Losing Weight Without Any Self Control-Part 3

OK, on to step 3. This is the one that actually talks about food and eating. Like I said before, I did not count calories. I did not count fat grams. I did not pay any attention to the food pyramid, a raw diet, a vegan diet, or the diet the Israeli army puts their soldiers on in order to train them for battle. I ate exactly what I wanted to-I put "healthy" on the back burner and tried to focus on being able to remove those cute little blubbers from our fridge once and for all.
Oh, I did have a few psychological tricks I played with myself. One was, I decided not to tell anyone I was attempting this. For some strange reason, every other time I'd go on a "diet" and begin to lose weight I'd stop trying the minute anyone said, "Hey, are you losing weight?" No idea why I did that, but I did. I also started this project in the winter so I could wear baggy sweaters and hide the fact that I was shrinking.

Now is when the rubber, (or should I say, blubber?) met the road for me.
The bible says that: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22-23 I kept waiting for self-control to magically appear on my doorstep and I'd be thin, only it never did. Finally I got sick and tired of waiting and I knew something had to change. OK, if self control won't come to me, I'll just do it myself!

Even though I think Gwen Shamblin is a little off in her theology, I decided to try her weight loss method anyway. In a nut shell, here's what it is: eat when you're hungry, stop when you don't feel your stomach any more. That's not Full. That's, "Hmmm, do I even have a stomach? I don't feel my liver or my kidneys and now I don't feel my stomach." See the difference? If I ate til I was Full, I wouldn't lose weight. No stomach, and I'd lose. The problem for me were those 2 little words: self control. I just couldn't do it.

To begin with, you're supposed to wait until you. are. very. hungry. We have a saying for that kind of hunger in our house. It's called After Church Hungry. That's when you're so hungry you'd cheerfully eat any road kill you happened by on the way home from church. That's when you're so hungry you trample your children in your mad dash to beat them to the fridge once you do get home from church. That's how hungry I would force myself to get before I ate anything. I would tell myself, every single second you don't eat, your body is losing fat. It's gnawing on all that blubber hanging around your middle instead of the food you want to give it.

So, on a practical level, here's what you're supposed to do:
Wait to eat until you're super duper hungry.
Take a tiny plate and put as much food on it as you can/want to.
Cut the food into fourths.
Eat 1/4 of the food, slowly, taking sips of water in between bites.
After eating 1/4 of the meal, stop eating.
Wait 15 minutes. if you're still hungry, eat another 1/4. If not,
wrap the food up and put it away.

Sounds easy right? It is if you're not using food as a reward, a stress reliever, a comfort, a reason to party, something to do because you're lonely or bored, etc. etc. But, if you're addicted to food like I was this is not so easy.

After the first 30 minutes of being on this plan I failed. It was soooooo hard to stop eating when I couldn't feel my stomach any more. After a few days of failed attempts, I really started praying. I would say, "God, I cannot do this. I need you to do it for me. This is way too hard. Please help me not to eat right now. I'm not hungry..."

I also had a journal that I started the day I started all this. Each day I would write the date, my weight in the top right corner, and then I'd find a bible verse or two to focus on for that day. I would leave the journal open and would write frequent prayers and pleadings in it. I'd look at the verses and beg God to help me focus on pleasing Him with food. I also used that journal as simply a place to emote or write my deepest, darkest secrets. :-)

One of the other things Gwen Shamblin says is actually a promise. She promised that if we would "fight like a tiger" for a time, eventually the control food had over us would be broken and we would be free of it. I can promise you she's right. It happened for me, but it took a while. Food was my go-to for every emotion. But, after fighting like a tiger for a few months that power was broken. And for me, the only, only, only way I could fight like a tiger was to ask God to do it. And He was faithful to do it for me. Minute by literal minute sometimes.

I have to tell you I did a lot of talking to myself during this time. "Judy, you need to fight like a tiger...fight like a tiger. Do not eat. God please give me your self-control since I obviously don't have any.Judy, you are NOT a garbage disposal. Stop eating...." My family thought I was losing my mind along with my blubber!

One other trick I used on myself was this: sometimes I would force myself to eat in front of a mirror. I'd stand there and look at my fat cheeks bulging with food they didn't need and it would really gross me out. All in all, it didn't take that long to lose the bulk of the weight I wanted gone. I think on average I lost 2.5pnds a week.

Oh-If I wanted sugar I would slowly suck on ONE chocolate chip. It shocked me how satisfying one measly chocolate chip could be if I focused on actually tasting it.

Now that the weight is gone, I find I have a stronger desire to eat foods that are healthy. I drink a green smoothie every day, and have cut out a lot of bread. We eat a lot of vegetarian meals and even the boys have noticed they feel better when they eat this way.

So, I think that's it. Please let me know if you have any questions or whatever.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Phil. 4:13

Losing Weight Without Any Self Control-Part 2

Before I go on with part 2, I forgot to mention one little thing about those darling little blubbers hanging on the fridge. I put those on the fridge months before I ever got serious about trying to lose weight. Well, I was serious about it when I hung them up, but not serious enough to actually begin. As a matter of fact, they hung on the fridge so long their colors began to fade. By the time all was said and done, they were probably 5 shades lighter than when they began life in the kitchen.

