How Losing 30 Pounds Affected My Health



                                           Not at my goal weight yet, but 30lbs sure feels good!

Lovely Friend,

  Today I sit before you, proud.  Very proud.  I still have MUCH ground to cover, but today I revel in the victory that I have defeated 30 pounds.  For me, this victory comes from a very large battle. A battle that is more than just choosing the right foods to eat.  A battle that is more than choosing the perfect Pinterest workout.  For my battle, this battle,  is both emotional and spiritual in nature.
   I have shared that I have been completing Arbonne boot camps off and on since January.  Though the boot camps have taught me much about food, they have been more successful in revealing my personal habits and emotions regarding food.   I have learned that I consume chocolate almost as if its taste gives me an immediate calm from whatever stress that I may be feeling.  There have been times that I have shoved it in my mouth and swallowed it so fast that I hardly tasted it.  There have been times that I have searched for it with such drive that you would have believed it to be one million dollars.  It seems odd to admit this, but I have used food to replace prayer time with my Heavenly Father.  I have used to food to give me a calm rather than calling on the peace that passes all understanding.  Although I have a daily prayer time, food had become the god of my stress. Since discovering this about myself, I have been able to defeat the urge to turn to food, but occasionally it is still a battle.
  As it has been said, knowing is half the battle.  So I have established an intimate relationship with the Spirit of God to listen when I am using food to replace the time that should be spent with Him.  I love that our Father loving weaves his way into every area of our lives, including the ones that we may not have realized that we rejected Him.  Truly, I did not realize that I have shoved God out of my eating habits and thus they began to become a wedge pushing me away from my Father when I should have been calling on His name.  The wonderful truth is that He has lovingly called me back, revealed to me the truth, and is walking with me on the path to be the best that I can be.
  The path to great health is one that I would consider hard and narrow.  It means that I have to make choices that I do not want to make.  There are days when I just want to eat something that will damage my body rather than heal it, and I have to remind myself that my body is God's temple and should receive the very best.
  Because my Father know the way that food affects our bodies, He is leading me into good health so that my body can heal and will not have to suffer later consequences of damaging choices.  Since April I have successfully lost 30 pounds.  For me, losing 30 pounds in 6 months time is very slow.  It is so slow, that it can be discouraging.  However, today,  I get to celebrate where I was 6 months ago, and that makes me smile. 
   Six months ago, not only did I have 30 extra pounds, but I also had high blood pressure. At 28, I had entered the "pre-hypertension" club with doctor's orders to try lifestyle adjustment prior to medicine.  I had the blood pressure of 140/90 and could not believe that I was letting my weight damage my health the way it had.  I am ecstatic to report that a recent visit to my PCP revealed that my blood pressure has drastically improved, moved out of the monitoring phase, and is at a healthy 115/71.
    In addition to the high blood pressure, I have thyroid medication.  My thyroid never really alarmed me because I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism as a teen and always considered it a problem that I would just always have.  I thought, it was inherited and there was never a possibility of it being cured.  God always has a way of surpassing our expectations, and losing the 30 pounds actually allowed my to lower my subscription by 24mcg.  Realizing that God created food to be healing to our bodies, I now have hope and eventually being able to possibly completely lose my thyroid prescription.
  The more that I learn about how my body was made and the way that food affects it, the more that I am amazed at the ingenuity of our God.  I totally am awed at the great detail that is reflected not only in our being, but also in the fuel that was created for our being.  We serve an awesome God that is worthy to be praised and I, for one, am going to choose to praise Him by treating my body like the temple that it is!

