A combination of birth control hormones and a good, relaxing dose of newlywed lets-sit-on-the-couch-and-gaze-adoringly-into-each-other's-eyes caused my first experience of weight gain. Googling told me that I was still a healthy BMI, but the sudden change unnerved me. I didn't look or feel like me anymore. I felt so out of control regarding the way I looked for the first time, ever. Maybe it was just one dress size, but it changed a lot about the way I saw myself. Sure, it's shallow and vain, but it was a big deal to me. I haphazardly exercised a little, Danny and I made countless new-and-improved Healthy Eating Plans, but nothing really changed, inside or out, until recently.
I got a new job. That job didn't work out. It just wasn't right, and I was fortunate enough to go back to my old job with a new, and joyful perspective on work. But the interim job that didn't work out was, in the mean time, pretty stressful. When I am stressed like that, lots of me goes into shutdown: I was too anxious to be able to eat much, and I wasn't sleeping very well, and then I wasn't eating or sleeping at all. It sounds kind of extreme when it's written down like that, I guess, but those reactions weren't intentional on my part, and I have a wonderful husband and support circle who ensured that I wasn't living in that environment and experiencing those things for very long.
It took a few days to recover from the anxiety, and get back into normal eating and sleeping, which was fair. But the strangest thing happened on the first day of my newly unemployed life. When I tried on my regular, everyday jeans, they didn't fit right. It turned out that I had lost seven kilos. In one week. Can you believe that? I couldn't. I thought that those kind of things only happened when people were seriously ill and was seriously shocked. I was more shocked, though, by my own reaction. Before I could even stop myself, the thought slipped out: What can I do to not put it back on. I want to the THIN.
I hadn't realised just how much I was judging myself over my size and shape over the last year or so. I had come to be dilligently fighting myself. As much as I am currently struggling to find a balance of healthy diet, body image, exercise regime, self-esteem, and all of those other catch-cries of not lapsing into an unhealthy lethargy of inactivity again...I can't get over how insidious this way of thinking is. I LOVE eating. I eat way too fast, and have way too many hang ups about discipline and self control. I'm starting to see that with food as an idol, gluttony can be just as bad for us as trying to control how little we can consume. With the kind of personality I have, striving for control in this area could easily control me.
I know that my situation is far from extreme, but my recent experiences have begun to open my eyes to what life is like for so many women. What my life could look like if I let myself keep thinking that way about how I look. I don't want to be like that. So I looked into the Bible a little for some divine wisdom. I wanted to hear God's voice about food, and be reminded about how He thinks. So here it is, a tiny part, that happened to strike me straight through the heart:
Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body (1 Cor. 6:19-20)
My body is a home for God. It doesn't belong to me and I must therefore not desecrate it. I am a holy and living offering to Him. Maybe this realisation and these thoughts are hardly more than a dot on the intellectual landscape of the big, wide world and I was a little hesitant to post this at all. But I know these thoughts are important to the one who made me and leads me. I am learning to honour this vessel that God has first honoured and I can see, so clearly, that I must not be at war with myself. Seeing it this way? I can hardly understand how I ever let myself start fighting so hard.
Thank you.
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