The Real Reason You're Still Stuck in Body Image or Other Issues for Christian Women

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Life Audio. Hey, their friend to other creekmore Here. Thanks for listening to the Compared to You podcasts. Today. Hey, today we're talking or real talk about why we feel stuck. Have you ever just gotten stuck? Maybe around the way you feel about your body, even really the way we feel around anything. I mean, body image issues are often the surface thing that perhaps we notice are most aware of that often there's a whole lot beneath the surface where we can see the same pattern that's happening with our body image issues, with other circumstances or struggles in our life. And so today we're going to talk about what do you do if you just are stuck, if you don't know how to get unstuck, if you feel like you're trying, you're doing, you're striving, you're just trying to check all the boxes to get unstuck, and you are still stuck. This one is for you. I'm glad you're here today. Hey. Are you friends with us on improvebody image dot Com? Yes, we have a friends list. Everyone has an email list, I get it. But we send out one encouraging message a week, and we've got freebies from time to time and just can keep you up to date on new courses and other books that we launch. We'd love to just have you partner with us. There you can get improved bodymanche dot com. It's also a great place to search for podcast episodes that are specific to things that you are struggling with from week to week. And you can find all my U version bibble reading plans, you can find out about all my books. All the things are there, so go to improve bodymanche dot com. You can take a free body image quiz, which is super fun. We all like quizzes, right, so you can take a quiz there and become email friends with us, and I promise we won't spam you. Okay, Now let's get to today's episode. Hey then, well, I'm glad you're listening today. I want to just let you know that I am trying to design this episode as an episode that you can go back to and listen to again and again. I'm trying to record this for those days when you're like I just can't anymore, like I just don't know what to do anymore, or maybe maybe you've said something more like this, if I can't change my body, I'll just die. And I don't mean that in a literal sense, but just the feeling is so overwhelming you can't stand it anymore. You're just hating your body, hating how you feel, hating how you look, and you feel like you just can't take it anymore. And again, like I said in the intro, it doesn't have to just be your body. It could be anything in your life where you get to that point where you're just like, unless this happens, I feel like I want to die. This reminds me of Rachel's desperation and Jenesis thirty. Maybe you know the story of Rachel and Leah, and they're both married to the same guy, Jacob. That's a mess there. But in Jenesis thirty, verses one and two, Rachel is saying, or maybe more accurately, yelling, to Jacob, give me children or I'll die. She's so frustrated, she's overwhelmed, her feelings have swallowed her whole. She just can't take it anymore. She's desperate. Maybe that's how you felt sometimes too, Maybe that's how you feel right now now if we pause and look at what's really going on here for Rachel specifically, oh maybe for you too. I'll leave that up to you but we can see that part of Rachel's desperation is actually envy. You see, if you remember the story, what's happening is Leah and Rachel both married to Jacob, but Leah keeps getting pregnant. She said, baby after baby after baby, and on top of that, boy babies, which were even more valuable in that society, more of a status symbol to be a mom of boys, and Rachel just can't take it anymore. Leah is getting ahead, Leah is winning in life. Leah is beating her. Leah's got the dream and Rachel can't take it. She must have it too. It's eating her alive. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you're watching everyone around you shrink on GLP ones but you don't personally feel that's the right move for you. Or maybe you want to scream every time you get on social media, between the weight loss ads, the supplement ads, the photos of your friends who've recently shrunk, it's driving you crazy, and perhaps, like Rachel, instead of yelling at Jacob, although I don't know, maybe you're yelling at the man in your life, but you're yelling at the sky, give me weight loss or I'll die. Give me a thinner body, a better body, or I surely won't make it another day. Oh maybe you've prayed this God? Is that me skinny? Or I'll always be miserable, I'll always hate my life. I can't think of anything else. This is all I want. This is my one desire. Oh friend, I think I've said and I've prayed it. Well, let's pause a second. My one desire. Oh my, we've stopped singing God, I'm desperate for you, and maybe we've replaced it with God. I'm desperate for fill in the blank. Maybe it's I'm desperate for thinness. Maybe it's I'm desperate for something else in your life. And please hear me. The only way I can articulate this clearly is because I've thought all these thoughts and I've felt all these feelings. The struggle is real. There's no shame or blame coming at you in this. I'm not trying to make you feel bad about where you're at. Please hear that I've been there too. But instead, today