A few months ago, my husband was listening to something I had recorded. On my way to meeting a friend for lunch, I had recorded my conversation with God in case it could be helpful to you all. That file is found here. When Bob was listening to it, though, he stopped it for a moment and asked me, “Does anyone know just how hard you work at this?”
I wonder about that. I get asked a lot about if it ever becomes easy. I have to say…well, yes, it becomes easiER at times. Until it becomes hard again. But I have to keep investing time, energy, and effort—I have to keep up the good fight.
That is why I make such a big deal about renewing the mind with truth. Because I simply HAVE to keep working on the way I think.
So, today’s truth card, found in the picture above, is specifically about renewing my mind and why it is worth while to keep on fighting, to keep working at changing the way I think. Many of these statements come directly from the work I have done using Barb Raveling’s material at her website. In case you can’t read my writing, here is what it says:
Renewing My Mind:
1. God has called me to a renewing of my mind habit.
2. It is important that I do this every single day.
3. God wants me to develop this habit because it helps me to think differently…to act differently.
4. God is crazy about me. He loves me. I am His precious daughter. I am precious in His sight. He calls me.
5. Satan doesn’t want me to renew my mind. He knows it will make me a more effective witness. He knows I will be more victorious. Renewing my mind changes me permanently.
6. To develop this habit, I will have to make sacrifices.
7. If I make this sacrifice, I will be more godly, even 6 months down the road.
8. I can be thankful to God for many things in my situation.
What About You?
Have you been working on changing the way you think? About food? About life? About your body? About a person who challenges you? What are you doing, practically, to think differently? Are you committed to renewing your mind daily about this situation/problem/challenge? If not, can you make a plan today to renew your mind daily? Do you need a truth card about renewing your mind? What can you include on it?
Hi. A friend of mine who frequents this blog, sent me an email following my post last week on Truth Cards. I asked her if she would be willing to write a blog post to share her perspective with the readers of this blog. It is incredibly valuable, but one I have little experience with. I hope you will share the link with anyone you know who may need to see this!
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I find truth cards to be extremely helpful. But my truth, as someone who has suffered from years of restrictive food plans of my own making and through various anonymous organizations, seems to be almost the flip side of your truth.
One of your truth cards, which you shared with blog readers on 9/3/13, reads, “Today I will have to give up food I want to eat in order to follow my boundaries.” When I read that I immediately thought, “that is not true for me.” For me, I MUST eat food I want in order to follow my boundaries.
I had so many years of telling myself the following lies:
LIE #1. I cannot handle sugar.
LIE #2. If I start eating that binge food, I will never be able to stop.
LIE #3. There is something wrong with me at a cellular level.
LIE #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that I can’t handle them.
LIE #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is one step on the path to sinning.
Maybe these lies don’t ring a bell with you. If they do, if you have been like me and felt like you were evil for wanting things, and then denied yourself those very things in order to be “good,” then you can place yourself firmly in the “restrictor” camp.
I have been underweight, at my ideal weight, and overweight. I don’t think all restrictors are underweight. When I was overweight, I felt like a hypocritical restrictor. But wasn’t it inevitable? As I grew and matured physically and spiritually, I began to recognize the lies inherent in my beliefs. But that recognition was at a somewhat unconscious or perhaps semi-conscious level, and that’s when I transitioned from full-time restriction to binge eating. For me, binge eating is best described as intermittent restriction. It was restriction on the path to healing. But it was a very hard place to be, and it didn’t feel at all transitional. It felt permanent, and in fact it seemed like direct evidence that there was something very wrong with me. I told myself the lies, shouted them to myself sometimes, until eventually the unconscious or semi-conscious part of me said “NO!” and I ate every item of sugar that I could possibly stuff into myself in a short period of time. Bingeing seemed to confirm the lies, “see, I REALLY can’t handle sugar,” and “see, there REALLY is something terribly wrong with me.”
When I was finally able to see that the binges were actually created by the restriction and by my belief in lies, and I started to let myself eat the things I actually wanted, I was amazed and full of awe at the truths that God revealed:
TRUTH #1. I can eat sweets in moderation.
