by contributing writer Kristen Webb

Reflections on ‘Made To Crave‘ by Lysa TerKeurst

My eating healthy journey is going well.  I am not perfect and I  still occasionally eating things I should not. Every time I make a good choice it becomes easier to make a good choice next time, so I am feeling energized.  

My weight is still not going down the way I want it to but I keep reminding myself that the goal is obeying God not losing weight.  This frees me to rejoice in the progress regardless of how much I weigh.

I found a scripture when I was doing the Bible study Made To Crave that has really helped me get to the core of my eating problem.

When the Lord heard them, he was furious;
    his fire broke out against Jacob,
    and his wrath rose against Israel, 

 for they did not believe in God
    or trust in his deliverance.

Psalm 78:21-22

This verse is referring to when the Israelites were in the desert and they wanted food.  Even though God had miraculously provided water in the desert they did not believe He could give them food too.

I think I may have the same attitude as the Israelites.  I haven’t been trusting God with my food and that is the core of my problem.  I want what I want and I don’t want to give the eating choices I make to God.  I don’t trust Him that He has the power to save me from the cravings that cause me to eat things that make me sick and fat.  I want to keep eating the things that are bad for me, the things that God has called me to give up.   I am afraid of losing the tiny bit of happiness I get from eating those bad things.

But God is the source of my joy and I can trust Him to replace the happiness of sin with a more lasting joy that is not tainted.  God does have the power to save me from my cravings.  I have seen that when I trust Him and rely on God, He can enable me to eat the healthy things instead of junk.  It still hurts a bit to say no to 5 cupcakes but it is exhilarating to push through that pain and find the strength to make the healthy choice. 

God is faithful and able and He is giving me the strength to win more battles in this food war than I lose.

 Kristen Webb boards horses in the country with her husband and three daughters – one of whom has special needs. She has been part of the HMC congregation for almost eighteen years.   You can find her over at her own blog, My Wild Ride Through The Door Of Faith. 

by contributing writer Kristen Webb

Reflections on ‘Made To Crave‘ by Lysa TerKeurst

I am on a journey of learning how to get my happiness and peace from God instead of the contraband food that I crave.  It is going well – difficult at times – but I am learning to lean on God’s truth instead of my addiction to food.

You would think that since I have been following God’s guidelines and not overdoing it on fat and sugar, that I would be losing some weight; however, the scale has been very disappointing.  I am not losing weight at all!

As a result I am struggling with depression and self-pity.  Why am I going to all this trouble to eat healthy if I am not seeing any success in the weight loss department?

To be honest I am a bit ticked off at God.

The disappointment I feel makes me want to eat some cookies!

Why does the scale have such power over my emotions?  I am realizing that I feel it is wrong to rejoice and relax unless I have reached a specific marker of success.  I do not deserve to be happy when I am an obvious failure at meeting my weight goal!

Because I have not had success at losing weight, the feelings of anxiety and failure overwhelm me.   Until I have arrived at my goal, there seems to be no way to banish the anxiety and depression.  I must wait until my weight has gone down to be content and feel like I am succeeding.

Not only does this apply to weight loss but my need to succeed applies to nearly every goal I set in my life.  And more often than not, I am shooting for perfection!

I have set impossible goals!  I have sentenced myself to never being able to be happy, satisfied or feeling like I am worthy.  This is crazy!  My own mind is the enemy of my soul! 

My all-consuming desire has become perfection and I don’t think I can relax and rejoice in anything until I’ve reached it.

But this is what I’m realizing:  I can’t ever reach that goal.  And even if I could, I would likely find that it was empty and unsatisfying.  I cannot fill my soul by being perfect.  I can only fill it with God and by building a strong relationship with Him.

So what do I do now that I realize I have set weight loss as the marker for success?   

I am pretty sure that this is not the marker of success God wanted me to set as my goal.  I was trying to get happiness out of a scale instead of from God.  That is as empty as trying to get joy and peace from sugar and fat.