I want to call you out of this place of darkness because I don't want you to stay stuck. And I think what will help that most is if I can challenge you to think about your struggle biblically. That's what helped me. I want to inspire you to lift your thoughts higher. So let's go back to the Rachel Lea story for a second. While Rachel is desperate for the babies that Leah has kept having, Lea's also desperate. It's interesting that Rachel can't see that. But Lia's desperation is a little different because Leah's longing for love and attention from Jacob, who is rightfully her husband as well. I mean, Leah has what Rachel wants, but it's also Leah envying Rachel because Rachel has what she wants. And isn't it strange to think about? Like Rachel is sure if she just has what Leah has, she'll be satisfied, she'll be happy, and Leah probably similarly is sure that if she just has what Rachel has, then she'll be satisfied, then she'll be happy. But they're both missing the point. Well not Leah missed it a lot, but there's this interesting, very rare moment of clarity that we see in scripture, and it happens for Leah when she gives birth to Judah, her fourth baby. Now, if you're not super familiar with the Bible, what you need to know is that Jesus is from the tribe of Judah. Rachel and Leah's sons eventually go on to be the twelve tribes of Israel. But Judah goes on to be the great, great several more great grandfather of Jesus. And when Leah has this baby, when she gives birth to Judah in Genesis twenty nine thirty five, she names him a little bit differently. Okay, so Judah and her fourth son, but the first few boys are named names that kind of tell us about where Leah's at, right. The first boy's name really means now my husband will see me, and the second boy's name is like, now my husband will hear me. But she gets to Judah number four and recognizes something. She recognizes that none of those driving all she thought those baby boys were gonna bring her closer to her husband, that they were gonna win her the kind of love and affection she really wanted from her husband, and none of it worked. Three babies nothing. But so she gets to baby four and Judah means, now I will praise the Lord. Leah shifts her atude. She shifts her thinking. She makes an intentional declaration of gratitude for what God has given her, instead of embracing envy or longing or an inordinate desire for something else. She thinks she needs to satisfy her I see, Rachel is kind of believing the same lie that Leah was believing. Like, Rachel believes that as soon as she has that baby, she'll have it all. She'll be able to rest and just savor the victory. She'll have Jacob's love, and she'll have given him a son. But does this actually work for Rachel. Well, you can read the rest of the story. I mean, Rachel and Leah start making their servants sleep with Jacob, and then eventually in chapter thirty, verse twenty two, God remembers Rachel and she does have a son. But what does Rachel do, Well, she doesn't stop and pause and see this as a great gift from God that makes her more grateful and more faithful to him. Instead, what we see is Rachel can't leave Laban's home without stealing the household idols. Now, most scholars believe these were fertility idols. So Rachel has the baby boys she always thought would make her happy, and what happened it wasn't enough. She wanted more. Instead of believing the Lord could do it for her again or trusting him to provide as he already had provided, she stole the idols. Getting what she wanted, what she desired, what she thought she couldn't live without, did not draw her closer to God. In fact, it separated her further from him. So hear me clearly, friend, It's not a bad desire to want weight loss or body change, or just to look different, or for other circumstances in your life to be different. These aren't bad desires. I mean, you don't have to be living under a rock to not want a different body. In our culture like fat is the new poor. Someday I'm going to write an article called that if you're still carrying extra weight in the age of Ozenthic, it must be because you can't afford it or you are too dumb to know about it. I mean, this is the cultural attitude that is present everywhere, and it's really difficult to navigate. There's so much shame around this, and there may even be more stigma around having a larger body at this moment in history because of how these glps have just taken over everything, and hear me clearly, I'm not mad at you if you're using them. My only hope is that you are not believing the hype that they'll fix everything forever and ever, especially when it comes to body image issues, because friend, body image issues are always about so much more than just your body. As I was saying before the break, us are about so much more than just your body. At the beginning of June, we started another forty Day Journey. We try to do this journey quarterly. It's six weeks of online meetings where we walk through my forty Day Body Image workbook help for Christian women who've tried everything. And if you're listening to this mid June, like you've missed a few sessions, but you can still join us. You can still sign up now, and I'd actually encourage you to do that and not wait. Just take action today because you can watch all the sessions you missed via replay, and then if you're not reading along or