Starving the Skinny Idol

Starving the Skinny Idol

Matthew2237b

A few weeks ago, the Lord told me to “starve the skinny idol”.  This was shortly after He showed me that I had made “skinny” an idol in my life.  It was quite shocking news!  Me?  Serving an idol?  Yup!

I dreamed of having “rock hard abs” or “flat abs”.  I had envisioned myself looking like Denise Austen or other exercise gurus.  I sought after it.  I deemed myself too flabby and went on a quest to “live the dream”.  Well, that so-called dream became my master.

“That other person, idea, or dream is your master, and it takes you over without your being aware of it.”*

That’s exactly what happened to me.  I lived and breathed this desire to have a certain look.  I wanted to be strong and to be at a certain weight.  If there was a book about it, I read it.  If there was a diet to help me live out my dream, I tried it or at least considered it.  I joined a fitness forum online so I could discuss this dream.  I counted calories.  I tracked points.  I stopped eating certain foods.  I tried to eat only raw foods.  And on and on and on.

I made skinny my “functional god”.

“They’re trapped, they’re deceived, and they’re miserable because they made a functional god of something or someone other than the one true living God.”*

I thought, when I am skinny, I will be happy.  I wouldn’t be satisfied until I lost a certain amount of weight or looked a certain way.  But even when I lost the desired weight, I thought, “How about 5 more pounds?”  You see, the enemy loves that we serve the skinny idol, or any idol for that matter.  He wants us to feel like we are never enough.  So I thought if I tried a different method, diet, technique, workout program, etc., that then I would have what I wanted.  Sure, I asked God for help, but “God won’t help us chase our idols.”*

My heart was set on being skinny.  “Idolatry is who or what you worship, what you long for, what your heart is set on.”*  And the sad thing is that back in the day, when I started on this quest, I was completely fine the way I was.  I believed the lies of the enemy that I needed to be more or less.  I didn’t think I was good enough where I was; so without realizing it, I built up my altar and started serving the skinny idol.

This is a photo of me from 2005, when I thought I needed to lose weight:

DCP_2705

Oh how I wish I could go back to that young lady (myself) and tell myself that I was fine and to STOP obsessing.  I wish I could go back and tell her the truth.  I know different ones in my life did try, but I wasn’t convinced.  I really thought something was wrong with me because I didn’t have rock-hard abs.  I remember asking my husband to take pictures of me when I was sitting down so I could see if my stomach stuck out and rolled out as I was imagining it to be (it wasn’t).  The funny thing is, after having two babies, and looking back, those abs look great!  Ha!

So when the Lord revealed this idol to me about a month ago, I started to sort of panic.  I have served this idol and it has served me.  It’s been my familiar friend, my companion, my security blanket all of these years.  It’s what I could obsess over; and boy, have I obsessed!  “It’s hard [to demolish the idol], not only because they don’t want to leave, but also because we don’t really want to lose them.”*  Exactly!

This idol has kept me “fixed”.  It’s like a drug.  I feel “high” when I focus on the things that feed this idol: like thinking about starting a new diet.  “We may experience initial relief, so then we cling to them, making them the objects of our desire.  As these objects grow in importance, our behavior becomes habitual and we can no longer satisfy or relieve our needs in healthy ways.  Even if we want to break free, we find ourselves enslaved.”**  I have looked to my idol to fulfill me; but only God can fulfill me.

I’ve often asked myself why I would give into this idol, this addiction.  When I look back to when I erected this idol, there were a lot of things in my life that I felt were spinning out of control.  Relationships were changing.  Boundaries had to be placed.  There was a lot of emotional uneasiness.  Looking back, I am beginning to see that instead of depending on God completely, I began to place trust in this idol to help me through.  I grasped onto anything that felt solid at the time to hold me up.

Now that He’s revealed this idol to me, I’m accountable to tear it down.  In 1st and 2nd Chronicles,  it talks about how there would be a new king on the throne and it would say if that king demolished the high places and idol altars or not.  Kings built, tore down, and built them up again.  I want this idol to come down for good and not ever be built up again.  I’m starting to see that it comes down to 2 choices: either I can trust God or I can trust the “golden calves” of the skinny idol.  I can serve God or “mammon”, but I cannot serve both.

