G4 Addiction

If the law of God can be summarized in a positive command, then we must end this study talking about how to “run to” God rather than merely how to “run from” sin. Life is not about what we avoid, but what pursue. How we run to God’s design for our life finds a unique expression in each person’s life. For this reason, you will do most of the writing in this chapter. It is your life that is being stewarded for God’s glory.  The goal is that you would find things that you could give yourself to more passionately than you once gave yourself to your food rules. But not just temporal, slightly healthier things that would quickly become the next edition of ruling desires; and not things that you give yourself to in private so that they foster selfishness and excess. Rather, eternally significant things that you give yourself to in a community of faith to maintain endurance, temper desire excess, and become an example to others.As you read through and answer these nine questions, remember God’s patience and timing. There will be some aspects of God’s design that you can engage in immediately. But there will also be ways you want to serve God that will require you to mature more or be equipped before you are prepared to fulfill them. The main thing is to begin to have a vision for life that involves being God’s servant and actively engaging that vision where you are currently equipped.

Are you enjoying where you are? Even if you are not “there yet,” can you identify aspects of this part of your journey that make it significantly better than where you’ve been? Unless you can answer “yes” to this question and take delight in that answer, perseverance will be grueling.Striving without delighting is exhausting.One of the keys to persevering, especially with a struggle as recurrent as food-related struggles (with which we have daily interaction) is the ability to enjoy an imperfect, in-process life. God does not just delight in you at the culmination of your sanctification. God delights in you right now. He invites you to agree with him; where he has you in this process is good. This provides the emotional stability and security to engage an unhealthy relationship with food.With that as our starting point, let’s ask the question, “What does it look like to continue to follow God from here?” Chances are that you’ve put so much energy into getting “here” that it is not entirely clear how to prepare yourself for life after an intensive focus on change. What do you do when your life is not focused on changing your relationship with food? That is the topic of this chapter and the next.

This is probably the chapter you were looking for when you started this study. Thank you for your patience and perseverance in getting to this point. The foundation you’ve laid will help to ensure that your current efforts towards establishing a healthy relationship with food do not meet the same fate as previous well-intended efforts.You’ve probably known that in order to be a better steward of your body you needed more than food facts and an exercise plan. You needed to understand how you were misusing food for purposes food could never fulfill. You also needed to allow God and others to play the vital role in change that God designed them to do.Now you’ve done those things. That means that practical advisements on meal plans, approaches to exercise, and other life management changes have the opportunity to become healthy lifestyles. No longer are these plans your “savior.” No longer are you merely mustering will power. No longer are you striving to make yourself acceptable to God and others through your appearance. You are now merely seeking to be a good steward of the body God gave you in the context of loving-supportive friendship with fellow believers. We will look at what this good stewardship means in three sections:Accepting Your BodyPreparing for a Return to Healthy EatingBody and Food Stewardship Practices

You will only be as free as you are honest. Privacy kills change and fuels sin. Transparency kills sin and fuels change. Chances are this step may scare you as much as any step you have taken since the first one. But remember it is not nearly as scary to move forward as it is dangerous to go backward. Don’t allow fear to make you forgetful.When you are tempted to think, “This is not worth it. Too much is being asked of me. Why do I need to confess my struggle to others?” remind yourself of these things. Our tendency has been to face difficult situations with indulging in food or punishing ourselves with restriction. That can no longer be our life pattern. Now we will face hardship by being honest with others. Confession serves two functions:Acknowledging how we’ve harmed relationships and making amendsInviting people to become a more informed part of our support networkConfession is what invites other people into our lives and points out to them where they can help. Confession is how we acknowledge our weakness and admit that we need their help; we won’t lie, dismiss, or lash out. Confession is what ensures others that we have the humility and realistic expectations necessary to be safe to receive help. Confession is the door to community; the door through which we must enter if we do not want to be alone in the dark with our disordered eating.Simply put; we confess to others because it is good for our pursuit of righteousness as much as because we’ve sinned. Often, with confession, we are like the child who is offended by their parents telling them to eat the vegetables so they can be “big and strong.” We perceive the remedy as an insult highlighting that we are “small and weak.” It makes sense, but as long as we think that way, we’re trapped.

Should we really say, “God I am sorry my food portions were not ideal (either too large or too small)?” After all, haven’t we established that God does not have an ideal body type? Doesn’t the idea of repenting for a bad relationship with food wreak of legalism? Aren’t we getting dangerously close to holding ourselves to the standard of some fictitious “heavenly meal plan”?These questions push us to ask, “For what are you repenting?” As we will see, the most important part of repentance is never the behavior that made repentance necessary. When we focus on behavior we will inevitably make some kooky legal code that is supposed to please God. We, then, either become a slave to the code or become repulsed by the code; either way, our focus fixates on the code more than God. We repent for the way our sin replaces or misrepresents God. When we sin, we either believe we have found something more satisfying than God (replacement) or we believe God has become unreasonable / out-dated (misrepresentation). So while repentance does involve saying, “I did wrong,” the real action of repentance is in gaining an accurate view of who God is and placing God back in the center of our lives. 

