In Barb’s study we have had a chance to evaluate and study a bunch of different motivators that cause us to eat–to break our boundaries of 0 to 5 eating.
This is the last of the review, but please know that you can review all the time. I personally believe that I can do her sets of questions again and again and train myself for success as I do! That is one reason why I have her app on my iPad, iPod, and iPhone. I want to have them at the ready access so that “on the fly” I can THINK through the choice to blast through my boundaries.
Not only that, but if I DO break my boundaries, I can do the questions afterward and it can help, too. Just because the “damage is done” doesn’t mean the damage has to be done! 🙂
Social Eating – Life isn’t fair. But that’s actually a good thing! If life were fair, I wouldn’t have the freedom to sit at my computer and read a blog! LOL! I am a sinful person and God is holy God and if life were fair I would be sentenced to death and expelled from His presence forever. Jesus took my penalty…life isn’t fair and I am glad! So, when I think about how friends of mine seem to be able to eat whatever they want, whenever they want, in the amounts they want, I definitely don’t want to coddle the thought “Life’s not fair! How come they get to eat so much and I have to struggle so much with food, eating and my weight!” Instead, once again, God is giving me an opportunity to grow in my character. He can use my struggle to make me stronger in Christ–a more God-honoring person who has a tender heart to His leading!
Is breaking my boundaries just because I am in a social setting really worth it? What are some blessings that have come to you when you have kept your godly boundaries in a social setting even when others have been eating?
Following Boundaries is Hard Eating – This was the study day when Barb socked it to us with the reality that we so very often look for life to be easy. We had to accept the fact that life simply will NOT be easy. If following our boundaries is the only way that we face challenges in our lives, we are living a very blessed life! LOL! So, yes, following boundaries IS hard. Suffering and difficulties are hard, but we know that God forms and shapes our character. This weight struggle has never been merely about losing weight. God is interested in our hearts. If we make it be just about weight loss, we will miss what he wants us to experience. Let’s not do that.
Do you struggle with the thinking that this should be easy? What is the truth about this? How might believing the truth–that life IS hard and God uses hardships to form and shape our character–affect you and your journey to be your God-given size?
Preventative Eating – We don’t like to be uncomfortable. We like to prevent a situation where we know we are likely not to be near food–not to have access to food. Sometimes, this motivates us to break our boundaries and eat to prevent hunger. Or to eat an extra amount of food so we are sustained longer, even though we know we are past 5. Eating to prevent hunger is still eating outside of our boundaries. We reviewed some strategies for coping with this concern and saw that really, it is a rare situation indeed when I will be without food of any kind. Planning my hunger so that I can eat within my boundaries just before a situation when I won’t be able to have a meal is one approach. Another is to carry a few nuts with me. Finally, another option is to be willing to be uncomfortable–to be hungry, knowing I can have a meal after my appointment, seminar, or courtroom appearance is over. God can grow our character!
Have you tried any of the strategies to avert preventative eating? What have you experienced?
So, which of these types of eating–of blowing through your boundaries–provides the greatest challenge to you?
Careless Eating
Justification Eating
Indulgent Eating
Appearance Eating
Entitlement Eating
Failure Eating
Holiday/Vacation Eating
Emotional Eating
Keeping My Boundaries is Hard Eating
Hopeless Eating
Good Food Eating
Bad Scale Eating
Social Eating
Preventative Eating
What have you done to grow? What has God been showing you? Please share your praises or questions or thoughts! Let’s celebrate what God has been doing!
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NOTE: We are starting our new study of the Healthy Eating Abundant Living book on Monday, May 6th. I hope you will join us. If you want to join us, but this is the first you have heard of it, please do a search here at the blog for “Study May 6” and you will get a list of posts that tell about it. Hope you will join us!
I dunno, but this lady looks nutty like I feel today. I saw this picture and there was something about it that screamed “ME!” Can you relate? For me, it is because of…well…have a look at this video (if you dare). It is more of a rant than a teaching video. Truly…it is Heidi letting her hair down if you will. SCARY.
See why I said I am this woman? She looks like she is prepared to travel. Like she is putting a lid on all her emotions…but they are ready to surface at any given moment. I need TRUTH to put my feet on the ground! I need TRUTH to keep me from freaking out when I travel at all, let alone for 16 days. I need TRUTH to keep me from letting my emotions run amok with me!
