Are You Waiting for Weight Loss? New Lent Series

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Speaker 1: Life Audio. Hey, they're head their creakmaar. I'm glad you're listening to the Compared to You podcasts Today, Today we are going to begin to answer a question that we're going to tackle really through the whole season of LINT. Yes, today's Fat Tuesday, as it's called tomorrow ash Wednesday, the official first day of LINT, which goes all the way to Easter, and we're launching something new called Waiting for Weight Loss. Now, if some of you are panicked that Compared to Who is going a different way, please please don't be. I'll explain more later. But this is a concept I've been thinking about for a long time. I mean, I've been on my body, image and food journey for more than a decade now. But I've been trying to think about what I would have responded to before I was free and candidly answers. I would have responded to anything that promised me my genes would fit better, anything that promised me actual weight loss. Oh, there's lots of those promises out there, aren't there. And while I can't promise that this series is actually going to help you with that, I can promise that it will help your heart especially if you are always on a quest to get those genes to fit a little better, or to fit into smaller genes, or to alter your body in some way. Yes, it doesn't just have to be about weight loss. It could be about looking younger, it could be about weight gain, it could be about changing your body in any way that you've obsessed over for days or decades. But Waiting for Weight Loss is something new we're launching through this Lenton season to reorient your heart towards what's really important without dismissing these other goals you have. I can't wait to tell you more about it in today's episode. Hey, I'm glad you're here. Okay, So we are launching a Lenton series called Waiting for Weight Loss brass Tax. Here's how it's gonna look. You're getting your Tuesday episode today, but you'll also get an episode tomorrow, and then again on Friday, and then through the six weeks of Lent, you'll get an episode Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each week. It'll be twenty short episodes to take you through with the forty days of the Lenten season. Now, perhaps Lent is something that you're used to celebrating perhaps you're like, I don't do lent, I don't really get lent. I don't know what lent's for. Either way, that's okay. If you're not quote unquote doing lent, just consider this a different kind of forty day journey to prepare your heart before Easter. But here's why we chose this season to launch this new thing. And I can't wait to tell you about all the different parts of this thing. But during this season where we're called to stop and evaluate what our hearts love most, what or who are we really living for? And it's the season, the Lenten season can propel us to examine, Okay, what's really driving my life, what is my top priority, what is consuming my money, my time, my thoughts. And so we're going to give you twenty days of podcast episodes for some support, some encouragement. It's going to take us those twenty days to talk through what to do if you're waiting for weight loss, and that's what it'll be. Twenty different strategies. If you find yourself waiting for body change, here's what you do. They're gonna be short, they're gonna be practical. There's gonna be a prayer each day, so you can listen to this short episode and pray it along with us, and we really pray that you come out encouraged and perhaps even challenged around how your goals have gone, what health goals have looked like for you. But we're not just giving you podcast episodes. Nope, we're doing something different. We are setting this up as a community. Now. We've never done this before. We did try to have a Facebook group, oh but Facebook never showed our posts to enough people. You know, we had a little little group of people who would respond, but not close to the number we had signed up for the group. And we also realize it's really difficult to speak about private things on a public forum like Facebook. And I know more and more of you are moving away from social media, or at least trying to cut back on your social media usage. So asking you to engage in Facebook more to be part of this community just didn't seem right. So we're setting up a private community and all you have to do to sign up for it is type waiting for weight Loss into Google and you can actually just type it into your browser waiting forweightloss dot com and it'll take you to a forum and right at the top of the form and just drop your email address in and you will be able to join our private community. You'll be able to put an app on your phone, you can check your private community messages on and we'll be able to encourage each other. We'll be able to talk about the content of each day. We'll be sharing in that forum other podcast episodes, like especially if you're newer to the show and you maybe haven't listened to all five hundred podcast episodes, We'll be sharing other episodes that go along with some of the topics we'll be covering. And our biggest hope is that this will be a safe place for women like you who want to pursue wholehearted health and by wholehearted health I mean body, soul, and spirit while keeping Jesus not weight loss as our primary hope. So here's what we're committed to in this community. We're not here for shallow pep talks. We're not here for shallow comfort. We're not here for out of contact scriptures telling you that weight loss is related to doing all things through Christ, or that temptation is a sin that's about eating brownies. Okay, I'm sorry if these verses have been used to shame you in the past for your weight loss efforts. Friend, the Bible's not a diet manual. And you may be triggered hearing me even say the word weight loss because you've been listening to the show for so long. Perhaps even you're confused, like why is Heather talking about weight loss or trying to wait for weight loss? And here's what I want to acknowledge. I think as part of my own journey, I perhaps may have been confusing around this topic. You see, for me, I started with really God showing me interrupting life as usual around my body image issues, showing me the idol I had made my body image issues and really finding new freedom in the area of body image. But God hadn't touched my food yet. In fact, I didn't even know that I had an eating disorder. And so that was another few years after I got touched my body image where he started to work with my food, and I I think