I had just replaced the idol of sugar with the idol of a scale.

I find jouralling has been a great way to hear what God wants to say to me.  About a month ago I wrote down some things God said to me…

 “Let me be God and put the cares and responsibilities on my shoulders.  Rejoice in all the answers and blessings and praise me even when your mood is in a funk.  Obey minute by minute and let that bring you joy and peace.  Get back into developing good habits (such as eating right and brushing your teeth)  Your goal is obedience to the spirit, and to obey you must stay close to me. Trust your emotions to my care and don’t fear or worry but trust and rejoice.  Grab hold of my peace and don’t let go.  Evaluate your success by your lack of fear and your obedience to me, not by worldly markers.  Go for the gold, go for the best, go for God!”  

Wow!  What He had me write down a month ago is overwhelmingly relevant for me right now!  God is so good and wise and supernatural and provided the clear answers I have been longing for.

My goal should not be losing weight as defined by the worldly marker of my scale.  My goal needs to be obedience to God.    I need to leave my weight to God to look after in His time.  I need to rejoice in each answer God gives and each little victory He enables me to succeed at.  The path to joy and peace is not in perfection or success as I define it, but in trusting and obeying God and looking for things to rejoice in all along this journey.  Peace is something I can decide to grab hold of by getting it God’s way not my way. 

I can be at peace even if the scale does not show any progress.  My peace comes from obeying God and following His spirit.  I can be peaceful and joyful because I am obeying Him and eating healthy. I don’t need to punish myself until I reach to what the world says is success.   I can let go of the anxiety and be satisfied and happy right now.  I have been believing a lie and now I can replace it with the truth.  Satan has been stealing my joy and peace and I do not need to let him have that power over me any longer.

I am not doing this perfectly but that is okay because I will not be perfect until heaven.  I am just aiming for improvement and obedience.

Thanks for taking this Made To Crave Journey with me!

 Kristen Webb boards horses in the country with her husband and three daughters – one of whom has special needs. She has been part of the HMC congregation for almost eighteen years.   You can find her over at her own blog, My Wild Ride Through The Door Of Faith.

by contributing writer Kristen Webb

Reflections on ‘Made To Crave‘ by Lysa TerKeurst

Okay, so I’ve got my guidelines of healthy, common sense, eating set and I am trying to live by them.  On one hand it is very freeing – the struggle to determine what I should and should not eat was taking up a lot of emotional energy.  Also I can avoid the guilt and other fall-out feelings that happened when I would rationalize my way into eating things I was unsure of.   Now, when faced with a food decision, I can determine if it fits into my healthy eating parameters easily.  I can avoid doing damaging things like  eating when I am already full.  I also have been making sure I eat small meals often and that I have regular protein so that I do not mess up my blood sugar and hypoglycemia.   This has had the happy result of me feeling much better physically.  It is very nice to not feel sick or dizzy, or that yukky feeling when you overeat and are uncomfortable.  These have been very good things that I am praising God for.

However, there are still some foods that, though they are not within my healthy eating limits, I crave hard core.  It has been hard emotionally to say no to these things.   If I am not going to get to eat them I feel a desperation and fear.   I also have realized that I feel I deserve and need the treats.  Somehow in my brain I have tied treats to celebrations, rewards, or the way to cheer up if I am having a bad day.  If I attempt to do any of these things without treats it just feels very wrong.  My mind really believes that the excessive treats will make me happy and inversely, if I do not get the treats, I will become depressed.

I recently attended my daughters public speaking contest.  While the judges deliberated following the speeches, mounds of donuts – sweet soft donuts – were provided!  Donuts were not within my healthy eating parameters for that day as I had my one gluten choice for the week.  Because I had determined clear guidelines I knew that if I was to obey God and stay on the healthy eating wagon I need to not have a donut.  But everyone around me was eating them and that was not fair.  I deserved one as much as any of them. The apple I had wisely brought to eat as a healthy option was tasting like dust in my mouth.

