Here’s the cycle:
1) Beginning on January 1st, you start (or restart) on a diet plan with the intention of staying on it much more perfectly than you did last year.
2) A particularly romantic Valentine’s Day, your anniversary, your birthday, a special celebration at church, or a visit to see Mom (and her home cooking) causes you to slip up on your diet plan – maybe even really blow it.
3) You wake up the next morning with even more determination than ever to stick with the diet plan and not let anything get you sidetracked.
4) You spend the rest of the year going on and off your diet and never keeping much weight off for long.
5) And then the holiday season begins with either Halloween (and all that candy) or Thanksgiving (and all that pie), culminating in either Christmas (and all that candy and pie) or New Year’s Eve (and all the Christmas leftovers and/or the one last big blow-out splurge), which leads to GUILT and …
6) Beginning on January 1st… (see #1,above, and repeat the steps).
OR, maybe this year you could try something outlandishly different – GRACE, God’s grace. But how on earth does that work?
It took me nearly two years to understand it, so it can’t be explained in six easy steps (like dieting can), but the end result was NO MORE STARTING OVER ON JANUARY 1st! Oh, what a relief it is. After yo-yo dieting for 20 years, I haven’t dieted since October 1984, and I’ve stayed about the same size (I don’t weigh myself, so I can’t tell you that number) since the summer of 1986. NOT through willpower, NOT through positive thinking, NOT through counting anything, such as points, grams, or calories.
Interested in a faith journey that brings you into the truth that really does set you free? Check out the grace of God that is in Jesus Christ. That grace really does teach you to live a self-controlled life in this crazy, thinness obsessed, diet mentality culture (Titus 2:11-14).
For more information, explore the “Food for Thought” blog posts at www.weightofgrace.org.