I have just started reading what I think will be a very life-changing book for me. The title is Made to Crave: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, Not Food, and I'm reading as a part of my 2nd major weight loss journey with Weight Watchers now that Jason and I have decided to give my body a couple years' break from pregnancy. For those who don't know, I lost 55 lbs between July 2008 and April 2009 using Weight Watchers the first time. The reason why I'm needing to lose weight again is that I SUCK at keeping weight off once I've lost it. I foolishly had no plan for maintaining a healthy weight after I got the extra pounds off, and I gained it all back plus some faster than I'd like to admit. It would be quite convenient to lay the blame on the three pregnancies I've had between September 2009 and the present, but how overweight I am right now has very little to do with the fact that I've been pregnant for the better part of the last three years. The honest truth is that I used my pregnancies as an excuse to relax my eating habits. I knew, and would be the first to tell someone, that a woman doesn't need extra calories during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and only 300 more a day after that, but I really didn't care. I love food, and I simply didn't want to do the hard work of keeping myself at a healthy weight and only gaining what I needed to for my babies' health during my pregnancies.
In looking back at my track record since starting Weight Watchers the first time, I've realized that losing weight is fairly easy for me once I have a plan and get started with it. Weight Watchers is set up a lot like a food budget, and that just clicks with me. The thing that I don't do well with is maintenance because maintaining a weight certainly isn't as motivating as seeing numbers drop on the scale. The biggest realization I've had with this is that my focus has always been on losing weight not on becoming healthy. I haven't given enough thought to the responsibility I have to take care of this body God has given me, the body He refers to as His temple! Because losing weight has been my primary goal and focus, things have always fallen apart very quickly once the weight has come off. This is why I'm reading Made to Crave: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, Not Food. The book is all about how an idolatrous relationship with food keeps a person from intimacy with God and from filling the role that God has created a person to fill. That has been the missing piece in my weight loss attempts before, even though I verbally have given glory to God. I have never cultivated the proper internal motivation based on God's truth about my body and His purpose for it.
The following is the passage from the book that has hit me the hardest so far:
Treats became Karen's comfort, what she'd turn to when she was lonely, sad, or stressed. This pattern became deeply ingrained in Karen and as the years went by, she ended up in what felt like an impossibly obese state. Through a series of medical scares and reality checks, Karen joined Weight Watchers and lost 100 pounds. And for three years, she was able to stick with it and keep the weight off.
Then her husband lost his job. They had to sell their home. Other stresses mounted and suddenly everything started spinning out of control. Suddenly, her old patterns of comfort seemed appealing again. Plus, being at her goal weight and still having to watch what she ate without the reward of watching the scale numbers go down wasn't as fun. What started as one treat turned into many and then turned into many and then turned into reverting back to those old, deeply ingrained habits. Five extra pounds turned into thirty and Karen felt the old pangs of defeat tempting her to make a complete reversal of all her progress.
It was time to get serious again, but boy was it hard the second time around.
She knew some things would have to be different this time, the biggest being shifting her motivation from the delight of seeing the diminishing numbers on the scale to the delight of obedience to God.
And then this sentence a few paragraphs later:
Define your week by obedience, not by a number on the scale.
This idea is both thrilling and HATEFUL to me. The part of me that longs to be closer to God and to reign in my lack of self-control loves the idea of making this about obedience. However, the part of me that wants an objective formula that doesn't touch WHY I am an unhealthy weight hates it.
And that tells me something really revealing about myself: I don't want to bring my eating under the Lordship of Christ. Not really. With Weight Watchers on its own I can eat anything I want as long as I calculate its points value and stick within my daily and weekly points budgets, even if a given food isn't particularly beneficial. I can, in a sense, lose weight my way without asking God what He thinks about my attitude about food. Let me put it this way: I can lose dozens of pounds on Weight Watchers without ever dealing with the real problem. And the real problem is idolatry. Food is an idol to me. EVEN WHEN I LOST 55 LBS BEFORE, it was still an idol! THAT is why the weight came piling back on in record time. If I had truly laid my soul's obsession with food before God and continued surrendering that area of my life to His Lordship, I wouldn't have gained the weight I did. Period. Pregnancies or no pregnancies. I know all the mommas out there will feel the impulse to argue with that, so let me clarify. I would have gained weight with my pregnancies, sure! HOWEVER, I would have gained an appropriate amount. Due to how much I weighed at the beginning of my first pregnancy (approx. 20 lbs overweight), I only needed to gain 15-20 lbs to have a healthy baby. I gained 40. For my second pregnancy, since I was 55 lbs overweight at the beginning, I only needed to gain 10-15 lbs and gained 27. With my third pregnancy, I, again, only needed to gain 10-15 lbs AT MOST, and I gained almost 30. Which meant that, at the end of my pregnancy with Gabrien, I was nearly 100 lbs over my healthy, ideal weight. 100 lbs heavier than the weight I had attained only three years before with Weight Watchers.