I felt like I needed to celebrate with my daughter because she did a good job on her speech.  I also felt I deserved a reward for making it through and enduring a headache.  It was crazy how powerful and painful my emotional need for that donut was.   My apple was not working as well as I thought it would in the fight against sugar and fat but I had another weapon in my arsenal.

In the Bible study, Made to Crave, I had learned about how my thoughts can be based on lies.  The idea that I needed that donut or that I could not celebrate without a treat – that idea is a lie.  Also the idea that I could not reward myself without sugar or that if I denied myself sugar I would fall into a depression also were lies.  That donut was not my only option to find joy or peace.  Part of my brain still has trouble and believes these things are true, but the truth is that God is my source of joy and peace and He can enable me to celebrate and reward myself without food.  He is a big Awesome God and He is not limited to food as His only way to make me happy.   This is still very hard for me to absorb though.  I struggle with depression and have been using food as my go-to option for years. This is a habit, like a drug habit or a smoking habit, and I feel such crazy pull to the donut.   I feel life will not be worth living if I do not get that donut.

But in the Bible Study I learned not only to distinguish the lies, but to fight them with the truth found in Scripture.  I had already found a Scripture in Proverbs to fight the particular lies that I was being faced with in that moment.

The path to true good and happiness is not found in disobeying God but in following the guidelines He had already given me about what food was wise for me to eat.  Also I realized that maybe all along, the donuts in my life had not filled me with the lasting joy and happiness I was looking for. The donut would give me a few seconds of bliss while it was in my mouth but then it would make me sick for a few hours because of my allergies.  This is why God has given me the guideline to avoid gluten and sugar.   Also one donut would not really be enough.   I would be frustrated and wanting more instead of satisfied and experiencing peace.  The idea that huge amounts of sugar and fat is my go-to for instant happiness is the lie.  The truth is that God is my go-to for all happiness and peace and that trying to make other things that just leads to addiction and despair.   I was made to crave God, and if I replace my craving with anything other than God – including food – it results in this whole struggle I find myself in now with the donut.

To get out of this vortex of craving food and then crashing over food that is not good for me, I am going to need some serious power.   Serious power is exactly what God has huge amounts of and a food addiction is no match for God Almighty.  However, if I attempt to overcome this without God I am beat before I even begin, as my vast past failures can attest to.

I need God.  I need to stay close to God!  I need God to teach me how to meet my need for happiness and peace through God-approved ways.   When I put food above God in my life it does not give me that happiness and peace.  I am running after a lie and the result is sickness, guilt, and frustration – all in exchange for a few seconds of chewing!

So I leaned on God and He enabled me to say no to the donut.  (Actually I had to say no to the donut about 21 times before I finally was able to get out of the donut-infested building.)  I still craved the donut and it did make part of me unhappy to not be able to put it in my mouth, but my spirit was exhilarated.  This is not a quick fix: God is going to have to completely reprogram how I think.  I am going to have to keep replacing the lies with truth.  I am going to have to learn to crave God first, and look to Him to meet my needs instead of food.  I have a lifetime of attempting to get my satisfaction and peace out of what I eat.  Even though it has not worked so far, part of me still wants to cling to the lie and try that donut one more time.  So I now have my truth scripture from Proverbs 16:20 on a cue card and my goal is to memorize it – to get the truth deep in my heart, and from now on, to face every treat with God as my help and the truth as my weapon.

Join me again next week as I continue this food adventure with God.

 Kristen Webb boards horses in the country with her husband and three daughters – one of whom has special needs. She has been part of the HMC congregation for almost eighteen years.   You can find her over at her own blog, My Wild Ride Through The Door Of Faith.