as part of recovery from my eating disorder and perhaps even just a revolt or a let's call it a pendulum swing that sounds nicer than revolt from worrying about my food all the time, restricting my food all the time, my thoughts being consumed with food all the time, I had to swing all the way over to no, I can't do any of it, reject it all. But now that I've been on this journey for a few more years, I'm beginning to recognize that there are some legitimate concerns around how do we eat? How do we take care of our bodies? What is the best way to eat? To take care of my body? And again, that's not what we're trying to answer here. There are zillions of options for you out there on that, which I think makes it a really frustrating and confusing pursuit. But I just want to acknowledge that the pursuit in and of itself isn't bad. The problem is, or, more accurately, the sin is when I make that quest for health, or for thinness, or for a better body, when I make that the purpose of my life. When I make that an idle, When I make that something I live for instead of Jesus, When instead of loving God and others well, I am most concerned about staying on my plan and getting to the gym and meeting my hashtag body goals. That's when it becomes a problem. But we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water yet. Please hear me. There may be a season in your journey where you kind to do, where the pendulum hask to swing for you all the way to Nope, never going to pursue weight loss again, never gonna think about weight loss again. I want nothing to do with that. That feels really uncomfortable to me. And that might just have to happen for you. But then you might come to a different season where you're ready to think about it again in a more God honoring way. And that's what we want to do here. We want him to be honored in every topic we address over these next forty days. We're going to talk about how to keep your good goals grounded. We're going to talk about why God even gave us bodies. We're going to talk about how can I stop despising my body while I'm pursuing my body goals. We're gonna talk about what to diff you feel like if you ruined your body. We're going to talk about discipline as a servant and not a savior. I'm going to talk about your identity. It's beloved, it's not before and after truth, thriving is always going to come from loving Jesus more than the promises of this world. But it's a battle, isn't it, Because everywhere we see is the promise of this world. You can get thin and have it all if you just lose weight. Sunshine, rainbows, unicorns, fantastic things are going to happen for you. It's all about weight loss. You'll solve all your health problems if you just drop the weight. And while there's a grain of truth in some of that, for sure, it's just not that simple and it's a lie. It's an idol that many of us have chased for years or decades. And my heart in this Lenten journey is for us to just write order this desire. Did you hear me. I'm not saying it's bad to have the desire. We just need to have the desire rightly ordered. And so that's what we'll be talking about in the community. Again. It's a safe place, so you can come and be as blunt as you like, tell us exactly what you've paddled, and we're there for you. In fact, I've got my whole team committed to being a part of this community. Responding to you with hope and encouragement and resources. We're not going to just leave you airing your concerns in an echo chamber. We want to walk with you for the next forty days. So here's my ask. Go to Waiting for weight loss dot com, join the community, and let's start a conversation. Let's start talking about why we've been so deceived into believing that body change was the best thing we could do for ourselves. Let's talk about what scripture really says about what size we should be. There's a lot of fantastic topics we're gonna be covering, and I hope you'll also tune in to these twenty podcast episodes over the next six weeks. And then, finally, would you consider inviting a friend to do this with you? I mean, so many times we do the forty day journey, and I love the forty day journey, and it was almost hesitant to do this because I felt like, oh, is it gonna be confusing that the forty day journey is different than this Lenten forty day journey. So hopefully you're not completely confused. But in the forty day Journey, we go through my forty day body image workbook, which is available on Amazon and you might be a great addition to your forty day Waiting for Weight Loss journey. You can grab the book really anywhere books are sold, and you can go through it over the course of forty days by yourself, or you can go through it with our group on Zoom. It's called the forty Day Journey, and our coaches and team members participate in that as well. But in the forty day Journey, what we hear over and over again, especially towards the end of the journey, is I don't want to leave because I don't have any friends in real life that get this, or that think like this, or that even understand this. And that's why I'm being really intentional with this Waiting for Weight Loss project and community to make my language user friendly. I don't know if that's the right term, but I promise not to scare off your friends. I might still be on a diet that might still be tracking every macro in every minute of exercise. In fact, maybe that's where you're at too. But if you really want in real life friends who can understand or at least begin to understand some of the nuances of the body image, struggle and maybe what scripture says about it and maybe a different way to think about freedom. This is your chance invite them to listen with you, have text conversations with them privately, and then come to the community and say, here's my question. I don't get this, but this is your opportunity to invite women in to perhaps the ways you've been struggling by yourself. This is your chance to maybe create your own community around supporting these issues from a biblical standpoint. So that's my encouragement and invitation to you. Invite them to start listening tomorrow, day one of the day Lenten journey Waiting for Weight Loss, and then join that community at Waiting for Weight Loss dot com. I can't wait to journey with you. I'll be back tomorrow with a short episode to get us kicked off on this great journey. Hey, thanks for listening today. I hope something today has helped you stop comparing and start living. Bye bye. The Compared To podcast has proud to be part of the Life Audio Podcast Network. For more great Christian podcast little Life Audio dot com.