not able to keep up, you can just be a fly on the wall. Just listening to our conversations will encourage your journey with finding body image freedom. But I mentioned this because recently on one of our first calls, and these weren't her exact words, but essentially, one participant asked me the question, and she's kind of like, what's the secret, Heather, Like, what's the secret to fixing all of this? Like? What is the actual goal that I'm working toward that will help me find peace with my body whether I'm skinny or pudgy or just outright fat? Like, what is the secret to, as Paul says it, like being content in all circumstances as it pertains to my body. And I had to pause and think for a second, and the answer that came to me was this pure humility. Now I use the adjective pure before the word humility on purpose because many of us believe that we are humble naturally because we don't really like ourselves or we don't really like our bodies that much, And we define humility as the opposite of pride. Pride, we believe is loving yourself a lot, and so that humility must be not loving yourself or not really even liking yourself. And we even like carried this conversation in the group discussion into people pleasing. In fact, if you join the forty Day Journey this summer. You get the replays, you can listen to our whole conversation. I thought it was really interesting. But in short, people pleasing is not humility. We're actually people pleasing because we think we can control what others think of us. And it's actually just another part of pride, and that probably deserves a whole podcast in and of itself. But let's go back to humility. You've probably heard the quote. It's misattributed all the time, so I'm not even gonna try because I know I get it wrong. But the quote is humility is not thinking less of yourself, but it's thinking of yourself less. And this gives us a good starting place as we think of humility. But let's look deeper into scripture for more insight. Okay, perhaps you remember in Philippines too, that's when we read about Christ's humility, that Jesus came and he emptied himself of all of the glory he had being God, but he came to earth as a baby, a fully human man. A better biblical definition of humility is in these three words meekness, lowliness, and well, it's actually three more words, absence of self. The Greek word that's translated humility and colautions three twelve literally means lowliness of mind. It is thinking of others more, higher, better. You choose your adjective there better than yourself. Right, and again, that doesn't mean that you have a negative view of yourself. It doesn't mean that you have quote unquote poor self esteem. It just means that you have a heart posture where it's okay if others are better. And this is what happens when we die to ourselves. A scripture structs us, right, that's when we can find this kind of humility. When we die to self, we give up all the ways that we've tried in and of ourselves to settle our own worth. There's like all these identities that we've tried to assume so that we could feel valuable or important or lovable or worthy or special. Right. Identity is like I'm the thin one, I'm the put together one, I'm the good mom, I'm the great athlete, I'm the clean eater. I could go on and on and on and again. It's not that any of these identities are necessarily bad, but when we find our identity and worse in these things, that we've tried to strive for to prove our value, O friend, we're chasing after false idols. And Paul says, perhaps you remember Paul talking about his whole resume, right, but then he says, that's all dung. He's like, that's not that's crap. Maybe the best common vernacular word. He says, I have nothing to boast about. I have nothing to brag about, even though I've got this long resume of I'm this, I'm that. Nothing on this list of things, of identities, of things that should make me valuable according to the standards of this world. Nothing is giving me worth. Nothing can give me worth other than Jesus. I did a podcast on this topic a year or more ago, and I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes. The podcast episode is called what If I just want a body I'm proud of? And I think it'll give you even more insight. Off. This is something you've wrestled with. But back to you and why you're still stuck. Oh friend, I'm gonna say this as gently and as lovingly as I can, but you need to get over yourself. Well. I'm not saying this is easy. I know there's lots of buzz about nervous system regulation and oh, you're stuck in fight or flight from decades of childhood trauma. And there's all sorts of other reasons that popular psychology maybe saying that you can't or you won't ever be able to get over yourself, you'll never feel safe, you'll never be able to stop thinking about you. But let me affirm something to you. Jesus doesn't ask us to do things that would not be possible. Scripture was not only written for a subset of people that had a healthy upbringing. In fact, if you think about scripture, oh my goodness, the amount of trauma that people in the Bible went through is overwhelming, right, And so we can't believe this lie that there's some psychological reason that we can't act as Scripture instructs. And I'm not I'm not trying to be harsh or legalistic about this at all. Friend, if you're struggling, get