THAT, dear reader, was not pregnancy. That was me not walking in obedience to Christ and exerting self-control with His strength.
I want it to be different this time. At least, I want to want it to be different.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Celebrating and Grieving - Yes, Grieving - My Expanding Family
I never find anything in life to be as straightforward and clear-cut as I think it will be. Especially significant life events. There are rarely disappointments and sorrows that come without the gift of unforeseen joy and blessing; and, even the hoped-for events that I long for with anticipation for what feels like forever, seem to hit me with a strange and sad finality when they come to pass.
It's easy enough for me to accept blessing on the heels of grief, but forgiving myself for experiencing sadness when I have every reason to rejoice? That's rough. Those who know me well know that I am very introspective. I love thinking on the whys of me, especially the goings on of my head, heart, and soul. Gabrien's birth on the fifteenth of March and the post-partum depression that settled in the night we brought him home from the hospital have me doing that again.
And, so,
And, so,
I blog.
Post-partum depression is, largely, a biological phenomenon triggered by hormones whipping a 180 after a baby is born and throwing a mother's body into general confusion and chaos. However, as with most, if not all, biological processes, there is an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual component that is uniquely "tailored" to each women's own set of fears, insecurities, and limitations. What this means, among other things, is that a woman can have very different experiences of post-partum depression with each pregnancy, even though the biological impact on her brain may be similar. (I'm not a neurologist. Just theorizing here.)
I think my bout of PPD following Gabrien hit me doubly hard and threw me off for that reason. I had already weathered PPD with Jonathan, and my particular set of fears, insecurities, and limitations after he was born centered around being a brand new mom with cerebral palsy and having ZERO confidence that I had what it took to be his mother. Over the fifteen and a half months with Jonathan before Gabrien was born, I mastered many, many different physical skills needed to care for Jonathan, and I didn't go into my pregnancy with Gabrien worried about my ability to take care of him. (At least, not in the same way that I worried with Jonathan.) Therefore, although I was expecting to encounter a certain measure of PPD this time around because of my history with chronic depression, I was almost entirely unprepared for how quickly it pulled me under and how debilitating it was. To tell you the truth, it was WORSE this time than with Jonathan despite my previous experience and the knowledge that came with it.
I think my bout of PPD following Gabrien hit me doubly hard and threw me off for that reason. I had already weathered PPD with Jonathan, and my particular set of fears, insecurities, and limitations after he was born centered around being a brand new mom with cerebral palsy and having ZERO confidence that I had what it took to be his mother. Over the fifteen and a half months with Jonathan before Gabrien was born, I mastered many, many different physical skills needed to care for Jonathan, and I didn't go into my pregnancy with Gabrien worried about my ability to take care of him. (At least, not in the same way that I worried with Jonathan.) Therefore, although I was expecting to encounter a certain measure of PPD this time around because of my history with chronic depression, I was almost entirely unprepared for how quickly it pulled me under and how debilitating it was. To tell you the truth, it was WORSE this time than with Jonathan despite my previous experience and the knowledge that came with it.
I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why it was so much worse after Gabrien, and what I've come to realize is that I was experiencing the disconnect between Gabrien's birth (which was SO MUCH wanted and happily anticipated) and the reality of Gabrien's permanent presence in our family. Please do not misunderstand. I love Gabrien with all my heart and feel SO PRIVILEGED to be his mother and proud to have him as my youngest son, but I experienced a deluge of very real (and EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE AND GUILTY) sadness and grief over the need to graft him into our family. After we brought Gabrien home, it hit my heart very hard that this was not going to be like bringing Jonathan home from the NICU and then having the next fifteen-ish months of being just the three of us, Daddy, Mommy, and Jonathan. Gabrien was being brought home into a family that had already been started, that already had routines and structure centered around a completely different child. Part of me HATED that. As I spiraled down deeper and deeper into the PPD, I found myself battling resentment against Gabrien for taking me away from Jonathan, along with resentment against Jonathan for taking me away from Gabrien. When I realized that I was resenting my own children, the loathing for myself as a mother (because what kind of mother resents her precious children instead of rejoicing in them?) pushed my mind and heart almost to the breaking point. I felt a panicked desperation to somehow regain what was lost in our home when Gabrien was born, and knowing that things would never be quite the same made me frantic.
