A Tiny Bit of Progress

Just 5 days from 5 months, and I have a little bit of good news to report - at least, good news for me. The needle has budged, there's progress been made. Is it huge? No. Is it where I want to be? No. But it's progress -and progress is what keeps you going.

Yes, I did sit down and pray yesterday. I took my measurements this morning. That's always nerve wracking because I don't know what I'm going to find. I don't know if I'm going to feel encouraged or discouraged.  I did feel very encouraged after taking them.

Here are my measurements from December 30th:
waist: 39"
gut: 48"
hips: 46"
bust: 43"
neck: 14 1/2"
upper left arm: 15 1/4"
left wrist: 7"
left ankle: 10 1/2"
upper right arm: 15"
right wrist: 7"
right ankle: 10"

Here are my measurements from today, January 25th:
waist: 38 1/4"
gut: 45 1/4"
hips: 45"
neck: 14 1/2"
bust: 42 1/2"
upper left arm: 15 1/2"
left wrist: 7"
left ankle: 10 1/2"
upper right arm: 15 1/4"
right wrist: 7"
right ankle: 10"

So, my clothes haven't changed in terms of fit - but what's impressive is that I can see they soon will. The gut has definitely diminished even though it's not yet where I want it to be, and there's even been a little movement around the waist. :)

Adding Prayer into the Diet

Today, I was standing in the kitchen thinking about my life. I was thinking about my battle to lose the excess body weight that marks my past failures to make good choices about what I ate and what I drank and what I did with my body. I was thinking about how discouraging it is to do your best to make changes only to see that they have no impact at all - nothing seems to change in your life.

That in turn got me thinking about my husband, and about his struggles with depression. About how he makes changes and they don't seem to have a positive impact on his life and then he gets discouraged and the temptation to give up on those changes becomes overwhelming even when he knows the changes he makes are for the better. 

I thought about what my advice to him is - to pray over it - and how he resists my suggestions. Then I remembered something I read the other day. It said, in essence, that if the Devil can't make you bad, he'll try to attack your prayer life. He'll try to get you to the point where the very thought of praying is loathsome and you can't stand it. So you won't do it, and you won't grow in holiness like you should be and you'll end up falling away from faith. I've seen that in action in myself. I have to constantly struggle against the temptation to let other things creep into and take over my prayer life.

This led me to a realization. That same feeling of loathing of the things that you should want to eat is characteristic of the person who is overweight.  Either because you can't afford them, or because they take effort to make, or you just don't like the taste of them - you tend to avoid what is good for you and end up eating what isn't. It ends up destroying the body, just as a failure to pray will eventually destroy your faith and lead to a spiritual death in the same sense that not taking care of your body leads to a physical death.

That's when I had an idea. It really shouldn't have been as much a revelation as it was. I mean, I do believe that God wants to be part of every facet of my life - or at least I say I do - but the idea made me aware that I tend to segment parts of my life as belonging to God and not belonging to God. The idea was that maybe I need to recruit God to be my weight loss partner by praying through my dieting. After all, he wants my body healthy just as much as - probably more than - I do. He wants me to see my body as a temple, and he certainly doesn't want that temple being poorly maintained and unfit for worship.

Up until now, I have been trying to do this by myself for the most part. I've been sharing this in blog so that I get a little encouragement from friends and family who follow me on the journey I'm taking, but I don't have any other support systems set up. I can't afford a doctor, so I can't get support from the medical community except what I can find online. But, the good news, is that I can invite God to be part of this diet with me.

He can help me when I become discouraged. He can do what I can't do - undo the damage of past choices - because he lives outside of time. He can help me to see things that I'm doing to sabotage myself in a whole new way, because quite frankly he sees the bigger picture of all of it. He understands, even better than I do, why I do what I do. But in order to help me with it, I have to invite him in. He's a gentleman. He won't come into my struggle uninvited. He won't be Mr. Fix It unless I ask him to be.

So, I'm going to start incorporating prayer into my diet. I'm going to ask for His help and His guidance in taking care of the body that He gave me so that the temple of the Lord is cared for in a manner that is pleasing to Him. I'm going to ask Him to help me fix what I broke, and to show me the way forward. I'm almost 5 months into this no soda challenge. We'll see where the next 5 months take us.

Just 13 Days Away

I am just 13 days away from having passed the five month marker. One of the things that giving up soda has done for me is to give me encouragement to look closer at my life and take control of choices I am making, to see what else I can do to improve my outcome and get my body back under my own control.

A few weeks ago, I started doing planking. At first, my arms would begin trembling right away and I could barely make it to a count of 20. Last time I did it, I was up to a 60 second mark. I've slipped in the past few days and haven't done it every morning, but it's encouraging to see that I can make such large improvements over such a small space of time with daily effort.

Yesterday, I decided to do something I have never done before. I have decided to go on a diet. I will tell you that as a person with very limited financial means it was incredibly discouraging to look at the list of recommended foods and know that this was going to cost me a lot of money to implement, but I did my best.

This morning was my first day of implementing the program. The one thing I have noticed is that while I don't like the hassle of keeping track of calories, it has made me more aware of what I'm doing. It's made me think before adding more sugar to my coffee.

Here's what I had for breakfast:
1 hardboiled egg, large.
1/4 cup yogurt
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/4 cup non-fat milk
1 cup coffee

Doesn't sound bad, right? Except that in the coffee, I added a tablespoon of sugar. I normally add two. Then, I sat down to do my calorie counts. I realized that the one tablespoon of sugar was 98% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar! I have been adding two tablespoons to my tea, and I normally drink between 2-3 cups of tea a day. That means I usually end up having about 300 extra calories from sugar added to my diet each day.

There may still be underlying medical issues - but I can control my sugar intake. I can reduce this amount greatly just by controlling what I put in my tea or my coffee each day. I can go without the sugar entirely in my tea and save it for coffee (I really hate the taste of coffee). I can also gradually reduce the amount of sugar I put in my coffee. That way I'm getting my body more in line with where I need to be in terms of calorie intake.

Sometimes one positive change in your life is what you need to make the next positive change and get yourself headed in the right direction. Giving up soda hasn't changed my waist line the way I hoped - but it has changed my thinking, and maybe that's the more important thing.