So, as I prepare this post ahead of time, I am preparing my mind for action–for obedience. Right now, as you read this, I am in New York. If you watched the video, you know how I feel about this! LOL! But I am preparing now (while I am still home writing this) for obedience. I am speaking TRUTH to my spirit daily as I prepare for the trip and the emotions and other stuff that all go with traveling!
Daily – I will wake up each morning to have a quiet time and first on my list after warming to Jesus’ welcome to the day will be to use My Affirmations about 0 to 5 eating list to renew my mind.
Because this list travels with me everywhere via Evernote, I will also pull it out mid-morning (before lunch) and mid-afternoon as a reminder about what is really important to me.
I will remind myself that vacations are a wonderful time to train myself to keep my boundaries no matter what happens in life. Life will be filled with all kinds of challenges and opportunities. I want to train myself for godliness, for obedience and that I can “celebrate” with means other than food and overeating!
I plan to shoot an email to my accountability partner each day that I have internet access.
I will ask God daily to open my eyes to His Wonders so that I might keep track in my gratitude blog. If internet access isn’t available, I will use my 1000 Gifts app on my phone to take pictures of the gifts God brings my way. It is pretty tough to give in to “entitlement” or “justification” eating (what typically travels with me on vacations) if I foster a humble spirit grateful to God for all his gifts and blessings!
What strategies will you plan to use when you next go on vacation or have a holiday? Mother’s Day and Memorial Day are coming up. What challenges might face you and what will you do to plan for victory? How will you make provision for obedience?
Emotional Eating Barb encourages us to make use of Renewing Your Mind Tools that she has at her website so that we can overcome the temptation to eat out of emotions. I have included that link here. Barb has written a full-length workbook called Freedom From Emotional Eating. While it is from a dieting perspective, I found it valuable when I went through it a few years ago. Please, though, if you are struggling with the dieting mentality, don’t run out and order this now. There is time later! But if you feel you have some distance and space from the dieting mentality and feel somewhat confident that your 0 to 5 boundaries won’t be derailed in favor of counting calories or points any time soon, then by all means, order her book!
Many of us are habitual…can I say this…drama queens! Ok, maybe you aren’t, but I know I have been. God is really working on training me to diffuse the drama rather than INFUSE the drama (with extra fuel). It is really helping! The video was just an example of a mild version of how dramatic I can be! Crazy, huh?
The truth is…TRUTH MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD.
At the heart of emotional eating one simple truth diffuses my tendency to go to food:
Food won’t meet the need of my heart.
It just won’t.
What strategies will you use to diffuse emotions that might lead you to look for comfort in food? Please share with us any victories you have experienced recently and/or any questions or even prayer requests you have about an upcoming potential situation.
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Note: This is our final day of the “Ditch Your Scale” Challenge. Some of us bailed early. Some of us bailed mid-way through. Some of us made it all the way through. No matter what, let’s celebrate that GOD IS DOING A NEW THING and prayerfully ask him to show us the importance we place on the bathroom scale. If we are living according to His leading, eating 0 to 5 as he directs us, do we really need to be concerned with our weight? The truth is, we will land on a healthy size and stay there…without worrying about keeping ourselves “honest” with the bathroom scale. Just a thought. Would love to hear from you about this. 🙂
The day begins with hot tea and the warmth of a personal encounter with Jesus. Blessings and truth gush like a fountain off the pages of the Bible and saturate your heart as you are in awe of how intimate and personal His presence is to you. You have carved out this time first thing in the morning and it is richly rewarding!
In fact, you don’t think about food until a gnawing sensation in your stomach overcomes all other thoughts. Wow! I haven’t eaten since last night’s dinner! I am at a zero! Your quiet time was so satisfying and fulfilling and your heart so satiated with the goodness of God that it wasn’t until you were truly hungry that you gave a thought to breakfast. You thankfully relish a modest portion of a thoroughly satisfying meal.
As the day continues, you are prayerful, joy-filled, aware that Jesus walks with you.
Lunch is another “I-can’t-believe-I-am-actually-hungry” eating experience as you enjoy a lunch out with a favorite co-worker. You readily stop eating when you are no longer hungry. This is what it is like to “whether you eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God” as spoken of in 1 Corinthians 10:31!