help. I'm not telling you to just get over what happened to you. I'm not saying that at all. Like there's wisdom and finding someone rooted and grounded in scripture to process things with. But I'm saying you're gonna need to get over yourself. You're gonna need to kill that pride. And while psychology can help us explain and understand some of the ways men and women think and operate, right, all of psychology has to fall under subject to God's word. It's not scripture and psychology explaining things. It's scripture over psychology. And this is getting really confused in our culture, and it's really concerning to me. I was with a group of women recently committed believers, and one innocently explained she just kind of made an innocent comment. She's like, well, you know, the Bible takes care of like seventy percent of our problems, but then like the other the rest, like we need psychology to answer for And I had to correct, and I felt bad because I could tell she was a little embarrassed, because as I was speaking, I think she was like, oh, yes, of course that's true. But I think she was a little embarrassed because it's just becomes so common to believe that you do need the Bible and you need answers from psychology as well, and that you need both in order to ever find healing or change things in your life. You need both, and that's just not true scripture Trump's psychology. My point is this, though, like Jesus is where the healing comes from. Period at the end of last summer, and I'll link this episode in the podcast in the podcast show notes as well, But I talked about how we can waste a lot of time just trying to understand our issues, while Scripture tells us to what, lean not on our own understanding, right, Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding, and all your ways. Acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths Proverbs three, five and six. I know a lot of you that memorized, but most of us just want to understand. We're kind of control freaks in that way. We believe if we can figure it out, then we'll heal. When I do this, like if I can just make sense of it in my brain, then I'll be okay. But doing the mental exercise of why we're struggling, though it can certainly be helpful to some degree, but this is not ultimately how you heal. You cannot think your way out of any issues. It's got to be Jesus. It's got to be Jesus coming in and touching them. So I'm gonna say this one more time. Friend, you have to get over yourself. You have to be able to think less about you. You have to lay down your pride, because, yes, I'm sorry, it is pride that keeps us stuck wondering am I good enough? Do people like me? Did I say the right thing? Did I do the right thing? Or people upset with me? Are people happy with me? Who's mad at me? Who doesn't think I'm good enough? It's pride that keeps us ruminating on ourselves all of the time. And it's a quiet, insidious sort of pride. Right. It's not the pride that we picture, like the arrogant, puffs up person who's flaunting themselves everywhere. No, like, this is a much more dangerous pride because it's a quiet pride and we fail to even see it as pride because it's so subtle. So let's go back to Rachel and Leah. Really like, who did Rachel care most about? Who was Rachel most focused on? She was focused on herself. Give me a baby's or I'll die. I want what I want, you know, I mean we talked earlier about how Rachel couldn't even leave town without stealing her father's household idols. She's not cant. And when she got the baby she wanted, she didn't stop and thank God for his mercy and just giving her a child. She didn't stop and praise him like Leah does when she has baby number four. She's still looking for something else, for false gods to stave her. Oh, let's juxtapose what Rachel did with Mary the Mother of Jesus. I was just reading this morning in Luke one and this is just a day or so after we had that conversation in the forty Day Journey group that I mentioned where were talking about pure humility, And today, as I was reading, I saw how clearly Mary the Mother of Jesus demonstrates this concept of pure humility. In Luke one point thirty eight, Mary is responding to this huge news. Okay, So the angel the Lord has shown up to her and has told her she's gonna have a baby, and she was like, dude, how's that possible? I'm a virgin And you know, he lays it all out for and like, let's just be clear on something, right, So natural this is not good news? Okay. So She's got this obstacle of figuring out how the world she could possibly be pregnant. But she also has to know that being pregnant is going to jeopardize her engagement to Joseph. She's got to know that any woman who gets pregnant outside of marriage could be stoned by her family for the shame that she's brought on them. Like this would be overwhelming news, maybe not even good news, but Mary's response is not reflective of that at all. Mary's response is pure humility. She says, behold, I am the Lord's servant. Let it be to me according to your word. Friend, if you're stuck, let me invite you to try a new way to be unstuck. You see, most of us try to strive ourselves out of our stuckness. We just tell ourselves we'll do better, and then we'll feel better. We'll eat better, we'll exercise better, we'll pray better, we'll serve better, we'll control our better. We make all these thousand promises