"Define your week by obedience, not by a number on the scale."

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.