I didn’t trust God to take care of this area of my life.  Oh, I would claim He was leading me (which I think He did at times–to turn away from the idol), but I did NOT want to give up the control of this area of my life.  It’s ridiculous because idols only hurt us.  “We think they’re more predictable than God is, and they keep us in the driver’s seat.”*  Oh yes, I have told God to move over plenty of times.  I’m driving!  I will get my rock-hard abs no matter what!  Trust God?  Whatever!

I didn’t want to wait on God.  “And so we turn to idols, often just to remove the uneasy feeling of waiting and depending on God.”*  I think a lie I have believed is, “God won’t help me, so I will do this myself.  He probably just wants me to be fat.”  Yeah…not cool!  “We are anxious about our idols.  We think, “What if I don’t get what I want?  What if I lose it?””  I held on dearly to what I wanted because I was afraid God wouldn’t give it to me in my way and in my time.  Truth is, God is more concerned about my heart than my outward appearance.  Of course He wants us healthy and at our God-given weight, BUT He wants my heart.  He is a jealous God.  He doesn’t want us bowing down to any other gods.  And I certainly made a god, an idol, out of skinny.

Addiction and disordered eating end and dependence begins when we stop relying on our own will to get what we want and begin trusting God to give us what he knows we need.”**

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be slim, but it’s not ok when it’s ruling my life.

I want the guarantee that I will never be overweight again and that I will lose the “fluff” if I am going to follow God’s ways.  But the thing is–nothing in this life is a guarantee!  Only God is unshakable and unchangeable.  He is our only guarantee.

So what it all boils down to is this–is God enough for me?  If I never release another pound, is He enough?  If I never have rock-hard abs, is He enough?  Yes, yes, yes!!

What does it mean to “starve the skinny idol”?  That’s something I’ve been asking the Lord and learning about.  When you starve something, you don’t give it anything that will keep it alive, not even a crumb.  So what’s kept this idol alive in my life?  I can name a few things: obsessing over food, researching food and diets, being fixated on my body, reading anything that brings on the obsession, etc.  So by starving the idol, that means not doing any of those things.  And it also means changing my focus.  We were all meant to serve God and have a relationship with Him.  There is a yearning in every person’s heart for Him.  But we find things that become “functional gods” to us.  I want to serve God.  I want to give Him all of my heart, mind and soul.  I don’t want to give anymore of my time, heart, mind, or soul to “skinny”.  My focus needs to get back onto Jesus Christ, my Redeemer, my Deliverer!

So as I’ve been working on taking down this idol and demolishing it, the idol has tried to remake itself in my life using what I listed above.  And the areas this idol has served me has been tricky to pin down at times and it seems like it has 1,000 lives.  I wrote this in my journal, “I have to ask God for help if I’m going to spot them, pin them down, and kill them as fast as they appear.”

“Whenever we erect and bow down to an idol, we displace our dependency on God.  We struggle to stay at the center of it all through willpower, manipulating people, doing everything in our own strength, trying to look just right, and falsely believing that we are in charge of our life.  We think we can do anything through willpower, even control our addictions, but the blessed gift of addiction is that it fails us.  If we are honest with ourselves, we eventually reach a point where we must admit we can’t go on like this; that we are out of control.  It is God who allows us to see the futility of placing our hope and trust in the false idols of our own making.  Then he helps us discover and articulate the aching, unfulfilled emptiness at the core of our being and invites us to take the first step toward God-centered healing.”**

And that’s the thing, I was placing my dependency on this idol, not on God.  I thought if I could just control my eating, that then I would get what I wanted.  But what I truly needed was the Lord.  I’m coming to realize that if there’s an idol, an addiction, or something is just plain wrong, that’s an indication that something within me needs more of God.

