This week, we deal with two really important challenges to our 0 to 5 eating boundaries:
“Yummy Food Eating” – when the food is there and it is “yummy” and we want it, so there! (Yep, it really is that simple sometimes!)
and
“Bad Scale Eating” – when I get on the bathroom scale and am depressed that I didn’t get away with eating outside of my boundaries or jubilant that I did or am disappointed by unrealized expectations and want to eat to celebrate or medicate (depending).
Can you relate to either of these causes for eating?
So jump on over to Barb’s blog and do Days 13 and 14.
Below are my thoughts on “Yummy Food Eating” outside of our 0 and 5 boundary.
(As always, if you are an email subscriber to the blog, the video doesn’t show up. Please come to the blog to see the video! Thanks.)
This week continue with your renewing of the mind goal. I would LOVE to hear how this is going for you. Are you discovering that you are changing the way you are thinking by being proactive about what thoughts you will allow your mind to dwell on? Is it time to recommit to renewing your mind each day or more than once each day? I know it is for me!
Please complete Day 13 and 14 (links above the video). More to come this week on these topics.
Please share with us here any questions or thoughts you may have.
What can you do to be proactive about the temptation that “yummy foods” offer you?
I got an email from one of my coaching clients. What a GREAT question she asked! I thought that others might be interested in hearing some thoughts about emerging as a conquering hero over the typical Church Potluck!
I can hardly believe this is week 6 of Barb Raveling’s Weight Loss Bible Study! It has been going by so fast.
And it sure seems like a lot of you are experiencing some great breakthroughs. I have gotten to visit with some of you on the phone, in Skype, and in email and WOW! Your stories are amazing!
Please consider writing up a testimonial and sending it to me at heidi bylsma at gmail dot com. Let me know it is your testimonial that you would like posted to our Testimonials page (or you can just go there and post it in the comments, but I prefer to put it in the page itself!).
This week we get to deal with yet more pertinent issues related to the way we think that affects our eating. Here is a video about the first part of the week (the rest will come later this week):
If you are an email subscriber, please be sure to visit the blog site, as the emails don’t include the videos.
I am editing this post because God led me to do some renewing of my mind about “This is Hard.” I want to share this with you. You can make a list like this and then read it out loud daily for your own “renewing of the mind” experience:
This IS HARD. That is true.
BUT:
God will use this FACT and make me more beautiful – more Christlike inside and out through the hardship.
I will persevere
When it is hard, I am perfectly poised to see God show up.
In my weakness, he will be made strong and visible.
When it is hard, I get to see HIM as the Redeemer.
I CAN keep going when it is hard.
I HAVE to keep going when it is hard.
He never promises that Life will be easy.
I share in the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ.
THIS IS LIFE! Life IS hard!
This is training for more challenging things in the future.
As I just DEAL with it and GET OVER MY DESIRE FOR EVERYTHING TO BE EASY I will develop and grow and change and be a better person—the one that God has placed me on this earth to be.
When life is hard, when eating 0 to 5 is hard, I know that I am becoming more like Christ. I am being trained to BUCK up for things yet ahead in my life.
I can PRAISE my God through this trial and blow the lid off of my own piddly expectations! GOD IS GREAT and He will show me His glory!
Satan doesn’t get to have his way with me.
LIFE IS HARD and I can LOVE it that way because I KNOW that this is for my good and God’s glory.
Through this being so hard, I get to develop a deep dependency, a greater intimacy with my God!
This week, your assignment (and mine) is the following:
Evaluate your renewing of the mind goal that you set earlier. Do you need to adjust it? Do you need to recommit to it? If so, do it! What do you need to think differently about?
Early on, Barb challenged us to commit to three days of staying within our boundaries. How about doing it again this week? Can you commit to just THREE days? Three days of saying YES to God and the boundaries that he has set for you? 🙂
Complete Day 11 – Following my boundaries – Losing Weight – is HARD Eating of Barb’s Bible Study.
Continue to journal about the questions Barb asks and share with our community here. I know we are in the final stretches, but let’s finish STRONG! If you aren’t at the pace that I am posting at here at the blog, go at your own pace! 🙂
What has been the most rewarding thing about this study for you so far? What has been the most challenging thing?
This is a repost. I have found that this issue has been coming up for a lot of the people I have been coaching, so I thought others might be encouraged with this information, too.
For those of you who are visual and prefer the video version, here is a video (email subscribers will have to come to the blog to see). This is an old video posted first in about 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_EEnT8Q6tw?rel=0
Thin Within has three “phases.” For some people, these phases are, indeed, a progression. For others, it is more like layers of an onion…they get to a certain “phase” to discover God peels away the onion and they step back and discover a new level to an earlier phase. I will just describe them in a linear fashion though, for simplicity.
First phase is the Freedom Phase. “All things are permissible.” This phase blows the lid off the dieting box! God designed our bodies to give signals when we are hungry (what Thin Within calls “0”) and to cue us when we have had enough food, too (what Thin Within calls “5”).
When we respond to our bodies in this way, any food is permissible. All the “can’t haves” and “do nots” of the dieting world fall away and no longer make us feel condemned! Freedom! No need to worry about counting anything.