If only we could say that we eat because we’re hungry, and we stop when our hunger is satiated. But does anyone really eat that way? We eat for comfort. We abstain because of fear. We eat to socialize. We abstain to be liked. We eat to be entertained. We abstain to punish ourselves. With the briefest of reflections, we quickly realize we have a very complex and elaborate relationship with food. This complex relationship with food starts very young; actually, from infancy. Food is used to get a child to stop crying. Food is used as a reward (extra dessert) and a punishment (no dessert). When you ate all the food on your plate, you were a “big boy” or “big girl,” but you couldn’t get up from the table until you ate at least five more bites of your vegetables.Food has always been more than fuel. We learn to use food for many reasons long before we had the ability to reason. We see in this statement the two realities we will explore in this step: (1) our disordered eating has a history and (2) our disordered eating has motives. Both perspectives are useful in our efforts to gain a healthy relationship with food. We do what we do to get what we want. That is true of all human behavior. Lasting change requires changes in our motives. We need a healthy “why” we eat if we’re going to get to a healthy relationship with “what” we eat.But we’ve also been doing what we’re doing for a long time. Habit is the momentum of the soul. Habit easily fools us into believing that self-sabotage can be comforting. We keep doing what we’re doing because change is hard. Unless we carefully examine and expose our unhealthy eating habits we will blindly repeat them because “they haven’t killed us… yet.”These are the two subjects we’ll examine in this step: history and motive.

Thank you for continuing on this journey. It takes courage to persevere in something that is difficult. You are to be commended for completing step one and beginning step two. In this step we will examine breadth and impact of our unhealthy relationship with food. In step one, we named our struggle, now we will examine it.It may be strange to realize that we all learned to start using food as both a self-soothing and punitive instrument as infants. Food is a primary tool in every parent’s motivational and disciplinary strategy. “The baby is crying. Maybe she’s hungry. Give her a bottle… If you don’t quit pitching a fit you won’t get any desert… You were so good you can have we’ll have your favorite dinner tonight.” These things are not bad. They just reveal how we’ve related to food since before we knew words. “You began life with normal eating habits: You ate when you are hungry and didn't eat when you were full. But in a weight conscious world, where food is used for comfort, you take small steps and ‘normal’ gradually disappears. You want to be thin, so you become more serious about dieting. You like how food makes you feel, so you overeat and binge (p. 4).” Ed Welch in Eating Disorders: The Quest for ThinnessWith this much history, it is hard to imagine that our relationship with food would not significantly impact our lives. Allow this thought to help you engage this chapter non-defensively. It is easy for this subject to illicit a sense of feeling judged or ashamed. That makes this journey more difficult, because it makes the journey lonely. If you can use this study to invite other people to come alongside you in your struggle, it will be a significant aid.

What is your goal for this study? We’ll discuss several self-defeating goals a bit later in this study, but for now let’s consider what a good, sustainable goal would be for this study:To develop and sustain a satisfying lifestyleThat seeks to honor God by being a good steward of the particular body He gave youBy relating to food in a healthy wayAnd recognizing that God gave us food to be enjoyable fuel“We need a new relationship with food altogether, seeing it as an aspect of life but not the reason for life. While food ultimately is fuel for our physical vessel, it is also something we accept as a pleasurable and good gift from God. There is evidence of his care for us and that his provision of food goes beyond necessity to include aspects of his generosity and kindness (p. 53).” Gary Thomas in Every Body Matters: Strengthening Your Body to Strengthen Your SoulNotice that in this approach we do not use numbers – ideal weight, desired pant size, pounds to lose-gain per month, etc… We simply want to be a good steward of the body God gave us. That is “success.” We will talk about numbers later, but they merely serve the larger purpose of stewarding our body. When numbers get in the front of our mind and priorities, bad things happen.This stands in contrast to ways that we often think about changing our eating habits (contrasting with four points above):We think about short-term fixes that we’ll abdicate in the near futureWe try to manipulate or condemn our body to conform to some idealized shape or weightBy relating to food in unhealthy ways or manipulating ourselves with food as a reward or punishmentAnd trying to use food to distract us from or resolve struggles over which it has no influenceHopefully, you can begin to see that most people try to change their eating habits by becoming personally abusive. Shame, condemnation, and coercion are their emotional motivators of choice. If they parented their children or treated their co-workers like they related to food, they would be arrested or fired. God wants something better for you.You can also see that most attempts at changing our relationship to food are self-sabotagingly short-term. Whether it’s someone who over-restricts eating a bit less to get parents off their back, or someone who over-eats “going on a diet,” the dysfunctional relationship with food remains the “norm” from which they commit to temporarily depart. God wants something better for you.