The lie is that the idol will make us happy, that it will fuel us.  But the truth is that we cannot live on substitutes.  My heart will “never be satisfied apart from God in Christ Jesus.”*  Only God can satisfy.  Substitutes never satisfy.  The skinny idol just made me lust for more, more, more.  And I was left wanting more.

This is like Paul, in Philippians chapter 4, saying, I will be content whether well-fed or hungry.  It’s choosing to be content.  It’s getting to that place, that no matter what, we are satisfied in God alone and that He is enough.

Something else I wrote in my journal was this: Going to an idol instead of God is committing spiritual adultery.  Ouch!

After the Lord revealed truth to me about this idol in my heart, I realized that I needed a plan to starve this idol and to renew my mind, because there were literally days where “skinny” was on my mind consistently all throughout the day.  I didn’t know how to pinpoint the thoughts and take them captive to the obedience of Christ.  And so I figured that starting somewhere is better than doing nothing.  Part of my plan (and what I’ve been doing) is putting my focus more on Christ.  I’m reading through the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and I’ve been reading Galatians over and over again.  It’s been awesome!  I wake up and instead of thinking about “skinny”, I get so excited to be in the Word and to get to know Jesus more.  I’ve also been reading my truth cards more often.  I also picked out sets of questions from the I Deserve a Donut app by Barb Raveling to answer in my journal: which has been extremely helpful in renewing my mind (the sets of questions I’ve been using are: Discontentment, Greed & Lust, Envy, Insecurity: Feeling Inadequate, Insecurity: Living Up to Expectations, Insecurity: People Pleasing, and Insecurity: Self-Condemnation).  And when I look in the mirror and feel any sense of dissatisfaction, I thank the Lord for my body.  Through all of this, and putting my focus on Christ, I have noticed that I’m no longer focused on skinny like I once was.  Praise God!

I still have work to do.  There are times I’m tempted to go on a diet to have my “guarantee”, so I have to keep pressing on and looking to the Lord and His truth.  This is a journey.  We learn and grow every day.

How about you?  Have you made skinny an idol in your life?  Have you served the scale or the food?  Where do you turn when the going gets tough?  Are you clinging to a “functional God” or the one true living God?  Ask the Lord to search your heart and He will show you.  If you are afraid you won’t like what you see, know that He is there to forgive as we repent, and He is there to help to get us where we need to be.  He will help us follow Him, but He won’t help us chase our idols.

P.S. You can hear more about what God has revealed to me in this Sound Cloud file I recorded:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/160296439″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

*Quoted from Gospel Treason by Brad Bigney

** Quoted from Hunger Within by Arthur & Judy Halliday (chapter 6)

 

“Weighing In” – How A Naturally Thin Eater Thinks About the Scale & Eating

My Sister, Andrea, Breezy (notice his tongue), and me!

My Sister, Andrea, Breezy (notice his tongue), and me!

Another post about the scale? 🙂 Yes. It seems to be something we need encouragement about!

In 2001, I had the joy of getting to be the collaborator with the Hallidays on the writing of the Thin Within book. Something that not many people know is that, in writing the book, I got to share stories from my own life throughout. (Don’t tell anyone!)

So the part about the Naturally Thin Eater at the top of page 136 was about my sister, Andrea. We changed the names of those whose testimonies we included, so I am “Teri.” 🙂

A Thin Within participant, Teri, tells of her sister’s eating habits: “She always eats small amounts, making a huge deal out of each bite, moving the food around in her mouth. I never could understand it before. Also, she is quite happy taking a single bite of someone else’s chocolate mousse pie instead of ordering her own. She eats strange things at odd hours. She always leaves food on her plate. It seems like she never eats much of anything at a sitting, but you can tell she really enjoys whatever she eats. When I asked her about when she likes to eat, she looked at me like I had a third eyeball and stated, ‘When I’m hungry.’ She’s been living and using the Keys to Conscious Eating all her life. I wish she had clued me in.” Thin Within, p. 136

That section of the book was written 13 years ago. Andrea visited last week and I had the chance to learn a bit more about her eating habits. We went out to a wonderful dinner and she ate what seemed to me like an enormous quantity of food given my prior claims. 🙂 I never noticed her do that before. I didn’t say anything of course. 🙂 The next day, we were talking about a dinner out with her friends one night. They expressed incredulity that she could eat such a big meal and not be larger than she is. She pointed out that she doesn’t eat that way all the time. An “occasional” meal where she eats that much is followed by eating the modest portions she almost always does. It doesn’t lead to another meal large meal, and another and another. And it also doesn’t lead to condemnation. She has found a rhythm in her life that works well for her to be a healthy size.

