Sustainable Weight Loss: Finding Balance Beyond Quick Fixes Waiting for Weight Loss Episode 13

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Speaker 1: Life Audio. Hey, Heather Creakmar here, Thanks for listening to or watching the compared to podcasts. Today, we're in a special series called Waiting for Weight Loss that we're doing through the Lenten season, and really the heart behind the series is for us to check ourselves. The weight loss isn't a bad goal, but if it becomes our first pursuit, our primary pursuit, if it takes over everything else, then perhaps it's at a disordered place. But you've got these desires. You want to lose weight, you want to be healthier, you want to feel better in your body, and then you also have the desire to serve the Lord and keep him first. How do you make it all work together? How do you keep the pursuit of weight loss from taking over your life? And that's what we've been just beginning to explore in this Waiting for Weight Loss series. If you've missed any of the episodes, go back. You can listen to them all right here anytime. Today we're at episode thirteen and the theme for today is sustainability. I can't wait to dig into it with you. Today. We're talking sustainability and it's kind of been a big buzzword in culture. Right, you want sustainably farmed foods or sustainably produced I don't even know, but you hear the word sustainability all over the place at least I do. How does this apply to what we're doing around our bodies and trying to change them, trying to lose weight, trying to get healthier. I think this actually could be one of the most important concepts that we cover, and it connects so intricately with an episode we did a few days ago, the topic of patience, because most of us want to have our bodies changed by Saturday. We want the transformation, we want the after picture, and we don't want to wait years for that. We want it tomorrow. And then I've got this added pressure coming from every direction of culture that you're going to be unhealthy unless you change your body by tomorrow, right, Like, you've got to change your body fast because the disease is knocking at your door, and unless you make the change fast, the disease is gonna get you. And I feel like there's some things that we miss in that paradigm of fear, right, because that's what it is. It's a fear driven urgency for change. To happen just like that. But here's the thing about our bodies. Right, And I'm not a doctor, this isn't medical advice. Please consult your doctor around all of these things. Right, But our bodies like to feel safe. Our bodies are happiest when things are just copaesthetic. But they like things to be just the same. That's when they're comfortable, and so to some degree, right, it's healthy to put some stress on our bodies to change them. Right. That's why we exercise, lift weights, or maybe make some shifts in the way we eat, because that change can force something good. But too often what happens is when we want to change our bodies, when we want to get smaller, we want to get thinner, we want to get healthier, we force too much change, too much change at once, and it's not sustainable. In fact, let me go beyond just deeming it not sustainable, it's not healthy. You see. The truth is if your weight loss program is causing you to lose your hair, if your fertility is gone, if you've lost your period, I mean, I know, if you're posting anoposle, that's a different kind of deal. If it's causing you to be depressed, lethargic, anxious, angry all the time. Friend, Like, those aren't markers of health, right, A healthy body will continue to produce hair and grow your nails, And there's signs that your body may be giving you that even if you're losing weight, what you're doing to lose weight isn't healthy. And what I've observed over the years now, like if you know my story, I mean, I've tried every diet. It's really just been the last five or so years that God has taken me on this food side of my body image journey to kind of see some things in a different way than I'd ever seen before. Because I always assumed if you were thinner, you were healthier, Like that was just obvious, right, Thin people are healthier people. But now looking back at my own story and the stories of hundreds of women that I've worked with, I can see how that's not always true. Of course, it's not true from a mental health standpoint. Right when I was thinner, but mentally I was not healthy. I was obsessing over every morsel of food in every minute of exercise, and I was thinking about my body all of the time, So it wasn't mentally healthy. For me. It also wasn't spiritually healthy for me. We're going to talk about that more in the next episode, right, But physically I had some signs that what I was doing wasn't healthy for me either. In fact, I've shared this on the podcast before, but at age forty, I was probably teaching five or roobis classes a week. I was eating clean healthy, whatever terminology would we want to use, I mean I cut out I think, dairying, and a bunch of other things. At age forty, I went to the doctor and I was diagnosed with hashimotos and hypothyroid and I had to start taking thyroid medication, and I was told I needed to cut out gluten and