Upon returning from lunch, however, demanding clients and a disgruntled boss cause the afternoon to lose it’s luster somewhat. By day’s end, the warm glow of the morning’s embers has been pretty well snuffed out. Tired, you saunter to your car considering the late afternoon commute. Your heart falls–overwhelmed–at what you know waits for you at home. Barring a miracle, the kids will be squabbling and messes will be everywhere. By the time you emerge through the thick traffic–made worse by a fender-bender in the slow lane–you are famished…you deserve some joy in your life. You enter the house and, sure enough, no one else thought to clean up the sink which now demands attention before you can even think about dinner preparation. Why is this always left to me?
You plug in the electric skillet with ingredients of what will not-soon-enough be a delicious meal and, as you reach for the cumin in the cupboard, the chocolate chips sitting right next to the spice rack grab you by the arm and threaten that you had better eat them! Ha! Not really, but you would think so! Before you give it any thought, let alone a prayer, you dive in. You finish your dinner preparation as you continue to revisit the bag of chocolate chips and by the time dinner is ready, you have inhaled enough chocolate chips to populate two batches of cookies. You aren’t hungry for dinner but feel the need to eat to “balance your blood sugar” since you know you will crash and burn later when you do get hungry after eating so much sugar. Besides, you don’t want the family to ask why you aren’t eating. That would be even worse than having eaten the chocolate chips!
By the time you go to bed, you are miserable…not just from having overeaten, but from the overwhelming sense of “failure.” Why can’t I ever have ONE good day of eating 0 to 5 all day long? The club of condemnation comes out and you start beating yourself up.
Can you relate to this scenario or one sort of like it? Are you frustrated that you can begin the day so well, but by the day’s end you have steamrollered right over your 0 to 5 eating boundaries?
What can you do when this happens?
In my personal experience and through the one-on-one coaching I have been doing for the past few months, I have seen this scenario or one like it play out numerous times. What we choose to do with our “failure” determines how “successful” we will be with our Thin Within program and the release of weight we hope to experience.
It isn’t the slip up that will keep us from releasing weight–not usually. It is allowing a mis-step to define what the next meal will be like, what the next hour will look like, what the next day, week, and month will look like.
This is why we have to, have to, haveto be willing to go from merely “observing” (and condemning) our behavior to planning a correction immediately. That way, the next time–and there WILL be a next time–we will have a plan of action to ensure success! We can take the proverbial bull by the horns and bring him down!
What do I mean by observation and correction? For those of you new or not yet experienced with the Thin Within book or workbook, this is a tool we use to help us see where we strayed from behavior and thoughts that didn’t correspond or support our godly goals. This is the “easy” part. It is the part that says, “I ate all those chocolate chips and then ate dinner when I wasn’t hungry and now I am stuffed!” In Thin Within, though, we try to observe dispassionately. We look at what happened and declare what action or thought was the culprit that derailed our godly intentions. We don’t judge. We don’t pull out the club of condemnation. This is the FIRST thing we do. You can add more power to this step by confessing it to the Lord in prayer.
Secondly, we want to plan a “correction”–what will we do differently the next time we are in the exact–or similar–situation? This is, simply, repentance. Choosing and planning a new behavior for the next time this situation arises. In our example, I would want to make a plan for when I am tired, frustrated, famished, and get little (if any) help at home after a long day. What could I *do* to change things around so that once I land at home the chocolate chips don’t assault me out of the blue? One suggestion for the woman in our example is that she could use her CD/mp3 player for the drive home to refocus her thoughts so that the commute time is spent renewing her mind about the rest of the day. Praise music can make a huge difference! Alternatively, downloading and using the audio files that I have made available to you might be helpful for the stressful commute. You can download the bible as mp3 or iTunes files, too! The journey home from work (or wherever) can actually become a sanctified “Holy of Holies” of sorts–land that you capture for the Lord. And if, when you do finally get home, you are famished you can have a prepared-in-advance baggie with a small snack designed for just such an occasion–to shave the 0 off just a tad. Like three Ritz crackers or one Oreo cookie–enough to get you through the dinner preparation without inhaling the chocolate chips!
Third thing you want to do after you have messed up is REJOICE! What? Did she actually say “Rejoice!”? Yes! You see, you are sensitive to the Lord and to the boundaries he has asked you to live within. That is why you have an awareness of the situation as a “Mess Up!” It means that you are tender-hearted. You haven’t become calloused to sin or to living outside of boundaries. It is a wonderful thing to realize! So, thank the Lord that he has given you a heart to obey him and that while you aren’t doing it “perfectly,” you are growing in godliness with each day. THIS time is different than any that may have come before as you are learning to do the struggle well.