Giving it my all,
Jess

Lessons That I Have Learned On My Health Journey



Lovely Friend,

   When I first began my health journey I was walking blindly into a new life.  Speaking of my health journey, it honestly began about 6 years ago, when I was uneducated and uninformed. When I first started to get healthy, I focused primarily on working out.  I hired a personal trainer (who was awesome by the way!  If you ever need one, I know a guy!)  and my definition of eating healthy meant skipping the fast food.  I worked hard for several months and lost about 20 pounds.  Shortly after, I got pregnant with my daughter.  In several years after, I got into the Mommy mode of survival by fixing quick and easy meals that were not healthy for me or my family. Once I got off track, I desperately wanted to get back on.  I got to a place where I knew changes needed to be made but I truly thought all those changes had to do with the food that I was eating.
    To start making my food changes, I joined my first Arbonne boot camp about 2 years ago.  I did well for the first couple weeks and then went back to my old easy habits.  Although I didn't lose oodles of weight, what did happen was a stepping stone to where I am now.  Because during that time, I started to learn that health changes are so much bigger than food.  I started to learn that food was emotional, food was spiritual, and food was in charge.  Following the first boot camp, I joined three more.  Each time I learned more about myself.  Each time I learned more about food. Each time I learned more about health. 
  I am at a point where I know that I will be ever learning about health and ever discovering recipes that will taste yummy and be healthy.  I am also at a place where I am proud to have learned about my health journey beyond just the food I eat.  To explain what I have learned, I do also want to explain my previous thoughts about the topics.
  In previous times, I would see an attractive woman with a great figure stuffing her face with something delicious such as the 1,500 calorie molten chocolate cake and I would immediately get jealous.  I would get jealous because I had preconceived beliefs about this woman that I thought I longed to be.  One of the beliefs that I had about this woman was that she always chose to eat this way.  Honestly, that may or may not have been true.  This could have been an exception to her daily routine.  She could have worked out really hard to compensate for the calories she was consuming.  I truthfully don't know how much this one meal reflects her regular habits, but I assumed that it was a reflection of every meal. 
   Another preconceived belief that I had for this woman was that she has always looked this way. This woman could have worked very hard to change unhealthy habits and may have not always been this thin.  This could have been her birthday and she chose to indulge on this day only!  Realizing that I had these preconceived beliefs about health, made me understand that I do have control of my personal health.  Good health was not some blessing from above that I missed, but rather a journey that I must embark.
   Food was emotional.  Who am I kidding??  Food is STILL emotional!  Being in touch with why you eat is HUGE for discovering unhealthy attachments, and the boot camps taught me that.  I am a stress eater!  BIG TIME!  When I am stressed, I crave sweets, especially chocolate.  I have come to the realization that I have trained my brain to temporarily relieve stress almost as soon as I start inhale said food.  The moments where stress was the highest, I would sneak away for a few seconds and inhale my chocolate to the point that the morsels barely touched my taste buds.  I have never smoked cigarettes, but I imagine my behavior was that similar of a smoker craving a cigarette during a high stress time.  I was not consuming out of hunger, or even enjoyment, it was totally emotional. I would love to be able to stand firm and say that I have totally broken my emotional attachment to food, but there are days where I struggle more than others.  Moving into the spiritual side of my battle is where the food addiction can be most addressed.
   As I began to pray over my health journey, God definitely addressed some spiritual issues that I had.  Spiritually, much of the time I was dry and not filling my spirit the way that HE designed it to be filled.  I was using food as a soul filler and it was just not compatible.  Upon this realization, I of course, confessed to God and He graciously forgave me.  Not only did I experience forgiveness, but also fulfillment from filling my spirit with the Word.  I can honestly say that the Word of God has been more alive to me in the last few months, than it ever has in my entire life.  My spirit is so satisfied with the Word, and I really love to read it now.
   Another spiritual battle that I have fought with food is trust.  When I get stressed, I often take my eyes off the cross and what the Word says, and put them on my situation.  We live in a hard world.  It sucks sometimes.  Life isn't fair sometimes. But with all this, I am learnING (as in definitely still doing it!) that God is greater than the stress of the moment and HE is where I need to turn my attention. 
     The thing about food being thrown into the mix of my spiritual battle is this- Satan KNEW he could trip me up here and it would never look like an outright sin.  What??  Did I just call it a sin to not eat right?  Yes, I do believe that being in a pattern of continually wrong eating habits, when you know that they are wrong, is sinning. Once I knew and still did not act, then I was purposefully not taking care of the temple that God had entrusted to me.  When I was overindulgent, I was not just binge eating one night or having a treat here and there, I was throwing in the towel for a healthy diet and doing everything wrong.  Because I was on this unhealthy kick (that by the way kept the cycle going with my sugar addition) my body was responding with conditions that were unnecessary simply because I was not treating it well.  Among my conditions were inflammation (that I had to get meds for), feeling extremely fatigued (too tired sometimes to do the work that God commissioned me to do),  short tempered with my daughter (especially when I was tired), low self-esteem (I was no longer satisfied in how I looked physically), higher blood sugar (because I was flooding my body with sugar), higher blood pressure, and cravings for food that kept me this way.  In a way, Satan was keeping me distracted and tired from my poor eating habits, so that I could not impact the kingdom the way that God had intended.  This eye opener was huge motivation for change! I did not want poor eating habits to keep me out of God's ballgame!
   Because food had such a hold in my emotions and spiritual actions, it was in charge of a good portion of my life.  Admitting that makes me sound like I'm crazy, but I had given food that much control over my life.  I had given food the ability to rule how my body, a temple of the living God, was treated.  It's ludicrous really, that I would let something as simple as food, be given the power that it was given, but the good news is, now I know.  Now, I can do something about it!
  Moving forward, I do know that I want to run as far away from that place as I can possibly get.  I want to make sure that from here on out, I am giving my body the VIP treatment and will have to rebel against my previous ways.  I will also have to rebel against cultural norms of large portions, fake food, and overindulgent treats.  It will take prayer, and lots of it, but I KNOW that I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.

Giving it my all,
Jess