigh our hearts right now. NOT our bodies. See below to see what I mean:
Heart Scale
All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart.
– Proverbs 21:2
If God were to weigh your heart, where would it land in the above illustration?
Here is a spiel about what I want us to do this week! 🙂
2.) Create a list of “land” you have captured for Christ on this journey this summer so far!
For instance:
I said no to a second helping last night at dinner
I have been drinking more water and less sweetened tea/coffee
I have been renewing my mind frequently and have noticed that I have begun to think God’s thoughts about myself, food, and God–to actually believe them!
I have been adding to my truth cards each week.
I have an accountability partner.
I have had 3 nights of successfully eating within my boundaries from dinner preparation time until bed time!
etc.
Your turn!
3.) If you have noticed that you tend to break your boundaries under certain circumstances, prayerfully make a plan for how to take that situation captive *before* it happens next time.
4.) Which of the three challenge levels mentioned by Barb in her evaluation post are you going to try out? Pick one and get an accountability partner if you haven’t yet. What can you do to structure your life to meet this challenge with victory? Make a plan!
5.) Consider having a gratitude blog or gratitude journal, specifically for thanking God for his gifts. Try these spots on the web:
6.) PLEASE POST HERE! What changes are you seeing in your life? Please praise our God and tell of all his wonderful deeds! Every continent (except Antarctica) has been represented by visitors to this website. So, if we are supposed to “declare among the nations” the things God has done for us, you can do so here and consider that one way of telling “The World” about what God has been doing! In fact, while I am asking for the moon :-), I would love you go to the Testimonials page and share a testimony there for everyone to see who lands at that page! Come on! 🙂
7.) Some sad news is that our trial membership at GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar has come to an end. I had *thought* that it was only $50 to continue, but it is $100! 🙁 I just can’t swing that. So, sadly, we won’t be having an online class this week unless I find a host that is cheaper. 🙁
8.) Will you pray for people to be encouraged through this ministry? I would love for visitors to see the many ways you see God at work in your life this summer! Thanks so much.
