On Saturday, after months of gentle nudges from my mom, I got the book Weigh Down Diet. Like many others, I've been trying to diet and exercise to control my weight for... Let's round down and say twenty years.
In those twenty years, there's been one significantly successful route. I asked God for the answer, and after two days of fasting and praying, I was led to a gym with personal trainers and an eating regimen that helped me cross that wonderful 100# threshold--and then some. It was wonderful. Except for the ten hours in the gym each week, the fanatical counting of every gram of carb, fat, protein, and continued general obsession with food.
It was less exciting when the progress stalled. Even less so when the trainer and I stopped trusting one another. We went our separate ways, and I ended up dabbling in Weight Waters, Paleo, Primal, low carb in general, and other in vogue methods, all to gain back thirty hard-fought pounds.
For several months I've known a new diet wasn't an answer; somewhere along the way in a Financial Peace University course marketing lost some of its power over me (although the word "sale" still makes my heart flutter). As I read in the Bible, verses jumped out at me like "Do not worry about what you will eat," which is basically all I had done for years. Then, do you know how many times bread is mentioned in the Bible? To a carb-starved brain, it seems to be every 30 words or so; Jesus with the five loaves comes to mind for one. I'm not sure man's way of controlling weight is right, at least not for me. Then comes the reading of the book of Ecclesiastes, where the wisest man to ever live tells us to enjoy food and drink a dozen times! Revolutionary!
So I took this Weigh Down book that talks about diet, food, and how it relates to God, and what had been a tilted axis feels straighter than it has for a long time. It's not the food. It's the relationship with the food. Deep down when I've read verses about having other gods and idols, my brain has quickly flitted away from any conviction that food might be my idol. For me, the book is like being snapped out of denial (population: earth), and realizing I'm in the Garden, naked but not afraid.
With a foundation of Joel Osteen and Joseph Prince sermons, I know that my Father loves me and wants to have a relationship with me and sent His Son to die for me. Over the years they have taught me hope and to believe in the grace revolution. And so I see myself turning away from the bottomless pit of fat free, sugar free, carb free despair and into the loving arms of my Father. This is my exodus.
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Ecclesiastes 9:7
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