The temptation many experience is to go a bit bonkers with this phase. 😀 Foods that have been “off limits” for years are suddenly “legalized!” When eating 0 to 5, a person can eat hot fudge sundaes, pizza, full fat salad dressings and still release weight. It is true! (True confessions: I lost most of my weight eating foods that people consider “junk” food or “unhealthy” food. Honest. I only like veggies in salsa. :-))
The freedom phase is a time of building, building, building, a foundation of my relationship with the Lord. He teaches me to lean on him more and more–especially as I discover that waiting for hunger is REALLY HARD! I realize that I have so many reasons I want to turn to food other than physical hunger. Remove my coping mechanism (overeating) and now I have to deal with my heart. God shows me He can be relied upon to help with this process.
So phase 1 includes learning how reliable He is to help me wait for physical hunger, to heal my heart that has issues that surface and that he can also help me to know when to stop eating. What does “hungry” and “satisfied” even feel like? Phase 1 participants are not considering so much the nutrition or benefit to eating one food or another. They are developing confidence that their bodies are reliable and that God is sufficient for meeting all their needs.
Phase 2 – Discernment Phase is based on the next part of the verse…Since all things are permissible, but NOT all things are beneficial, I need to exercise discernment.
Now I begin to evaluate prayerfully how does God want me to nourish my body? What foods really work best for me? As I ask, He shows! I begin to see that I have a responsibility and this is an awesome privilege! I begin to scrutinize my choices. Thin Within calls the categories for food Teasers, Pleasers, Whole Body Pleasers, Total Rejects. This is explained in the Thin Within book in detail in chapter 18.
I still don’t worry about nutrition labels, but some phase 2 folks have the freedom to be able to read labels and use what they know to ask God for wisdom in feeding their bodies. More importantly than food labels, however, I begin to notice how various foods cause my body to react or feel. I still eat only when hungry and stop when satisfied physically. But I begin to see that my body is amazingly efficient! It gets by with so much less food than I ever thought possible, so I begin to want to fuel it with high octane fuel! Like a high performance race car, I begin to see that different fuels will cause performance to vary! With so little food needed, I really begin to make what I put in my body count. I do this with joy and without a sense of deprivation because the foundation established in Phase 1 is still in place. I am free. All things are permissible! I delight to do God’s will and what that looks like for one person will be VERY different than what it looks like for another.
In phase 2, we probably don’t have an entire meal of German chocolate cake like we may have during phase 1. Or if we do, it won’t be as often as during phase 1.
Instead, in phase 2, we may reserve some “space” in our stomachs (within 0 to 5 eating) for a small taste of whatever it is we have always loved so much at the end of a small meal. We continue to delight in our freedom, but we begin to see that freedom means not just free TO eat, but free from having to havewhatever it is we used to live for! Having a smaller amount at the end of a satisfying meal does as much for us as having the entire thing for dinner did in phase 1.
One other thing about Phase 2, the Discernment Phase, is we also begin to scrutinize our choices regarding activity. We begin to see that this body, God’s chosen dwelling place on earth, can operate best when it is given some activity. In phase 1 we have delighted in the *fact* that we don’t *need* exercise to lose weight (not if we eat between 0 and 5!!!), but we nevertheless realize that we are free to exercise in a godly way…that this is something that honors the Lord when we do it for His glory instead of our own like many of us have in our dieting/exercising pasts. We realize in phase 2 (if not sooner) that we don’t just want to release extra weight, but we want our bodies to be fit temples as well. We want to be able to go up stairs and not be winded. We want to be able to run and play with our kids, go to the snow, go swimming and splash around, horseback ride, and not feel like our bodies are going through the ringer! We want to be healthy, vibrant and truly as alive as possible for all the days God ordains for us to be on this earth! That all happens as we worship God through moving our bodies! Be it through dancing to praise music, walking the dog, getting silly with the kids, or our every day chores done with a bit more spring in our step…and some, of course, can even do a regimented workout schedule without becoming obsessed. Some can do it with a worshipful submissive heart!
Phase 3 – The Mastery Phase – is based on the last part of 1 Corinthians 6:12 “I will not be mastered by anything.” Can I say no to hot fudge sundaes? Sure, they are permissible. And I can choose to have some if I wish…but do I have to have ice cream? (Or whatever it might be for any particular person?)
The person in the Mastery Phase might discover that the brownies the kids made last week got buried beneath mail on the kitchen counter and never got eaten, even though previously she LIVED for brownies! Sure, they are “permissible” and sure she can have some…but it just doesn’t matter any more…she doesn’t have to have brownies or any dessert at all! Or she can slide the chips and salsa away at the Mexican restaurant without having any because she would rather enjoy the entree! She isn’t going to bow to her tastebuds!
These phases are dynamic, not static. You don’t just “arrive” at Mastery and stay there forever *necessarily*. Maybe some people do eventually. But I have found that some of us may always have a “thorn in our flesh” that causes us to keep needing the Lord to help us through…our desire for food may be what God uses to keep us clinging to Him the rest of our lives…but what a wonderful thing it is for something that once caused so much pain in my life (my overeating) to be used of God to call me to himself again and again…Praise Him for redeeming that which the enemy intended for my constant harm all my days!
Which phase are you in? What will you need to believe in order to move to the next phase?
(If you subscribe by email, you will need to visit the blog to see the video.)
What can you do to ensure you won’t give in to eating outside of your boundaries today and tomorrow? What will you do about the mistakes that have happened previously so that they don’t dictate what happens next?
