Hi, everyone. I know many of you may have gotten the link for the study starting tomorrow from Barb Raveling’s blog.
That said, I don’t want anyone to be surprised…I use a non-diet approach. Specifically, I use Thin Within. I was the collaborator with the Hallidays for the book and drafted the first edition of the workbook back in 2001. I am pretty entrenched in the material! 🙂 And happy to be! I won’t be talking about dieting during our study. Or at least I would rather not. 🙂
My (very lengthy-desperately-needing-to-be-edited) testimony is here. I hate to ask you to read the entire thing, but it might help to let you know where I am coming from if you don’t already know.
I am looking forward to getting started with you tomorrow.
Some of you are also wondering how this will work. The majority of the studying will be done by YOU! 🙂 You can get out of this study as much as you like, depending on how much time you put into it between Mondays.
Each Monday, I will post a blog post that recaps the previous assignment and/or what is to come. Some of these may include video. Some may not.
Monday’s post will typically include an assignment. Pace yourself for the week. Some of it may need to be done as soon as possible. Do as much (or as little) of this assignment as you would like, but I challenge you to dive in deep…go for all you are worth in this! Of course we want the easy fix, but we know that there is no easy fix. We have all lost weight before, but we know that there is more to this. This study will get us digging for the more.
You will be challenged to work hard. Not at losing weight, but on thinking differently. The internal work you will be encouraged to do, may be challenging! Plan now how you will handle the desire to quit or to ignore this much needed component of our study.
Between Mondays during the week , I plan to have other content posted for you. Some of it will be related to a topic that I have stumbled upon during the study. Some of it may be more supplementary to the study. Either way, it will be designed to help you as you continue this journey! I hope you will stop by during the week. Follow the blog or subscribe if you want to be notified when new content is posted.
Remember that this study will focus us more than anything on Renewing Our Minds!This is what will make the HUGE difference. We are going to use Barb’s approach of renewing the mind and apply it to our Thin Within journeys. I believe that these strategies (Barb’s renewing of the mind and Thin Within’s non-diet approach) are HUGELY compatible!
As we prepare for launch tomorrow, just a couple of things I would love for you to do:
…pray for me and for yourself and others studying. Pray that our eyes would be open and for clarity. Pray for unreserved devotion. Pray that we will be “sold out” to the Lord and resign our eating to Him, forsaking an attitude of entitlement! Pray for open hearts and open eyes. He is faithful to answer that prayer.
…ask questions…here now as well as through our study. The more questions you ask, the more clear things will become. Chances are that if you have a question, someone else has that same question, too. If you ask it, others benefit as well.
What do you hope to experience through this study? 🙂 What questions do you have even now?
Mark your calendars for Mondays, starting one week from today–March 4th–for our study of Barb Raveling’s Weight Loss Bible Study. We will study putting a Thin Within Spin on the material.
Before we begin, I wanted to share with you some thoughts I have at the outset.
First, if you know me at all, you know that I don’t prefer focusing on weight loss. And that is one of the things I love about Barb–neither does she. Even though this study is called “Weight Loss Bible Study,” she focuses our attention on renewing our minds so that the transformation we desire physically is birthed by a deeper transformation inwardly. This is the only way to experience permanent change. It is only fair to warn you this requires a lot of work. You likely will be pushed out of your comfort zone. You may want to decide now what you will do when you are tempted to quit!
Secondly, Barb *does* use the word “diet”…be forewarned! So, when you see the word DIET or DIETING in Barb’s material during our study, please replace it in your thinking with “0 to 5 Eating” instead. Barb does a great job of speaking of boundaries. For those on diets, this may include points or calories or whatever else. For us, our primary boundary is to eat between 0 (physical hunger) and 5 (physical satisfaction). Please don’t let the use of the term “diet” throw you! God can use this material in our lives!
Thirdly, logistically, it can be easiest to work through the material if you print it out or have it on your own computer. I like to copy and paste Barb’s material into a Word document so I can interact with the material directly. This way, her blog posts become a journal for me that I save on my laptop. I can refer to it later or finish the study at a later time. If you don’t want to do that, you can print them out and/or journal in a notebook just as effectively.
What I do *not* recommend is to just do it in your head! 🙂 We tend to get lazy if we try that approach.
Given how much energy and effort and practice we have put into eating more than we need, causing us to carry extra weight, we can certainly spend time renewing our mind, thinking differently, by doing bible study. 🙂
So, what are your hopes, concerns, questions before we launch into this study?
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy,
to offer your bodies as living sacrifices,
holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—
his good, pleasing and perfect will.
~Romans 12:1-2
Join me starting on Mondays for a “Weight Loss Bible Study” written by my friend, Barb Raveling at her blog. I love her stuff because it deals with the way we think. We want to CHANGE the way we think so that we change the way we interact with food permanently. God calls us to allow Him to renew our minds.
We will start with the first installment of her study on Monday, March 4 (or that is the plan), but don’t fear if you start late. ANYtime is better than never! 🙂
Of course, you don’t have to participate here. You could, instead, go directly to Barb’s website and respond in her comments section.