various other things to help with the hashimotos, which is autoimmune thyroid disease, and my body was crying out for help. What I should also share is that I had some degree of adrenal failure. There's some argumentation as to whether or not that's a real thing, but I know for me, like my body felt exhausted. So I would get up and sometimes teach like a six am spin class, and then I would have to take a nap at ten am, and then I would maybe take another nap at like two pm. It was two naps a day to get through a day. And it was because I just kind of burned my body out and I burned my thyroid out, and so all of these things I was doing to try to be healthy or get healthier were actually harming my body. What I love about some of the research that I'm seeing come out now is that there's more and more research showing that there is such a thing as too much exercise. I never heard that before, right, Or there is such a thing as being too thin. We didn't hear that in the nineties, Right, That your body needs a certain amount of calories. We're hearing more and more of that statistic that you know, twelve hundred calories a day isn't enough for a toddler, Right, you are a grown woman. Your body needs more than that. And I'm seeing more and more trainers on the internet kind of share that truth. And so it's awesome. Well, let's go back to you, right, is the way you're trying to change your body sustainable? Is this something you can do for the rest of your life? Now? Let me let me clarify here, right, Because what happens when you start your program, like let's say keto or intermitt infesting or even back of the day we did low fat and trust me, friends, that's coming back. But you do keto for like six weeks, you see some great results and you're like, I can do this for the of my life. I love this, I feel so great, this is fantastic. This was what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. And we do that, right. We vowed to ourselves like, oh, I found it. I have found the plan, the holy grill I've been looking for for my entire life, and I'm gonna do this forever. But then it stops working, or your body's overwhelming desire for carbohydrates it kicks in and you just can't. You just can't do it forever, and then you kind of feel like you failed. But for let me tell you, you did not fail. Your body was designed to run on carbohydrates, protein, and fat, the three macronutrients every cell in your body needs. To some degree or another, All three of those macronutrients play an important role in your body. And although diet after diet comes out and says, ooh, we found the hack to be skinny, just get rid of this macronutrient. It never lasts. And some of you friends were with menineteen nineties when we were eating low fat and we wouldn't touch an avocado, And then some of you were with me in the twenty tens when we were making fat bombs to try to be healthier, and it was just such a one point eighty like, what in the world has happened? Now I'm eating all fat and I used to not eat any fat. Friend, The trends of our culture around food and diet have had us on mister Toad's wild ride. And I think the healthiest place for us, as Christian women who desire weight loss is to tune out all of that noise and ask the Holy Spirit, Ask the God who created your body, because that's the other thing. We're all different, right, My body loves red meat. My husband's body cannot handle a couple bits of red meat. He loves fish. We're all different. Ask the God who made your body, how to eat, how to move, Consult him, ask him. Now, that doesn't mean you don't get outside help. Of course, of course there's wise people that we can bring into the process, for sure, But by and large, the noise of culture is promoting ways to lose weight that are not sustainable and may not be right for your body. Now, let's take a different twist on this. Let's talk about this from a spiritual perspective, right, because I already told you our biggest problem is we're impatient, right, Like, we just want the change tomorrow, and we know, I think, somewhere deep in our hearts, we know what we're trading, right, We kind of know, like, if I do this thing, I might be skinny by next month, and I really like being skinny by next month. But then we kind of know in the back of our heads, in the back of our hearts, and it's probably not gonna last. And sometimes candidly we just make the choice, right like, well, I don't care. I want to be skinny for those vacation pictures. I'm gonna be skinny for my kid's wedding. I want to be skinny for this. I don't care. I'll just worry about the consequences later. And then we have to start all over. Right, then you've done it too. I'm sure you lose the weight, and then you gain even more weight, and maybe you're further behind quote unquote on that goal. That you had to begin with. You made a short term sacrifice, You made a long term sacrifice to have a short term goal. And here's the thing. As Christians, right, we are not called to live lives that are driven by Oh, I'm gonna call it a word. It's greed, right, that's what makes us impatient. It's greed. It's actually lust and greed kind of go together. Lust isn't always just sexual, like I've got to have that thing, right, Lust and greed