Reflections on ‘Made To Crave‘ by Lysa TerKeurst

I have issues with food.  Even my kids tell me on a regular basis – usually after I’ve eaten half a pie or their share of something.  Until recently I just shrugged it off and didn’t worry too much about it, feeling it was an endearing quality.  If there is a acceptable problem for a Christian to have it is eating and I thought it was not really impacting my faith.  But more than that I felt as a “good Christian” there were so many things I gave up (like not getting drunk or sleeping with men besides my husband) that there should be something I could indulge in.  Food seemed pretty safe and so I just let myself go there.  I did not admit this to anyone – especially myself – but now I am taking a Bible study at my church called “Made to Crave” by Lysa TerKeurst and God has used it powerfully to open my eyes.

I would have to classify my previous limits about food as wishy-washy.  I  never really nailed down my goals or aspirations but kept them vague.  I think I did this so that I did not have to feel compelled to actually follow any “rules”.  If you don’t set the bar at a particular height then you don’t have to feel bad about not reaching the bar.  But the funny thing is that the indecisiveness I used to protect myself from failing caused me huge amounts of anxiety.

Here’s what it looked like in my real life:

I would eat a cookie and immediately feel bad because a cookie was “cheating”.  I am not only sensitive to sugar because I have hypoglycemia but I am very allergic to wheat which is the second ingredient in cookies after sugar!  Despite those realities I somehow convinced myself that it was okay to have cookies.  Now I did not do a good job of convincing myself and so I still had that deep down unrest when I ate anything that was not perfectly good for me.  But one cookie is just the start of the food drama that overshadows my life.

One cookie does not satisfy me.  It just makes me want more cookies.  Since I do not have any set limits it is fairly easy to convince myself that it is okay to have more cookies but again, I’m terrible at fully convincing myself so that nagging anxiety and guilt deep down still exists.  Two cookies are not enough for me, the second one makes me want more too, so number three finds its way into my mouth.   The uneasiness of compromise sucks the joy out the situation.  When left unattended with cookies I have eaten 7 large ones including ones that were earmarked for my children.  I have taken cookies out of the mouths of children!  I have also eaten an entire tray of turtles!  This does not bring joy to my life but I am driven by an all-consuming need for food and because I didn’t want to limit my indulgence, I didn’t make clear limits.  Eating like this makes me feel sick but I still struggle to find ways to keep doing it.   I thought the lack of limits would help me eat more cookies guilt-free but this brilliant idea was not working.

My struggle is as old as the fall and I don’t think I am alone in my pain.  My eyes have been opened through taking this Bible study and I am starting to realize that the root of this problem is trust.  I am afraid that if I give my food choices to God I will not get to eat all the fun indulgent things that I think will bring me happiness and satisfaction.  Yes, I am deluded, and still thinking that somehow the road to happiness is down the road of no limits, even though this has not worked in the past.  I think Satan must be laughing at how his lies are so effective – that he has me unwilling to give up what is causing me immense misery.

It all boils down to me wanting control and thinking I know how to do this food thing better than God.  I am afraid that if I give my food choices to God He will hold out on me and limit my freedom.  Like Eve in the garden, Satan lied to her and as a result she was questioning God’s goodness because He had limited her freedom and told her not to do something.

I look like such a fool clutching to the food that is harming me not only physically but spiritually as well!  I need to give this area to God completely and submit everything I put in my mouth to Him.

Everything!!!!

This also means figuring out what are healthy food choices for me by asking God for wisdom.  This out of control cookie monster needs some clear limits.  Anytime God asks us to yield something to Him He is not holding out on us – He wants to save us from the mess we end up in when we refuse to give Him control!  Not trusting God with my food is not an acceptable sin, it’s just a sin like any other.  True freedom lies in giving this area to God not holding it from Him.

Join me in the following weeks as I take this food adventure with God.

 Kristen Webb boards horses in the country with her husband and three daughters – one of whom has special needs. She has been part of the HMC congregation for almost eighteen years.   You can find her over at her own blog, My Wild Ride Through The Door Of Faith.