Bringing it home:
Step 1: Observation. Consider the last 3 “mess ups” you have experienced. What did you think or do that worked against your godly goals?
Step 2: Correction. What will you do to structure life for success so that the next time you are in a similar situation you maintain your commitment to your boundaries?
Step 3: REJOICE! Can you thank God right now that he has given you a heart tender to him? You are here reading about this, aren’t you? That says a lot! LOL! 😀
Share your three steps below for one of your “Mess Ups.” You might give others that read your ideas some strategies for dealing with their own struggles! Let’s win some for the LORD!
Welcome to our final week of studying through Barb Raveling’s Weight Loss Bible Study. We have plans to revisit this material in the future–for sure!
This week, we will look at the pressure we feel in social settings. (If you subscribe via email, you may need to come to the blog site to view the video)
This week, please complete Barb’s Day 15 of her study, “Social Eating.” You can find those questions at this link here.
Additionally, I will be adding another study/question set for you to do on “Preventative Eating.” So you will still have two days worth of material to get through. I love that we have been taking our time with this material, wading through it slowly. Before we begin our next study, there is time to complete any of that material you may not have had time for or to review the material that God brought home to your heart. We will do that next week, in fact.
Please keep renewing your mind about your renewing of the mind goal or the adjusted renewing of the mind goal that you have established. How has that gone for you? I found that I “forgot” to include that in my routine and so what a surprise! I ended up with my resolve diminishing and then it was easier for me to justify eating outside of my boundaries!
Today, I am recommitting to renewing my mind! Will you join me?
Do you have any potential social situations this week that you may need to make a plan for? What plan might work for you to emerge victorious?
“Yummy Food” or “Good Food” eating is what we do when the food happens to be available and we just happen to decide to eat it. Can you relate? It is typically, a grab-and-go sort of experience…not at all a thoughtful one!
For instance, you are making dinner and simply must taste the goods as you do so. A taste here, a taste there and you discover when all is ready that you are not hungry for dinner when it is time to sit down with the family! BOO!
One solution to this sort of “Yummy Food Eating” is to chew gum while you are cooking/preparing food. It is typically a bit off-putting to taste something else while the gum is in your mouth! At the very least, it can help you to realize that you are being more intentional about the tasting than you thought. When I discover that my “accidental” bites aren’t quite so “accidental,” I know it is time to pray for a willing heart and renew my mind about my boundaries!
Another example of a “Yummy Food Eating” temptation is Costco and Sam’s club (or other membership club). Food samples that are out everywhere no matter which time of the day you choose to shop there. This may sound silly, but if you know you love the samples, you can actually plan to be hungry during your shopping trip at Sam’s or Costco. That way, you can enjoy the samples (though you might be “breaking” your secondary boundaries, so I recommend being intentional about focusing on the food since you will likely NOT be sitting down!) and it won’t break your boundaries. It can actually be your meal! If you end up not hungry and find yourself at one of those stores, then I recommend chewing gum as you shop, too. Again, it isn’t likely you will “accidentally” eat the samples if you are chewing gum.
A third place we may give in to “Yummy Food Eating” is at bible studies or fellowship groups. Again, you can plan your hunger (remember, this takes practice, so extend grace to yourself as you work on this!) or establish a secondary boundary, such as staying out of the kitchen. Again, if those options don’t work for you, chewing sugarless gum can.
It may sound like I chew a lot of gum! To be honest, I hate chewing gum, and you may as well. It is worth it while we are training ourselves to be more aware, though. It IS temporary! You won’t feel like you always have to do this. But for now, as you are realizing the moments of your life when you unconsciously may have had tastes of food that resulted in a “mess up,” it may do the trick.
Some of you work in an office where snacks and temptations abound literally all day long. You can “strike early” by taking samples of the foods in the office staff room and putting them in your own container in the fridge. Then you can have them when you are hungry! You can enjoy the items that other people brought without breaking your boundaries.
Plan ahead. Think through the day. Are there any potential opportunities for “Yummy Food Eating” to come calling? What will you do to prepare for it?
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CONTEST WINNER: I will make that announcement later tonight. I hope you will check back!
Day 2 of the “Ditch Your Scale” Challenge: How is it going? Did you stay off the scale today? Did you need to renew your mind about it at all? Are you off to a good start today? What thoughts have you had about this as you have given this to the Lord? 🙂
