I get asked about physical hunger all the time. I made a video to help answer some questions about this. I hope it helps!
Summary:
Hunger is not a sound (a growl), it is a sensation.
Getting hungry will not slow down your metabolism in Thin Within because we eat when we are hungry. We are actually teaching our bodies that it is a good thing to be hungry since that is when we get to eat. We will not go into “starvation mode.”
The stomach is higher than you may think. Knowing this can help you immeasurably in figuring out when you are hungry!
I so appreciated the response that I got from Brianna (not Angela…I accidentally called her Angela at the beginning of the video) here at the blog and realized that there is a lot in her question…so I put together not one…but TWO videos to respond! They are each 11 minutes long! ARG! So sorry for the verbose response. I promised I would zip things down…but there was so much to share. So here are both parts and I will be posting the links I promise on Friday. 🙂
…and here is Part 2…
So, what other words of wisdom do you all have to offer Brianna and others like her who have little ones at home all day?
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.
She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors
and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.
When she heard about Jesus,
she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,
because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.”
Immediately her bleeding stopped
and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.
He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered,
“and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ “ But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her,
came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear,
told him the whole truth.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you.
Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
– Mark 5:25-34
“God’s way is the way of faith and freedom. When we bring our struggles with food, eating, and weight to him in honest surrender, we can be restored. For this to happen we must allow God to lead us to a place where we are:
Free to risk–letting go of the past in order to live unencumbered in the present (1 Peter 5:6,7)
Free to change–being transformed from the inside out by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2)
Free to trust–trusting God and the way he made us (1 Cor. 6:19)
Free to love–loving as Christ loves us (John 13:34)
As we act in faith and surrender to this kind of freedom, we will experience a new relationship with God, with ourselves, and with our bodies.”
——— This idea of being free to risk has really hit me afresh. We talked about this in our Thin Within online support group chat the other night. If we give our coping mechanisms–if we dare to reach for the hem of Jesus’ robe even while we lay hemorraging in the dust–what if he doesn’t choose to heal? What if he doesn’t choose to change me?
The hemorraging woman in Mark 5 believed that just a touch of Jesus’ robe was all she needed. In that act of faith, I wonder if she got more than what she bargained for–God’s power surged through her in a burst of healing. She had risked everything she had left–all her hope, all her dignity (if she had any left)–to weave through the crowd even though the culture had declared her “unclean” for years. She had tried everything else–and had always come up with dashed hopes. She had to be free to risk…this time the last of her hope as well as everything else. With the last bit of daring she could muster she lurched for the hem of his robe–even through the crowd of people, all who hoped to get closer to him…
As she risked it all, dared to put “all her eggs in this basket,” she experienced transformation. But in order to do that, she had to be willing to risk losing it all…again.
When we come to the Lord with our disordered eating, and choose to change the way we cope with anger, with frustration, and with all our other emotions…when we willingly surrender the way we have turned to food in order to cope, we take a huge risk. How will we cope now?
We begin to see the truth–the truth that sets us free–that our issues with food, eating, weight aren’t about food–not really. It is about something so much deeper and thus, it has the power to hurt so much more profoundly. What IF I hope and am disappointed? What if I am left…hungry…I mean with my soul hungering yet?
IS it worth the risk?
I wonder…had the bleeding woman not been healed if she would have regreted the act of lungeing for Jesus’ robe. I wonder if, in spite of disappointment, there would have been something in her that would have rested in resolution. Somehow, I don’t think she would have regreted taking the risk, even if things had turned out differently.
But things didn’t turn out differently. She was healed.
Am I willing to let go of the past in order to live unencumbered in the present? That means letting go of the way food has comforted me, been a companion for me, numbed me to anger and pain…been the focus of my Saturday nights and celebrations. Am I willing to let go of all the “been there done thats” that have come before and believe that God is even now doing a new thing? Am I willing to risk?
Are you?
I challenge you to journal a prayer about your willingness (or lack of). Ask God to meet you where you are just as he met the bleeding woman.
NOTE: I am leaving for DisneyWorld early tomorrow morning. My daughter and I are meeting up with my dear friend, Jan, and her daughter for 5 days in the happiest place on earth! If I don’t have a chance to blog while I am gone, I will see you when I return!
While I was back east with my kids–especially the first day of our visit to Washington, D.C., I became very convicted in my heart about how sedentary my kids have been during the years we have homeschooled. I value physical education and activity, so why haven’t I made that a vital part of our homeschool curriculum? Time, primarily. It *is* hard to do all the other subject areas and enrichments (like music) and make time for exercise. BUT…I must.
So, since we had ended two units–one in history and one in science–just before leaving on vacation, I decided upon returning home to make a deal with the kids. I won’t ask them to do science and history (per say) during the month of May IF and this is a big IF, we plunge ourselves headlong into a month of family fitness. Not a huge diehard program, but of daily being active in some way and daily making some small little choice in our eating to say no to self.
