Letting Go

As I began to only eat after my stomach reached empty (a growl), I fought hard to obey this simple rule. You would not believe the things that stood in the way. But today I am going to discuss one of the biggest lies I believed that held me from reaching my goals in weight loss. The lie screamed to me every day of my life up until this point. It was a lie called "Failure". I believed I was a failure. Period. I felt like I have failed on every diet and exercise plan before and I was doomed with this new plan too. There was no way, no how, eating what I wanted when I was hungry without any exercise would work for me. I was going to fail at this too. I had to fail. Failure is my middle name. But, this plan is working for me and I am not a failure at all. I had to dig deep past the diet topic as to why I am so gung ho about about believing I was a failure. Why did I believe this lie about myself? Then God opened my eyes to something remarkable. He allowed me to see. I saw myself as the little child in Elementary School. The one everyone picked on because she could not read well. The one everyone pushed around and beat up after school because she was different. That is when the doubts about myself started to take control in my life. That is when the word failure and all that, that word implies invaded my very essence. All of these years later I was still licking the wounds that were inflicted upon me during my childhood. BIG FAT FAILURE!!! You can't read, no one likes you, you can't write, you can't do math, you are not normal. These lies ate at my soul for years. They have infected my life and the quality of my my life for years. So I used food to numb this pain all of this time. The pain of failure. The pain of being different. I remember running home after school and crying over a bowl of pasta and meatballs. I still did this. I was still that little girl at age 41 stuffing down pasta and meatballs and anything else I could think of to numb the pain of my failure of a life. This revelation changed me. I felt chains break and weights fall off my heart when God revealed to me why I ran to food.
This was my first breakthrough. My first glimmer of hope that my escalating weight has nothing to do with food or exercise but with my heart, my mind and my soul, my very essence as a human being. It is about why I run to food not how much food I eat. But why I eat so much food. My new middle name is Victor!
What about you? What drives you to food? What are you running from when you run to food? Allow God to probe you for the answer to that question.