to ourselves, hoping and trusting that someday we can be better enough to actually feel better. And we pursue self improvement and thereby hope we will feel better about ourselves. But the answer isn't in self improvement. In fact, I think too often self improvement just opens us up for more pride. It's like, finally I've arrived, I've done all the improving, I'm good enough in this area. And then we're kind of looking for the compliments and the accolades, like, hey, everyone noticed that I did good in this area. Everyone noticed I lost weight. Everyone noticed that I am dressing better. Everyone noticed that I have kids that are proving that I'm a good mom. And then we kind of puff up even more. See, now everyone knows I'm and that's that false identity statement again, right, everyone knows I'm the thin one. Everyone knows I'm the accomplished one. I'm the successful one. I'm the good mom, I'm the clean eater. I've done it, I've made it, I did something great. Look at me. Oh the pride that can puff when we get what it is we strive for. I'm gonna say this gently, but we're a little bit like three year olds, aren't we. Like when we watch a three year old accomplish and I use that word loosely, something like pouring milk and cereal or tying his or her own shoes or picking at her own clothes for the day, and that three year old's like me, digit me, did it? Me? Did it right? And a three yearlds's so proud of themselves, while the adults in the room were like, oh, you kind of made a mess. But we're so self focused. Friend, we need to grow up. And I say, this was so much grace and compassion. I know it may have been a really hard journey for you to be exactly where you're at today. But God's call for you to be unstuck is a call to spirituality. It's a call to pure humility. It's a call to put the pride aside. Stop trying to be something and do something apart from him, or worse, stop trying to be something and do something and pretend you're taking him along for the ride. If he's not leading, friend, you're going in the wrong direction. Instead, we have to do as John commands, and for John five point twenty one he says, and it's curious that he says it this way, Little children, keep yourselves from idols. All of these ways we try to chase better, better, better are idols. I write all about this in my book The Comparison Free Life. So if you're not sure what I mean by that or how that works, I hope you'll just go grab that book on Amazon. It's called The Comparison Free Life, and I explain it all. I also explain how to stop comparing if you've tried all the things. But isn't it curious that John says little children goes back to that picture of us as the three year olds, saying me did it? We did it, We did it. John see's that too. Until we grow up, we keep chasing idols. That's why we have to grow up. We have to put the prede aside. We have to be like Mary and declare, behold, I am your humble servant. You know. A few verses later and Luke one, we read Mary's Magnifica. It's a prayer, a song that Mary sings, and the first verse of it you might be familiar with. Maybe you've sang this song at church. My soul magnifies the Lord. So to magnify something is to make it larger. And what we make largest in our hearts is what we will worship. And Mary is declaring goodness versus. After she gets this big news, she is boldly declaring that she will make the Lord largest, she will worship him. Here's my question for you today, friend, what are you magnifying when we're stuck in body and ma just us? Most of the time, we're stuck magnifying ourselves. An illustration I used probably a decade ago when I first started teaching around this, but I was driving outside of Dallas. I lived outside of Dallas at the time. I was on six thirty five, if you're familiar with it. There was a ton of traffic. I was going really slowly, and a ladybug landed a right smack dab in the middle of my windshield. And again, I'm going like five miles per hour at at most, And I started noticing that if I zoomed in my focus on the lady bug, I couldn't see everything else clearly out of my windshield, Like everything else went out of focus when I zoomed in on that little ladybug. But if I zoomed out, I could see everything just fine, and I could tell that the ladybug took up what maybe one one thousandth of the space in the windshield ahead of me, Like that little ladybug wasn't really affecting my ability to see out the windshield unless I zoomed in on the ladybug. And when I was magnifying the ladybug, when I was super uber focused on that ladybug, man, I was a dangerous driver right because I couldn't see anything else clearly except for the ladybug. But all I had to do was zoom out, and then I could drive without problems. And that's why what we magnify makes a difference, my friend. Oftentimes, when we're magnifying ourselves and our bodies, we are staring at the ladybug and missing everything else in life. Everything else in life is out of focus. And that's one of the reasons why I love this, why my team loves to work with women, because it's a great privilege to help you learn to zoom out. It's when you zoom out. It's not just ever about body magi issues. It's not just that your body magicues change. It's like everything changes. You see everything differently. What we're trying to do is help you understand and notice what you're magnifying and shift