OK. Enough babbling.

Step 4. I found a picture of myself from my not-so-blubberous days and hung that up on the bathroom mirror. I'd see that and then the "new" me. You get the picture?

Step 5. I wrote out bible verses and other quotes that convicted me about who I should be and who I wanted to be. I hung those cards up in the kitchen on all the cabinets that had food in them. Sometimes I would ignore those and eat anyway, but more often than not they would stop me dead in my tracks.

Have you ever heard of Gwen Shamblin and the Weigh Down Workshop? It's a weight loss program "loosely" based on biblical principals. I say loosely because when all's said and done, I think Gwen is off her rocker. This post isn't about her so I'll just leave that at that. The Weigh Down Workshop was held in churches all over the country and it was expensive. So, another motivation for me was the money my poor husband had poured out so I could go through that program not once, but twice. And that was a couple years before I got serious about all this. I'd gone through the program twice and lost not a pound. I felt sooooo guilty about that. All that wasted money!

Anyway-here are some of the things I had written out and posted on our kitchen cabinets: (and where they came from)

-Gwen: When you feel hungry, your body is burning fat

-Gwen: Remember Eve. When you're not hungry think about how much harm one bite can do. (using Eve in this instance was taken completely out of biblical context, but this quote did give me food for thought. Every bite I take when I'm not hungry harms my body)

-So that he can no longer spend the rest of his natural life living by his human appetites and desires, but he lives for what God wills. 1 Peter 4:2 (bible)

-Consistency. A living model of patience, determination, and strength. It's an obvious mark of maturity. It's hanging in there day in and day out in spite of everything that could get you sidetracked. (not sure where this came from-dictionary maybe?)

-And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. Gal. 6:9 (bible)

-All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.
1 Cor. 6:12 (bible) Mastered=to be held under the authority of something
This verse isn't talking about something lawless or wicked. It's talking about something that is lawful but not profitable. You know, things like pigging out.

I knew I needed to stop rationalizing my over eating and making excuses for it. And now I'm going to say something that may sound harsh or judgemental. Please don't take it that way. This is my personal story and what I felt God speaking to me.
In my list of reasons for losing weight I felt like I should include:
-to glorify God

I wondered what it said to people when I told them I was a Christian and Jesus was my everything and then I sat there wearing a size 18 pair of shorts. Um, excuse me? Who is your God? I knew in my heart that I was going to food for everything; stress, sadness, joy, anger, fear....anything at all that came down the pike was a reason to eat. I felt so guilty every time I put something in my mouth. It occurred to me that I might even be hurting God's heart. Not that that's possible, really, but the bible does say He is jealous for us:
—for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. Ex. 34:14
And for me, I knew food was an idol I worshiped.

Losing Weight Without Any Self Control-Part 1

I've battled being overweight most of my life. I was a chubby little girl who wore a size of clothing "unpolitically correct" called: Husky. Now that alone should've motivated me to lose weight, especially when I hit my teen years and was still, well, Husky. I managed to lose a bunch of weight when I was 15 and kept it off until I graduated from high school. After that my blubber cheerfully found me and crawled back onto my body for the long haul. I kept begging God to help me lose weight. I cried over it. I pigged out because of it. I tried every diet known to man and womankind. I kept waiting for self control to find me. Finally one day I got sick and tired of being plump. It was December 20, 2005. I realized that my life was probably well over half-way done and I'd spent most of it well rounded. That morning when I woke up I decided then and there that I was going to finish the last half of life on the planet not-so-fat.
Several people have asked me how I did it. Enough people have asked that I've finally decided to write about it here, step by step, in embarrassing detail. If I can do it, anybody can. So, here's what I did first:

Step 1. I wanted to lose 40 pounds so I cut out 40 little pieces of happily colored construction paper and taped them onto the side of the fridge. Those were my "blubbers". Each time I'd lose a pound I was able to rip a "blubber" off the fridge and throw. it. away.
If I gained a pound back, I cut out another happy piece of paper and taped it to the fridge. That was a good visual for me every time I went to eat something. All those cute blubbers hanging there, staring at me.

Step 2. I had a pair of skinny jeans I wanted to fit into so I took those and draped them over a chair in our bedroom. Good motivation.

Step 3. I made a list of all the reasons I wanted to lose weight. Some of those were very personal, others not so much.

That's all I'm going to write tonight. I have a little person waiting to be tucked in and kissed!

Ding Dong! The Blubber's Gone! (most of it)

I did it! It's been a long, slooowwww process, but this morning I weighed in and guess what? I weigh what I did on my wedding day way back in 1984!
I took the long, slow lazy way of losing weight-it only took 3 years and 3 months.
(Actually I lost 30 pounds in about 4 months, maintained for 3 years and then lost a little more....)

Now I'm debating more weight loss. It would be fun to weigh 1 pound less than I did 30 years ago, (Yikes! THIRTY YEARS?!) June 2nd when I graduated from hhhigh sssschool. Like I said, I'm debating. I haven't decided yet whether I want to buckle down and do it or not.

Anyway, for me this is a "miracle". I've battled overeating and being overweight my entire life. My prayer is that I'll now be able to apply what I've learned about losing weight to dealing with all the hidden uglies that lurk in my heart.