Originally published on 2/01/2020.
I’m sharing today about a topic that is quite different than any of the content here on my website. I think it’s a topic that most readers will relate to, but I’m going to be presenting ideas that go against everything we’ve been taught in our culture.
In a nutshell, I want to talk about the prayer that I never thought God would answer. I prayed this prayer for 30 years and He finally answered it in 2019. It has been a life-altering change for me, and I feel passionate about sharing it with you!
So, what is the prayer that I prayed? If you’re a woman living in western culture today, it’s likely a prayer that you have prayed in some form or another. I have spent my entire adult life asking God to free me from my obsession with food.
Like many of you, I’ve tried more diets and so-called “healthy lifestyles” than I can remember, thinking that food rules and structure would surely free me from the mess I was in. I’ve posted more sticky notes and inspirational quotes to the refrigerator than I care to admit. I’ve pinned as many low-calorie recipes online as any other woman in America. I’ve tried to discipline myself with all manner of exercise regimens. I’ve tried memorizing scripture and confessing my food sins to God on a daily basis. In 2017, I tried working for a weight loss company, thinking that extreme accountability and surrounding myself with other dieters was what I needed. I even tried fasting for seven days in my early twenties because I read a book that told me it would free me from my obsession. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. None of these things worked.
Why? Because I didn’t really understand my obsession.
God showed me that technically, my obsession was not with food. What actually consumed me was an obsession with being smaller in order to make myself more valuable and lovable in other people’s eyes. Oh sure, I called it “getting healthy” and “being my best self”, but deep down, I was straight up convinced that I had to be smaller to be valued. This obsession is what drove me, what controlled me, and what oppressed me for thirty years.
The result of being obsessed with shrinking my body was constant food restriction and obsessive rules around food. I was caught in a swinging pendulum, vacillating between dieting on one end, and compulsive overeating or bingeing on the other. Both ends involved shame of some kind. I could never find the in-between. So, I swung back and forth for years on end. I didn’t realize that if I simply stopped swinging to the restrictive diet end of the pendulum, I would stop rebounding to the obsessive eating end.
At the beginning of 2019, I embarked on a journey that turned out to be the answer to my prayer for freedom from food. God has done what—at some point along the way—I stopped believing He could do. My story of freedom and healing is way too long and intricate to explain in a post like this…but I plan to write a book about it. Today, the reader’s digest version will have to do.
At the Lord’s leading, I began investigating and practicing ‘intuitive eating’. Essentially, IE is an approach to eating that advocates the abandonment of outward rules and cues for eating and instead focuses on letting the body indicate when one is hungry and what the body needs nutrient-wise. Like my story, there are many layers and nuances to IE, but I won’t get into all of that today. Basically, the more I have let go of controlling my food, the more freedom I have experienced.
Perhaps you’re thinking about your own food issues or beliefs and you believe that if you let go—you will lose all control. But here is the proof: I have not binged since the very early days of my Intuitive Eating journey.
Two key things have helped me on this path to freedom:
1) Rejecting diet culture’s assigned moral value to food
2) Letting go of the “ideal” size that was supposed to bring me value, happiness and success
I had, for many years, elevated certain types of food (calling them good, whole, clean, healthy, etc.) and demonized other foods (calling them bad, addictive, or junk). I complicated what God meant to be a very simple gift. He gave us food to fuel our bodies. All foods provide fuel. I made fueling and enjoying food a complicated process that involved loads and loads of shame.
The glorifying of certain foods and the establishment of food rules created what I call “food righteousness”, which offered me a false sense of victory and control over my life. When starting a diet, or while rocking a new “lifestyle”, I felt an incredible sense of control over my life, my size, and my value as a person. I felt healthier when my food choices were “good”, but in reality, what I felt was that false sense of control. It was all an illusion. I know this because as soon as I made a “bad” food choice, the sense of control and value evaporated, and I was left with shame and hopelessness.
I’m weary of the multitude of messages that come at us every day regarding food and its supposed moral value. Society is pushing food morality hard. But I’m here to say that food doesn’t have moral value. We don’t gain or lose value from eating certain foods. I wasted 30 years of my life thinking my food choices made me a better person and gave me control over my life. Every day, I tried to increase my value by shrinking my body with food choices. Every day I shamed myself into “better” choices. I lost ME in the process. I sacrificed my mental health chasing the size I thought I had to be.
When I started feeding myself without restriction and shame— I experienced the freedom I longed for. It was the restriction, not my “weakness”, that caused my intense desire for food. I thought I was broken because I craved “forbidden” food so much. But this intense desire for food is the body’s natural response to restriction. The body can’t distinguish dieting from famine. And the human body is wired to beat famine. That’s why my pendulum always swung back to compulsive overeating. My body was refeeding itself after every diet.
Since I stopped restricting, the impossible happened: I stopped thinking about food all the time. I don’t feel out of control around food anymore. I don’t think about my body size all the time. I don’t worry about whether my body is good enough. I see that God made me to be a woman that takes up space. No one who truly loves me does so because of my size. No one who respects me as a Jesus follower, a wife, a mother, a friend, a teacher, an author, or an artist does so because of my size. It doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did.
When God released me from my obsession with being smaller to increase my value in others’ eyes, the result was freedom in so many areas of my life! I could not be more grateful. For most of my adult life, I believed that being too big and too obsessed with food was my cross to bear, my thorn in the flesh. I thought the only answer was to be more disciplined. How wrong I was!
If my story sounds at all like your story, please consider reaching out for encouragement and any help you might need to start working toward freedom. I started by reading books about Intuitive Eating. I’ll add some book titles at the end of this post.
Talk to someone about your struggles. I was already seeing a counselor at the time that I began this journey, so I was able to discuss issues with a professional. Find someone safe who can relate to your struggles or advise you on them.
Change up your social media feed by removing sources of diet culture and perfect body idolatry. Replace them with positive messages about freedom from diet and weight obsession.
If you’re local to the Inland Empire (CA) and want to have coffee with someone familiar with this journey, send me a message, and let’s chat!
Suggested reading:
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Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RDN and Elyse Resch, MS, RDN. This book is research-heavy, but has practical principles in the latter half to help.
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Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy Harrison, MPH, RD. This book is laid out more simply than the book above.
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Feed Yourself: Leslie Schilling, RDN. Exposes lies of diet culture and offers truth from scripture.
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The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. Obviously, you must overlook the profanity, but this book may have helped me the most in making peace with food! It stopped me from turning intuitive eating into another diet, another thing to control and perform.