shift it so you can zoom out or really even better, shift it to what you're magnifying. Is what Mary magnified, which is the Lord. So I called this episode what to Do if You're Stuck, and I've thrown a lot at you today, but I want you to hear this. It's really hard to get unstuck alone. Of course, we all would rather just do this ourselves. I'm just gonna keep listening to the podcast and read your books, Heather, and all by myself, I'm gonna get better, Oh friend, hear me. Sometimes that's just pride talking. And sometimes I could just be shame that we just don't want to involve others in our issues, like it's embarrassing. We're kind of a private person, so that was not something we would do. But let me just be clear, I'm not sure if I know anyone who has successfully been able to get themselves unstuck all by themselves. You need someone in your life who is a mature believer who can help you process these things and help you grow up. And if you don't have someone like that in your life, or if you just want someone who's outside of your circle, so it feels a little safer to process your stuff with someone that doesn't really know you or the people around you. I get that too, and I want to know we're here for you. In fact, one thing we're offering now is Bible based coaching. It's really called New Fetic counseling if you're not familiar with that term, but it's really just looking at scripture as the foundation for coaching around a number of issues body image issues. But also we're offering coaching for issues beyond body image, because like I said through this episode, it's always more than just the surface issue. You can find more about that on our website improvebody image dot com. You can go to work with me tab and look for beyond body image. But if you need help, if you're just looking for someone to talk to around these issues, I hope you'll reach out, like go through the web site and we'd be honored to work with you. So this is going to be the last new episode of the summer until August, but let me encourage you to go back and listen to episodes you may have missed this year. We're putting out almost one hundred episodes a year, so there's a solid chance that you missed a few. And we did this whole Waiting for Weight Loss series in the spring, and that would be a great place to start. If you're new to the show and you're hoping for weight loss or hoping that weight loss will help your body image issues, man, this will really reframe the way you are looking for weight loss to fix something that might be a spiritual issue. So go look for the Waiting for Weight Loss series that we did through Lent. Also, I have several Bible reading plans on you version. I have one specifically for summer body image issues, so you can go check those out to put a link to that in the show notes too. We want to keep you supported the summer, but our team also needs a break, so no, you don't have to struggle alone. We've got lots and lots of resources at improve body image dot com to help you. Also, one of the best things you can do for healing journey is to start talking to people that are in your real life about these issues. We've got to open these conversations with women. We've got to get real with each other. We've got to be confessing our envy and our pride and holding each other accountable and living different than the rest of the world. We need to be women that are radically following Jesus's call in our lives, not distracted by what the world says. It will give us life and joy. Now. I know not everyone in your life is ready to go this deep. I get that right. I know there's some women in your life that are just they only want to talk about the latest night and the latest exercise thing, and they're just not not to a place yet where you can have a deeper conversation here. But let me encourage you. Don't write them off. Test the waters. Send this to a friend or a couple friends, and see who stops and listens, See who wants to talk about it more. This could be a great way to find a real friend, a true partner for you in your real life, and you two can journey together towards greater freedom around body image issues. I mean you you could even sign up together for the forty Day Journey when we offer it next fall, or you can can sign them now. But we've got lots of ways for you to keep encouraging each other. So consider sharing this and see who you can have a real conversation with about this content. That's the best way to process it. Again, Body image healing is not a mind game. This is something that you need. The Holy spirit to heal, and you also need real people in your life to be accountable to and talk through this stuff with. Hey, I'm so glad you listen today. I hope you are too. That's all I have for today. I hope something today has helped you stop comparing and start living, and we'll see again in August. Vibe the Compared to You podcast is probably part of the Life Audio podcast Network. For more great Christian podcasts, I hope you'll go to life audio dot com. Hey, has this show blessed you? You need more reviews? I mean, who doesn't you hear this on other shows you listen to. But those reviews determine how Apple shows episodes and how Spotify shows episodes to other people. So if you would stop right now and leave us a five star review, man, we'd appreciate it. Thanks for considering. We'll see you in the fall.