I shared with Andrea that the most popular post *ever* on my blog was last week’s post: Your Body – What is Your Natural God-Given Size?  I told her that I think people are eager to be convinced that getting rid of the scale is a good idea and that life won’t fall apart if we do it. She shared with me that now, at age 62, she has never had a bathroom scale her entire adult life.  Whenever she has had an occasion to see her weight (annual physical exams), she has been the same weight since she was sixteen years old. She gets on the scale and, PRESTO! there it is again…the same number that the scale has told her for 46 years! Without doing anything differently. (She sheepishly mentioned that, even with a regular Yoga session, she finds the weight has “redistributed,” but she is still the same number on the doctor’s scale.)

She eats when she is hungry. She typically doesn’t eat when she isn’t hungry–or, if she does, it is a bite (literally…one tiny taste) of this or that. Occasionally, she enjoys a large meal and then gets back to eating modest portions again after that. That’s it. No strangle-hold on her scale or on calorie counting or some other approach. She is free.

Note: She doesn’t know Jesus. I would love for her to know that freedom. Could you  pray for her real quick just now?

Have you experienced freedom from the bathroom scale and discovered that you are approaching or found your natural God-given size and maintained it? How did you deal with the doubts and questions of “Shouldn’t I be weighing?”

Numbers: Do They Work For or Against Us?

Photo Courtesy of iStockPhoto

Photo Courtesy of iStockPhoto

Why does one of my coaching clients (and friends) say: “I don’t plan to ever weigh myself again.” The answer may surprise you!

Counting Calories

I heard on the radio this morning that obese teenagers are more likely to use calorie information at fast food restaurants than non-obese teenagers  This fact was presented as if it were a good thing, as if counting calories is something that will help obese teenagers to slim down and get healthy. I think that some of the teenagers in this study are obese BECAUSE they are using external signals such as calorie counts offered by fast food restaurants to tell them how much they can/should/will eat, instead of relying on their God-given signals of hunger and satisfaction. The non-obese teens don’t need the calorie counts. They might order the bacon double cheeseburger and eat one third of it, stopping when they are satisfied.  Are calorie counts (masquerading as “nutritional information”) part of the problem or part of the solution? I’m all for nutritionally dense food, but something tells me the teens aren’t checking protein, fiber, and calcium counts. They are focusing on the calorie information. And, I’ll wager, it’s not only not helping them, it’s actively hurting them. It’s getting in the way of their ability to listen to their internal signals.

Pounds

Similar to the perhaps inadvertent problems directly caused by calorie information, are the problems caused by the bathroom (or gym or doctor’s office) scale.

When I was a child and didn’t know about calories and couldn’t have guessed my own weight with any kind of accuracy at all, my eating was fine. But when I started counting things (calories and body weight), my God-given natural appetite regulation system was disrupted and it wasn’t long before I had a bona fide eating disorder. I was trying to externally regulate something that is much better left to the natural, internal regulation system ordained by God. My weight and my appetite take care themselves and run smoothly if I honor and respect them and don’t get in there and try to improve on God’s handiwork.

I don’t plan to ever weigh myself again. Why? Because I am finally convinced that weighing myself is part of the problem, not part of the solution, just like counting calories are, for me, part of the problem, not part of the solution. I’ve heard many times over the years that in order to fully recover from an eating disorder (or disordered eating, or whatever you want to call it), a person should entirely stop weighing herself and trust that God knows what our bodies should weigh, and trust that our doctors will tell us if we gain or lose precipitously. But other people telling me rarely results in me doing whatever is advised. I don’t learn very well from other people’s experiences. Eventually I had my own personal experience of divine intervention that really got my attention.