Barb’s material is awesome and definitely applicable in many respects to our Thin Within journeys, but please be aware that she isn’t a Thin Within participant. So, there are a few things in her study that I will throw a “Thin Within Spin” on! LOL! I hope you will join me here and DIALOG with me about it. In fact, it is time for a new contest! I haven’t had one in a couple of years.
For the duration of our study, any time you post a comment, I will put your name in a drawing. So if you comment one time, your name goes into the drawing one time. If you comment five times, your name will go in five times.
I will be giving away two Thin Within books and two of the newest release from the Hallidays – Hunger Within (which is an updated version of Silent Hunger, Get Thin Stay Thin, and Thin Again). I am not sure how long it will take us to work our way through the material, so we will go from March 4th possibly into May, doing her questions from her study on Mondays. This is a slow pace, and it is possible I will adjust that, but for now, that is the plan.
If you want to get a head start, go ahead and head over to Barb’s blog and begin with this page.
Have a look and then let me know…are you in? If you comment here, your name goes into the drawing for one of the free books!
In addition, to renew your mind, I highly recommend Barb Raveling’s I Deserve a Donut app for iPad. My review on it can be found here.
Above all the tools and tricks, I encourage everyone who is at this place…rest, be still, let go of the weight focus. Fix your mind instead on the author and perfector of your faith. He is worth it. This is about so much more than body, weight, and food.
Jesus didn’t die so we would be thin. He died for us so that we might be HIS. Let’s not forget that.
Obsessed with lights, reflections, and shadows, my golden retriever, Daisy, slams herself into the wall as I open the back door. The sun has just risen above the hill in the distance and Daisy is convinced that the prey animals–squirrels, perhaps–scamper a mass exodus on the facing wall, reflections moving in synchronization with the door. She earnestly assaults the wall to stop the invasion.
Never deterred by the obvious pointlessness of her behavior, the beliefs she possesses drive her to pursue the illusive prey.
Sometimes, she tries to “control” her urges. Body still…alert, watching, quivering…yet seemingly resolved to “leave it,” when, suddenly, she flings herself into the wall yet again, overcome by the urge that has ruled her for her seven years of life. Daisy has never successfully captured a reflection. Why she keeps at this behavior, one can only guess.
I wish I could explain that reflections have no substance and thinking differently is necessary in order to be victorious over the impulses she faces. I would expose the fact that believing the lies keeps her stuck in destructive and futile behavior.
Can you identify with Daisy? Do you keep slamming into a wall but feel like you accomplish nothing?
I wonder if you, like Daisy, might benefit from thinking differently.
My focus in the pages I have written here since 2006 has clearly been on the “success” that you will experience (losing weight) if you eat when you are hungry and stop when you are no longer hungry. Whether implied or stated explicitly, I have asserted that you will experience the physical transformation seen in my pictures (down the sidebar and elsewhere on this site)–that you will “release” all your extra weight and keep most, if not all, of it off your body permanently. That if you eat “0 to 5” and go to God for all the other reasons you are tempted to eat, you will be transformed!
This IS true, but this is only PART of the truth! Believing that 0 to 5 eating will physically transform you without incorporating the whole picture can actually perpetuate discouragement and, even, captivity. Without the context of a renewed mind, changed thinking, and new beliefs, 0 to 5 eating is just another diet.
I know some of you are dealing with this. You have done everything. You feel like Thin Within is a last hope. And some of you have tried TW, “released” weight, regained it, tried it again, lost weight, gained it again…and you find you are on another figurative treadmill…only now feeling more hopeless than before. I really believe this is the same behavior that Daisy’s reflection madness illustrates for us. We could restrain her externally, but true lasting change has to come from some place deeper. Somehow, she needs a new belief about reflections on the wall. Perhaps we need new beliefs about food, our bodies, about weight and about God!
We need to stop slamming into walls chasing something illusive! Maybe what we keep chasing is serving only to distract us from what is really worthy of pursuit.
I propose that we turn a new direction. I hope you will go with me down this new road. Instead of chasing lights on the wall, I want to chase hard after God. I want to pursue a transformed heart and a renewed mind. I don’t want to settle for a change in my body–I don’t want YOU to settle for that! Or for the promise that we think having a smaller body will offer us when SO MUCH MORE is offered by our great and generous God who lavishes grace and mercy on us so freely!
I want nothing less than God very God, breathing his life into me and through me. I want to sense his presence so powerfully, that it is palpable. I want to invite him to expose lies that I believe in a new way…not just if the truth feels better than the lie I have believed. Sometimes the lie feels good, even more “truthful” than the truth! That is why we grab at it. It is familiar. But nevertheless a lie.
I want to rebuke any lies that somehow whisper comfort and solace to me when I desperately long for it and there seems to be none forth coming. I want to be willing to stand cold, alone, bare before my God and trust him that if I am exposed and left standing it is for very good and perfect reasons.
Let’s stop slamming into the walls, led astray by what we are so convinced is true. Let’s take time to pause and consider together. Over the next weeks and months, I hope to do that here. And you are invited to join me.
Was there anything that I shared in this blog post that resonated or rang true for you? Won’t you share with me what that was/is?