TRUTH #2. I can eat what I truly want and be satisfied.
TRUTH #3. There is nothing wrong with me (other than the fact that I believed a bunch of lies for years and years).
TRUTH #4. The fact that I crave carbohydrates is evidence that either I have overdone it in the sugar department and need some protein to balance out my overindulgence, or more likely, that I have not been eating enough carbohydrates and my body needs some sugar or complex carbohydrates to operate effectively.
TRUTH #5. Desperate wanting (craving) is a way of God communicating with me through my body. I can listen to God, honor my bodily signals, and take loving and nurturing action. Craving sleep, craving a hug, all my other cravings signal real needs that can be simply met. I do not need to be afraid. Cravings can be satisfied.
It all seems like a lot and as a person who is recovering from perfectionism, I tend to want to get it all right and find it overwhelming and want to retreat into a food plan that someone else has constructed because I still sometimes believe the lie that I am incompetent in the food department. When this happens, then I try to center on just one concept: My one goal for eating today is SATISFACTION.
When I am satisfied, I have no desire to binge. When I eat to satisfaction, I forget about food until next time I am hungry. In all those years of restriction, I was almost never satisfied, which is why I thought about food all the time.
Satisfaction is scary. It takes me to the next level. It solves my food problem and opens up new possibilities for me. I have been eating to satisfaction consistently for almost four months now. I have been eating to satisfaction and have been binge free for that entire time. This is coming from someone who five months ago and for the past 10 years before that was bingeing on average at least three times per week, with brief forays of binge free living that lasted at most six weeks at a time. It’s both a miracle and an incredibly simple answer to what seemed like a hugely complex problem.
It takes a lot of trusting in God to eat to satisfaction. But God is faithful, as always. If weight is a concern for you, then take heart. I had been bingeing heavily when I started, so I lost five pounds within the first week or two, of what for me has come to be known as “binge weight.” Over the subsequent few months, I’ve lost another five pounds. I am now at what I would consider an ideal weight for myself, a weight that I have not been at for over 10 years. And I got there by eating to satisfaction? Yup. Praise God!
Post by – Name withheld by request
How About You?
Prayerfully consider if you are someone who needs to write a different kind of truth in your truth cards. What does God’s Spirit testify to your heart? Are you, like my friend, in need of pressing on all the way to satisfaction? Are you restricting your eating in a way that is not trusting the body that God has given you? What is true for you? Are you willing to step out in faith and trust Him today?
Today’s post is another snapshot from my truth card deck.
Have you added to your truth cards just how great 0 to 5 eating is yet?
What truths will you add to your truth cards today about the blessings in 0 to 5 eating?
Take some time to review your truth cards today. Ask the Lord to show you if you BELIEVE what is written on them! If not, what will you need to do in order to truly renew your mind and be transformed?
Yesterday’s postshared that we often believe a lie…at the heart of our “failures” with eating between the parameters of physical hunger and physical satisfaction. I suggested actively replacing that lie with truth. This is the foundation for lasting change!
If we daily take our thoughts captive and surrender them to the Lord, trading lies we believe for His truth, we will be on our way.
Beyond that, there are a couple of approaches that we might choose to take when it comes to the “mechanics” of Thin Within. Anything in-between might be a viable option, too! The two radically polar opposite approaches are:
1. Extremely structured
2. Extremely free flowing.
Today, I share the first of these. It isn’t uncommon for participants to use extreme structure to help get a handle on eating 0 to 5. What I will share with you here is something you can try for a week (or less)–though I HIGHLY recommend that you sit with the Lord and ask him if you should. This is not for the faint of heart or the person who still feels like they have some obsessive tendencies related to the old dieting days. In fact, as one person I know recently shared, you may feel like you are a person who should use structure, when God is actually calling you to the other approach which I will share tomorrow (or some variation of one, the other, or both!).
Thin Within has a number of tools that can be very helpful. These tools are intended to serve you, not for you to be a servant of the tool. It is important to be circumspect in your use of any tool or you might find that you are enslaved to the tool! That isn’t the way of freedom!
Paul’s challenge to the Galatians about their tendency to operate in their own strength rather than God’s might be applicable here:
Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit,
are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?