One morning, I wanted to weigh myself at home. I had the wherewithal to pray and ask God if this was a good idea. I heard very clearly in my head “you weigh X#s.”  “Should I still weigh myself, though?” I wondered, “Probably not,” I thought.
“But I want to.” My brain did this dance for a couple of minutes and then the “I wanna” part of me won out and I weighed myself.  [I weighed] X#s. Not a big surprise. Why had I been so willful? Who knows. Oh well. I’m not perfect. Chalk it up to that. I went on with my day. I went to the gym mid-morning. There’s a scale at the gym. The “I wanna” part of me thought, “I should weigh myself to see if they gym scale and my home scale register the same number.” And then, I heard the voice of wisdom, only this time, with a bit more power clearly say in my head, “If you want to never binge again, you need to never weigh yourself again.” !!! “But, but,” the “I wanna” in me spluttered, and then, as a quick follow up, I heard a powerful, “It may seem like a high price to pay, but it is THE price. “

Wow. Ok. So…I won’t weigh myself. You’ve got my attention, God. It does seem like a high price. But really, is it? I don’t think Jesus got up every morning to check his weight. Nor did any of his apostles. There are still people on earth who probably go their entire lives without even seeing a scale. It’s not like I’m being asked to do something actively unhealthy. There is, as it turns out now that I’ve thought about it, nothing helpful in me knowing my weight. It never stopped me from binge eating. It never made me feel closer to God. It sometimes made me proud and it sometimes made me feel like I could afford to binge, but both of those outcomes are ones that I am much better off without. I am so grateful for this experience because I feel like God tried to show me this in a multitude of ways over years, but I wouldn’t listen. So finally, I had to hear his wise, loving, but scarily clear voice telling me exactly what to do. I can’t complain any more that I’m not sure whether or not I should weigh myself. I’m quite clear that I shouldn’t. And I don’t plan to. Not ever. Thank you, God.

Catherine Wilson Gillespie, Ph.D.
Mary Collier Baker Distinguished Professor
Drake University School of Education
Des Moines, Iowa

Contest Winner Announced

This week’s winner for the drawing is Adriane.

We have only one more week of contest drawings (I think), though I may do it in June as well. 🙂

Remember, if you comment here at the blog, your name gets put in the drawing on Friday for one of three prizes (your choice):

  • Thin Within book
  • Hunger Within book
  • One-on-One Thin Within/Life coaching with me for a week.

How is Day 2 of the “Ditch Your Scale” Challenge going for you? Comments starting now get counted for next Friday’s drawing! 🙂

 

Bathroom Scale Stuff

scale3

What power will we give the bathroom scale? This is something we each get to decide in the stillness of our hearts with the Lord. I urge you to consider, if you haven’t already done so, renewing your mind about the power you give the scale and what it “says.”

Barb’s study in Day 14 is helpful on this subject.

Here are some thoughts about it (if you subscribe via email, please visit the blog to see the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1xJmrqnkGo?rel=0&w=640&h=480

We also touched on this a bit in Week 3 when we looked at “Appearance Eating.”

Here at the blog since 2006, I have experienced quite the journey about whether or not I would have a bathroom scale in my home. I went about 4 years without a scale and it was wonderful! Before that, I was chained to it, looking to it for its approval. You can do a search here at the blog or use this link to have a look at my journey with the bathroom scale, if you like. Whatever your feelings about the bathroom scale, I am sure I have been there, too!

I am at a point now where I am able to have a bathroom scale (my husband wanted one) in the house and it doesn’t own me like it did before, but I am convinced that I needed it out of my life in order for me to have this freedom now.

How do you feel about the bathroom scale? Is it a tool for your use? Or is it a Master that you struggle with giving too much power over you? What can you do to have a “healthy” relationship with the bathroom scale? How can we help and support you?