Greetings my friends,
I am asked sometimes “what did I do today” in my recovery from eating disorders and dieting from a spiritual perspective.
I thought I would make a list of the last 25 years of growth and learning I have been blessed to work through that continues to grow me today.
Here is a list I created of reminders so to speak of many of the activities God will keep us busy with if we really want to be free and walking as His ambassadors here on Earth, out of diet/competitive culture. It doesn’t mean you do all these things every day, but just reminders that there is always hope and active ways to let God meet you where you are at.
- Repent — yup, as soon as you catch yourself berating yourself, prideful thoughts about food or weight, for your family, teachers, etc who taught you to compare/worry etc about food and weight.
2. Deliverance – learn about it and learn to understand the deceptive ways that humans make it weird and scary when it is a command as Christians to “cast out devils in his name”. Check out some of the prayers here: https://healbytheword.com/tools-for-freedom/ and look under deliverance and prayers sections.
3. Know and daily be in the word – It will become personal for you.
4. Renew your mind
5. Pray (about everything) without ceasing
6. From a food perspective, if you don’t know how to eat normatively, get help. Get feedback about what are accurate body signals and intake that is supportive eating for your health and season in life. Fads are for profit; eating normally and consistently brings peace.
7. Speak Life – when you call yourself names, criticize yourself, this is death. Repent and remember you are not perfect but being sanctified and loved
8. Speak scripture in your prayers and your testimony
9. Yield to the Holy Spirt; ask for indwelling often
10. Godly counsel and relationships – being a lone wolf with your problems in your mind makes you vulnerable to the whispers of the enemy
11. Understand how the enemy is working in our ourselves, our families, friends, our culture but don’t obsess; the enemy will use those closest to us to trigger us and delay progress. We don’t war against flesh and blood but against powers, principalities, and rulers in high places.
12. Don’t take the Bible out of context for your own purposes
13. Focus on physical health without obsession. You don’t need to know your weight, calorie intake, etc. God gave us bodies that can regulate; learn how to listen. If you need some nuance in how you eat, seek the Holy Spirit and Holy Spirit filled non-diet nutrition professionals to guide you.
14. Allow God to heal the trauma from the past so that we are not triggerable
15. Challenge and decode “I feel fat” and other ways that are a signal that you are feeling uncomfortable. Do not just go with what you are feeling but name it, get deeper and what was the trigger.
16. Repent: Rebuke: Renounce
17. Learn to bind and loose
18. Remember God knows the condition our hearts. He knows why we want to change our bodies, why we avoid full recovery. Why we believe that the only way to be loved is to be thin or the only way to improve health is dieting. The enemy will only tempt you with things you care about holding onto.
19. Pray that God would heal your mind and bring all parts under his firmament and not be stuck in the past or a servant to the enemy. God can heal our fractured minds and make us single minded again.
20. If you are a dreamer, seek the Lord on what your dreams mean and discuss with dreamers. Be careful of online “dream meaning” websites.
21. Know and call forth God’s promises
22. Go to the Mercy Seat daily and plead the Blood of Jesus over every aspect of your life and being
23. Clean up hypocrisy: The enemy is very legalistic and loves it when we preach one thing, but we haven’t yet cleaned up our own house. We must not overlook our deficits but not shame ourselves either. (2nd Corinthians 10:6, Psalm 139: 23-24)
24. Stop word cursing yourself and saying you can’t get well. Borrow other people’s hope and faith if you need to.
25. Surrender our self-reliance. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t participate in our redemption and healing. It’s that God’s ways are higher than our ways.
Finally, friends, I will end with this.
Our heart condition and our thoughts precede our behaviors, see Mark 7: 21-23 where Jesus says our heart is where our desires and judgments come from and what you take in via your diet is not what makes you “clean” but the condition of your heart.
We all want peace but if we have open doors for the enemy to torment us through relational wounds (trauma), generational inequity or our own transgressions, it will seem like life loops in the same 2 steps forward, 1 step back process.
We need to shut these doors and using any of the above ideas for physical and spiritual nourishment will be you taking a step closer into the rest the Lord has for you.
Please reach out at www.healbytheword.com/contact if you need help in any of these steps
Many Blessings,
Tracy