are kind of the same, like driven, must have what I want now, any way possible. Give it to me, Give it to me. I need it, short term gratification, must have. In fact, listen to something I read about greed and lost as they connect impatience. Okay, catch this right. So greed connects to impatients because it feels an insatiable, urgent desire for more right now. It forces shortcuts that sacrifice long term value for immediate gratification. Impatience acts as the accelerator for greed. It drives desperate actions, risky decisions, and even exploits others. Because the greedy mind cannot wait for legitimate gains or shall we say, legitimate losses, Lust is similar. Lust connects to impatients because it transforms our desires into urgent, immediate demands that we cannot tolerate living without today. But here's the thing. We're called to live by. What not big green and lost, We're called to live by love. Love is characterized by patience, by long term commitment, by secure pacing, whereas lust and greed or high energy, it's now or never, I've got to have it now, and they focus on reckless behavior or skipping necessary steps to get the results that we want. Friend, stewardship of our bodies cannot be driven by lust or greed, right, it just it can't be, and so often, right, that is what kind of drives us. In fact, Oh, I want to tread carefully here. But if you've been involved with certain dieting programs, what do they do? They get you involved in the program, you start to see some results, and then they actually convince you to buy into the program and start selling the program yourself, and then you start making money, right, and oh goodness, our human hearts tendency to greed. Oh it's just right there, always ready, right, And then you start making money and you've got the weight loss and this machine starts going, I'm not making money, I'm loosing getting skinny, I'm making money, I mean and friend like, even if you're not making money, right, Like, let's just be honest. A thin body is a commodity in our culture, right, that is how you are wealthy in our culture. In my course called the Body Manage Freedom Framework, I dig deep into like some of the belief systems and how like really even just our economics are messed up with what we believe about a thin body and value. But greed should never be our motivator. Greed lost. These aren't the answers. And so let's go back to Patients School. Listen to that episode again. If you need to, right, what can you do to support your weight loss goal that you can do right now and you can do it for the rest of your life. Right, you can incorporate it into your habit today. You don't have to wait and start Monday. Right, That's the worst thing anyone ever came up with, this starting Monday thing. Today? What habits can you start today that will last a lifetime? Those are the habits to incorporate and like I talked about before in my forty Day Body image work book. I do have a list of some sustainable habits. In fact, you could join us on the forty Day Journey. We start in just about a month right after Easter. Friend, This journey could be so good for you in terms of thinking about your body in a healthy way and thinking about sustainable habits around food in a healthier way. Join us. You can go to improvebodymage dot com and find out more about how to join us in that. We'd love to have you there right so, but my project for you today is think about some things that would be good for you and how you can start incorporating them right now, and then look at these other things you're doing around weight loss and ask yourself, is this sustainable? Can I do this for the rest of my life? Like I'm not against jlp ones. In fact, I thought about doing a whole episode on that as part of this series. I'm not sure if I will or not. You can let me know if that's something you'd like to see. I'm not against them, but my problem is there is clear research to show that, and let's use it for the rest of your life. It's not gonna work. The weight will come back, and that's a concern for me now, I think there's certain populations right where it makes a whole lot of sense. But for other populations, if you're trying to lose that fifty forty thirty twenty pounds ten pounds, oh, I don't know. I think this is playing with fire. So again, I'm not a medical doctor. Can sell your doctor around that. But think about what you're doing in your life and ask yourself, is this sustainable? Can I work out like this for the rest of my life? I mean, assuming you don't get injured, all right? Can I eat like this for the rest of my life? Or Am I going to show up at a birthday party some day and be like, Nope, I'm having the cake and friend, let me tell you that's not a bad thing. That's my challenge question for you today. I'm glad you're watching her listening. Hey, if you've got questions you'd like to hear tackled on the show. Even after this series is done, join us in the Waiting for Weight Loss community. We're having some great conversations there. You can go to Waiting Forweightloss dot com and you can be part. Thanks for listening today, Bye babe. Compared to podcasts, is proud to be part of the Life Audio Podcast Network. Former Great wisal podcast Go to life audio dot