Shame myself thin?

     Hello again. So today I am going to talk about another method I thought would be effective in my weight loss struggle. I thought that if I could just realize what shame I was brining to God by being overweight, I could have the motivation I needed to lose. Well It worked, for like a second. Yeah I stayed focused and lost a few pounds, but then if I slipped up, I would feel worse than before. That one little slip could lead to an oh well attitude, I would overeat and than say I will just start again on Monday. Enough of those types of slips lead me to be very overweight and out of shape.

     So the shame thing does not work. Why you might ask? Well for me its because it doesn't allow for God's grace to have any space in my life. It does motivate me at first, but then it just leads to frustration and I become very discouraged. Its only when I am ready to accept God's grace that I can see what I need to do.

     When I allow God's grace to move in, I can feel His love for me. This leads me to have a repentant heart and it changes the way I think about myself. I begin to see that God made me. He knit my very being into existence. He designed me and formed me and because of His deep love for me, I want to take care of myself. This isn't done by guilt or shame, it can only be done by accepting His grace and Love.

     I must repent from the way I was trying to do it. This didn't happen for me overnight and it isn't done in me yet. Daily I must change my behaviors and attitude. Daily I need to choose how I am going to show up in my life. Am I going to revert to old habits, which by the way is the easy route, or am I going to fight for myself and my life and show up differently?  I choose to show up differently. The other way I was doing things obviously wasn't helping me at all.

     The key here is not to diet. It is to follow biblical principles and to nourish ourselves, not gorge ourselves. Portioning in America today is so out of wack that we can't trust it. We must learn to weigh and measure food so we can get the adequate amount of nutrients. There is not a diet to follow other than to know that God created food in a natural state to provide the nutrients we need. Trying to follow some restrictive diet just made me feel like a failure.

     So when I wouldn't be able to follow the "diet", I would feel like I was disappointing God. He was never disappointed in me because he never expected something of me that He didn't already know was going to happen. I mean, He knew what choices I was going to make before I ever made them, so I couldn't disappoint Him in that. He already had a plan for me for my recovery. He was just waiting for me to decide I wanted something different.

     That different is learning from my mistakes. So I know that before I was trying to do it all on my own terms. I know now that it doesn't work that way. I, in and of myself, can do nothing. I need Him and in recognizing this, I am able to move forward. I am just thankful that God is patient. He gently teaches me the right way and leads me where I need to go. Phillipians 1:6 tells me, "I can be confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in me, will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus."  Knowing this, I can never give up on myself. I want you to know the same.

     I will leave you with this today as I have some other things I need to attend to. I am praying that maybe with my humble writings, you to might find it in your self to have a little grace for yourself. That you, and I, might be able to see ourselves in a different light. Not as a failure in what we are trying to do, but as a person who is striving to be better at what I am doing. Learning from my mistakes as I go and using it to build a stronger me. Tomorrow I will touch on what is a proper way to approach food and weight.

     Many blessings upon your day.