Weight Loss Honesty: Day 5

I stood staring at our tall, lean oldest son whose face had become bronzed from many hours in the Southern Georgia sun. He had just completed Advanced Infantry Training for the Army and it was hard to take my eyes off of him. The transformation into a warrior must have been an incredibly difficult process. I was so proud of him and couldn’t wait to hear his stories. You may be wondering what this has to do with honesty and weight loss. Hang in there because what I am about to share with you is the major “Aha moment” that totally changed my weight loss from failure into success.

Two days later we sat in Dan and Amy’s house pen and paper in hand and ready to listen to the adventures with God and man that had shaped Dan’s life over the past three months. After over an hour of talking I finally asked the question that was nagging at the back of my mind.

“How did you endure the long ruck marches with those heavy packs and endless hours of marching?”

His answer turned light-blubs on inside my heart. “One of the hardest things to learn during ruck marching,” he said, “is to NOT listen to what your BODY is telling you. Your body will be screaming for rest. You just want to stop and collapse to the ground. Your body will send messages to your brain to try and get you to listen to its demands. So you have to be on guard and take your thoughts captive and not dwell or think about what your body is saying. If you begin to allow your brain to think about the pain and exhaustion you will fail giving into your body’s demands.”

“Your body doesn’t know what it is capable of doing. It is all about protecting itself. So it will tell your mind that it can’t take anymore. Generally without knowing it we listen to our minds. We make a mental decision to quit based on the body’s demands.” To keep his mind from caving in to the body’s screaming demands Dan meditated on scripture. Psalms 91 was one of his favorites. As Dan kept his mind focused on the Lord and the goal ahead he found himself passing up much stronger men who were younger and more athletic but who had believed the lie’s of their body.

OK, so how does this apply? First I re-read the above story about Dan and substituted the word flesh for body. Then I took this message back home with me and began to apply it. I tapped short inspiring verses on the kitchen cabinets and reminded myself through-out the day to not allow my body (flesh) to even think about food. My body was no longer in charge. I already knew what was good for me to eat and what wasn’t. That information wasn’t the problem. Instead I began to block my body from controlling my mind. Each demand sent to my brain I would say, “no.” I refused to dwell on what different foods tasted like or smelled like but instead I took each thought captive and refused to listen to the whining “crazy old aunt” living in the attic.

This is the amazing part… as I refused and continued to say “no,” over the next days and weeks I noticed something incredible happening. Each time the power was there within my spirit to NOT listen to the flesh. I discovered experientially that I was not bound by the power of the flesh in anyway. My flesh was indeed nothing more than a nagging, loud mouth crazy woman living in my head. As I refused her demands, the power was gently and instantly there to walk on in obedience. The demands of the flesh has likewise been destroyed over all believers. It took a huge sacrifice on the part of Jesus Christ to accomplish this fact. I am finally enjoying walking in the truth and finding the freedom that I had all along but never believed it.

Thought: “But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you…Therefore… if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live…” Romans 8:10, 11 & 13.