We would journal each day about how we feel physically, emotionally, spiritually and, at the end of May, evaluate what we would do for June. It is like an experiment. (Of course, Michaela pointed out that a true experiment has only one variable and we are throwing in too many variables for it to be a true experiment…sometimes she is too smart for her own good.)
Additionally, we are reading the Harris boys’ Do Hard Things. This is an amazing book. I am totally motivated! It exposes the Myth of Adolescence and challenges teens to “rebel” against low expectations. Oh my word…I am excited about what my kids may feel led to do as the “Do Hard Things” that God is calling them to do.
This past week, these changes in our homeschool curriculum made life SO much richer for me. I hope for them, as well. I guess technically, we only really did this stuff for a couple of days…starting May 1.
You may wonder how I would feel about logging and journaling my own physical activity with the kids and/or doing a regular exercise program of some sort, given my past and how I have avoided returning to obsession by avoiding any kind of regular program at all.
God brought something important home to my heart this past week. And now it is time to see if I can follow His prompting. Of course I can! He pointed out in my spirit that I enjoy freedom with my eating, right? No food is off limits, right? In fact, at Thin Within, we use Colossians 2:20-22 to point out that it is so easy for us to try to control the food to feel righteous when what we need to do is to control the heart. I have not had any difficulty with the concept that I no longer need to control the food. I understand and embrace the fact that my heart must be submitted to the Lord–no food is evil! When I go bonkers with a certain food, it isn’t the food that is an evil “trigger,” but it is proof that my heart is still chained to the food and my heart must be dealt with.
I understand, believe, and live that with food.
Well, what about exercise, logging and journaling and so on? God convicted me that a regular exercise program also is not some great evil I should avoid. By avoiding it, I am controling an external instead of my heart. I must, instead, allow him to teach me how to walk in freedom amidst exercising and logging and journaling. In essence, it is time for me to “grow up” in this a little bit. Besides, while I have always loved exercise, is it possible that my heart is deceiving me…that I really am…dare I say it…lazy…and just don’t want to exercise?
While it *is* true that I don’t want to become dependent on exercise to have a body that I am willing to accept…as I believe that is total captivity (where you live in fear if you don’t have time to exercise, or have a legitimate reason not to or something)…by the same token, God wants to train my heart to cope with those things in life…and that exercise is good for my heart.
I know that I have a very active life compared to most just by nature. Yesterday I exercised three of my horses, for instance! That required quite a bit of *me*. My arms are strong and my back has to do a lot, too (last night it was screaming at me that it had done too much!). But I know that, like my kids, I would *feel* better if I was fitter. If I was able to enjoy mountain biking for instance…When I used to run all the time, I will never forget the first time I tried true mountain biking in Lake Tahoe. I was fit enough that I could do it without having ever done it before. Either pedaling up some hills or getting off and hiking with a bike up hills was no big deal to me because I was fit.
I live in mountain biking mecca. I would LOVE to mountain bike with the kids. It would be great to be *able* to without dying. Yesterday when I was riding Breezy, I saw some guys sailing…I don’t know what you call it…it wasn’t hang gliding, and it wasn’t parasailing…but it was like a parachute…they hiked up the hills and let the sail carry them around…Oh my…it was breathtaking to watch. I want to do that and must be able to hike up those hills to do it. (Which shouldn’t be too tough given my usual routine involves climbing up steep hills with a feed bucket full of hay spreading it in the hillside forest for the horses! LOL!).
Anyhow, this month will be a training time for me…not just physically, but spiritually–that I don’t return to captivity–obsession. We have a 2 week free pass to a gym that we used to be members to. We will enjoy using that, too, after everyone is totally well. Maybe that will be our last two weeks of May or maybe I will save it for the first two weeks in June! We have to drive 45 minutes to use it, so the gas costs are expensive. The kids and I have enjoyed playing racquetball there before. Talk about a workout!
Hi, everyone, from sunny snow-covered South Lake Tahoe! My family and I have been on vacation since Tuesday. I hope you can see the video segment above. Ordinarily, I am not one who likes to be photograhed or video taped…but this video in particular demonstrates the physical freedom I have found since releasing 100 pounds. In the past, I would send my family off to the snow without me…I couldn’t bear to try to lug my 250 pound body up a hill, only to provide a comedy routine for any cruel onlooker as I flipped and flopped all over myself coming down the hill. So, I never went on the snow trips with my family.
This has been a BIG event for our family. They don’t know why I never wanted to go…and I haven’t told them. But I did want to chronicle the silliness now that I have released the weight and my self-consciousness.
I wish I hadn’t waited to lose weight before enjoying my family in the snow. But no matter. I am enjoying it now! Thank you, Lord! Below is hubby and me enjoying the snow together:
And this is my daughter and I enjoying the snow. There is NO way I would have even TRIED to put me and another person in a saucer or sled a couple of years ago!
And this is my daughter and I enjoying the snow. There is NO way I would have even TRIED to put me and another person in a saucer or sled a couple of years