This frantic energy presented itself as a borderline obsession over Jonathan's adjustment to having a new baby in the house. Every emotional outburst or frustrated behavior from him felt like a punch in the stomach and, in my mind, was proof that, in wanting to having another baby, I had chosen to disregard and neglect my sweet J-Pants. As you can probably see, it would be fairly easy at this point for a depressed and anxious post-partum (i.e. flooded with chaotic hormones) mind to give in to viewing Gabrien as a threat to Jonathan. I did my best to fight thinking this way, but PPD has a way of developing a voice of its own; and every moment I spent with Gabrien felt like actively turning my back on Jonathan and pushing him away. I will admit that, in the darkest moments of my PPD, I thought back to how my pregnancy with Gabrien had been tentatively diagnosed as a blighted ovum early in the first trimester (meaning that my uterus was empty and no baby was present), and I had flickering thoughts of how it may have been better if that had happened instead of Gabrien being born and jeopardizing my relationship with Jonathan. The thoughts were fleeting and not indulged in, but I hated myself for thinking them. I am now well past that horrible time, and I can hardly believe that I could ever think something that horrible; but it shows how scary and terrifying PPD can be, especially in a woman with a history of anxiety and depression.
Gabrien and Jonathan are now six months and almost twenty-two months respectively, and my worries about Jonathan successfully adjusting to Gabrien and Jason and I successfully integrating Gabrien into our family have all but vanished. Both boys seem to have a very real affection for and attachment to each other; and, although having two sons so close in age and so young has its challenges, nothing that I tortured myself with during my PPD has materialized.
Praise God for His faithfulness in seeing me through that awful time and for forming our family as beautifully as He has! The fundamental lesson that He has written on my heart through all of this is that it is HE who orchestrates my story and HE who is over all. He is in control of when life comes into being. He is in control of the planning and timing of our family. He is in control of post-partum hormone fluctuations and imbalanced brain chemistry. And, although I felt like Satan's personal playground in the midst of my hellish post-partum thoughts and chaotic emotions, GOD - and GOD ALONE! - was in control the entire time, fulfilling His promises to me that He would never leave me or forsake me.
The following verses are from a Psalm that has been precious to me for most of my walk with Christ these 12 years, and they speak perfectly to how low PPD brought me and how faithfully God rescued me from it.
To God be the glory.
This frantic energy presented itself as a borderline obsession over Jonathan's adjustment to having a new baby in the house. Every emotional outburst or frustrated behavior from him felt like a punch in the stomach and, in my mind, was proof that, in wanting to having another baby, I had chosen to disregard and neglect my sweet J-Pants. As you can probably see, it would be fairly easy at this point for a depressed and anxious post-partum (i.e. flooded with chaotic hormones) mind to give in to viewing Gabrien as a threat to Jonathan. I did my best to fight thinking this way, but PPD has a way of developing a voice of its own; and every moment I spent with Gabrien felt like actively turning my back on Jonathan and pushing him away. I will admit that, in the darkest moments of my PPD, I thought back to how my pregnancy with Gabrien had been tentatively diagnosed as a blighted ovum early in the first trimester (meaning that my uterus was empty and no baby was present), and I had flickering thoughts of how it may have been better if that had happened instead of Gabrien being born and jeopardizing my relationship with Jonathan. The thoughts were fleeting and not indulged in, but I hated myself for thinking them. I am now well past that horrible time, and I can hardly believe that I could ever think something that horrible; but it shows how scary and terrifying PPD can be, especially in a woman with a history of anxiety and depression.
Gabrien and Jonathan are now six months and almost twenty-two months respectively, and my worries about Jonathan successfully adjusting to Gabrien and Jason and I successfully integrating Gabrien into our family have all but vanished. Both boys seem to have a very real affection for and attachment to each other; and, although having two sons so close in age and so young has its challenges, nothing that I tortured myself with during my PPD has materialized.
Praise God for His faithfulness in seeing me through that awful time and for forming our family as beautifully as He has! The fundamental lesson that He has written on my heart through all of this is that it is HE who orchestrates my story and HE who is over all. He is in control of when life comes into being. He is in control of the planning and timing of our family. He is in control of post-partum hormone fluctuations and imbalanced brain chemistry. And, although I felt like Satan's personal playground in the midst of my hellish post-partum thoughts and chaotic emotions, GOD - and GOD ALONE! - was in control the entire time, fulfilling His promises to me that He would never leave me or forsake me.
The following verses are from a Psalm that has been precious to me for most of my walk with Christ these 12 years, and they speak perfectly to how low PPD brought me and how faithfully God rescued me from it.
The Lord Is My Rock and My Fortress
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, fthe servant of the Lord, gwho addressed the words of this hsong to the Lord on the day when the Lord rescued him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul. He said:
From his stemple he heard my voice,
and devouring ufire from his mouth;
xthick darkness was under his feet.
he came swiftly on zthe wings of the wind.
thick clouds bdark with water.
chailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.
and the Most High uttered his evoice,
he flashed forth lightnings and grouted them.
at the blast of jthe breath of your nostrils.
for they were ntoo mighty for me.
he rescued me, because he pdelighted in me.
To God be the glory.
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