– Galatians 3:3 (NIV)
So, hopefully, I have shared enough disclaimers. Buyer beware! Please don’t go into this super-dee-duper-structured approach unless you are certain the Lord is calling you to do so. Then, if you do, I suggest that it be temporary with a plan to re-evaluate if you are experiencing the freedom Christ purchased for you. Sometimes, some of us discover that tools like these can be tools of grace.
So what am I talking about? Here it is: —>
If you visit this link, you will see a Google Doc that you can copy and save and make your own to use.
You can copy it to your own Google account, edit it to reflect the things that you want to keep track of and then, if you have an accountability partner (which I highly recommend), you can share it with her so that she can visit your Google doc online record any time.
What is the value of this? Well, I have been doing this for just over a week now. During that time, I have seen patterns and tendencies in my behaviors. I have been able to learn about myself a bit. For instance, if I don’t eat to satisfaction at lunch, I have difficulty with figuring things out for the rest of the day. Crazy, huh? I tweaked my log to include a column of renewing my mind and I jot there what I have done during the day to think differently. This helps a lot, too! VERY much, in fact.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.
Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
– Galatians 5:1
Whatever you do, I urge you to be sure to pray about whether God would have you do this! If this would be a return to slavery for you, don’t even go near it! It may not be right for you! 🙂
Tomorrow, we will look at the polar opposite end!
What About You?
Before you make a choice about if you will use this extremely structured approach, be sure to replace lies with truth beginning with the lie that is operational for most of us when we eat outside of our God-given boundaries (see yesterday’s post about this). Daily, repeat the truth and reject the lie! Write it on a sticky note and place it in a strategic place or on an index card that you can carry with you. Find scriptures that support your efforts. Write them down. Create a deck of truth cards.
Will you take a moment and prayerfully consider whether God would have you give this structure a shot for a week? Will you connect with your accountability partner again (or get one using the Accountability page)?
…for we have made a lie our refuge and falsehood our hiding place.
Isaiah 28:15b
At the heart of almost all of our eating “failures” — our choices to eat outside of our God-given boundaries of physical hunger and satisfaction — is belief in a lie. In fact, this lie is likely the #1 reason we keep “failing” at releasing weight or at sustaining 0 to 5 eating.
The belief we hold is this:
Obeying God is not as rewarding as eating will be.
“OUCH!,” right?
Is this a lie that is operative in your life? It is in mine (I hate to admit). In the moment, when the ice cream calls your name from the ice box or the GF muffin (when you aren’t hungry) insists that you peel back the paper and sink your teeth into it, what are you believing? This is going to taste soooOOooo good…and be more rewarding than heeding the Lord and living within the boundary that He has graciously given me.
Ok, so maybe this isn’t what you are intentionally thinking, but somehow, this thought is there, influencing your actions. It may have happened by accident.
How can we break this cycle? How can we stop the lies from affecting us accidentally? We can dismantle and, even, destroy this stronghold by being proactive. Each day when we wake up we can read, speak, listen to TRUTH. Even saying a true statement out loud can help set the tone for our day:
Lord, I know that obeying you is an honor and privilege
No food will taste so good that it will be worth disobeying you.
This is what it means to renew our minds with truth. I can use my truth cards to help me with this, taking just moments each morning before my feet hit the floor to practice what I want to think for the rest of the day!
We want to take a lie that has been causing us to act in ways that run counter to our godly goals (like eating within 0 to 5 eating boundaries) and reject it outright. We then replace that belief (rooted in a lie) with TRUTH–God’s thoughts after him.
As we do this more and more, we will experience transformation.
Romans 12:2 says that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. We want to expose the lies where they exist and welcome the truth into our lives. As we do this consistently, we will find that we actually like the freedom from the tyranny of the lie! We will find that we like the freedom from having to eat outside of our boundaries!
What About You?
1. What are some examples of truths that you can tell yourself each morning (and maybe throughout the day) so that when you are faced with an opportunity to eat outside of your boundaries, you have a truth at the ready…right there at the front of your mind…to refute the lie?
2. What is one practical way you will do this…today?
