Exposing Your False God: Food

What does a discussion of God have to do with a book on becoming beautifully, healthfully and gloriously thin for life? After all, losing weight, dieting, and exercising are all a matter of willpower, discipline, and brain-retraining, right?

                Not entirely. In fact, God has a very important role to play in your becoming the person you want to be, so that you can overcome the negative habits and behaviors that have so long kept you from reaching your goals.

 

We think food is our friend. We equate eating with a kind of support, because it makes us feel better. Although if we stop and think about it, how good has food, or overeating, really been to us? Does it help our finances, our self-esteem, our well-being?

 

The opposite is true.

 

One of things I have done in my life was make food my friend. It’s a false friend, but I didn’t realize that at the time. This began when I was in college and didn’t have much money. My parents, who were well-off, gave me $1,000 a month while I was in college. Nevertheless, that thousand dollars didn’t seem to go very far, and I wasn’t used to not having money. I supplemented their money by waitressing 15 to 20 hours a week, but things were still tight.

 

That’s when I began to use food as my friend. It was absolutely crazy. I’d be stressed about money but would buy food because I was stressed, which in turn cost me a more money. Then, eating so much added extra calories, and I gained weight. As I kept turning to food, this “friendship” cost me even more money, because then I couldn’t fit into my clothes and had to buy more—in larger sizes.

 

Obviously, spending so much money on food only made my financial picture worse. Gaining weight meant I couldn’t fit into my clothes and had to buy more. To top it all off, the financial anxiety and weight gain did nothing for my self-esteem. So now I was depressed about two things: weight gain and strained finances.