- Faithful Fitness: God, Weight Loss, and Exercise
- Garlic Sweet Potato Mash
- Why My eBook Hasn’t Been Popular
- One Weird Thing that Helps Me Enjoy Exercise More
- How Does Guilt Fit into Weirdly Faithful Fitness?
- Are there Good Foods and Bad Foods?
- The Freedom of Constraint
- Call Me Weird, But…I LOVE the Paleo Lifestyle!
- Do This When You Feel Ridiculously Underqualified
- Laughter is the best…Fitness?
- Motivations for The Coming Week
- Ask the Experts for Fitness Advice: YOU!
- I Am a Person Who
- How my Son’s Life-Threatening Condition Gave Me Freedom
- Do You Need Exercise Accountability?
- How Losing the Guilt Breaks the Cycle
- My Family Hates Exercise
- Grace for the Now
- How Workouts Can Lead to Fat Gain
- Your Expert Advice: Fitness
- Don’t Forget de’ FEET!
- Four Steps to Tell Your Support Peeps What You Need
- A Day in the Life of Maintaining a 100 lb Weight Loss
- Three Girls and a Dog
- The Red Zone: How to Enjoy the Holidays and Stay Fit
- How to Avoid Burn Out and Find Fitness Success
Should we feel guilty when we overeat? Should we feel guilty for being overweight? How about for eating junk food, like chips and chocolate, that we know aren’t good for us?
I’m not sure a day has gone by that I haven’t had some sort of guilt in the realm of food or health. My first 30 years were so thick with it, I remember those years as if there is a dark blanket of guilt wrapped around the memories.
Logic would tell me guilt is part of the deal. Gluttony is a sin. Overeating is wrong. It’s unhealthy, it’s sinful. Done deal.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with any of the above statements either. All I can say is, I spent 30 years of my life beating myself up over my eating, and it didn’t do one bit of good in healing me of my eating problems. None. It wasn’t until I started lovingly treating myself with compassion that my behavior changed. We must not downplay the sin, but we cannot downplay the grace either. Christ offers full and amazing forgiveness, and I needed to fully embrace it to stop the cycle in which I was caught.
I know it seems weird. Beating ourselves up when we mess up seems much more normal. “Shame on you, self, for not doing better! Get your act together!” This seems like the way to whip ourselves into shape. Problem: it never works.
See the sin. See the Savior. This is the only way.
This way is weird to our human minds because we are just sure we have to fix this ourselves. We got ourselves into it and surely we have to get ourselves out of it, right?
Not in God’s economy.
How does guilt play into your weirdly faithful fitness?
- Faithful Fitness: God, Weight Loss, and Exercise
- Why My eBook Hasn’t Been Popular
- One Weird Thing that Helps Me Enjoy Exercise More
- How Does Guilt Fit into Weirdly Faithful Fitness?
- Are there Good Foods and Bad Foods?
- The Freedom of Constraint
- Call Me Weird, But…I LOVE the Paleo Lifestyle!
- Do This When You Feel Ridiculously Underqualified
- Laughter is the best…Fitness?
- Motivations for The Coming Week
- Ask the Experts for Fitness Advice: YOU!
- I Am a Person Who
- How my Son’s Life-Threatening Condition Gave Me Freedom
- Do You Need Exercise Accountability?
- How Losing the Guilt Breaks the Cycle
- My Family Hates Exercise
- Garlic Sweet Potato Mash
- Grace for the Now
- How Workouts Can Lead to Fat Gain
- Your Expert Advice: Fitness
- Don’t Forget de’ FEET!
- Four Steps to Tell Your Support Peeps What You Need
- A Day in the Life of Maintaining a 100 lb Weight Loss
- Three Girls and a Dog
- The Red Zone: How to Enjoy the Holidays and Stay Fit
- How to Avoid Burn Out and Find Fitness Success
Oh, Sara, I’ve been trying to articulate this concept to my baby girl who struggles with eating disorders. It’s all about treating ourselves ‘lovingly’–that’s straight from the Bible, too :). “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” If we don’t love ourselves, we have no real basis for loving others. Thank you for linking up and for our inspiring reminder!
Anita, how old is your daughter? My heart, love and prayers to each of you! It’s soo hard! I struggled with binge and compulsive overeating for much of my life. I am writing a series about it. Here is one of the key posts: https://theholymess.com/100-lbs-weight-loss-a-different-type-of-miracle-post-3/ God has brought me much healing. There is HOPE.
She’s 20, and has struggled with anorexia (orthorexia, to be exact) and now binging and purging and depression. Thanks for the link.
My prayers are with your family. ((HUGS))
Even as a fit, healthy, thin 23 year-old, I beat myself up for eating badly. It’s terrible, the society we live in. How do we balance between being physically healthy and emotionally healthy?
Exactly, Samantha. It’s an ongoing struggle. I do wish our American diet was healthier overall. I do think the quality of our food has gotten ridiculously bad. I’m not one to bash society problems as a whole, but it really has gotten out of control. But then again, we make the poor choices…
You definitely have a point about the food in general. I studied abroad in Paris for a semester in college. I ate pasta and baguettes and croissants and chocolate crepes every day, and yet I actually LOST weight. Their food is just so much more natural. I remember eating a piece of prepackaged salmon from Target when I got home. I though it had gone bad. It tasted so salty and… processed!! Anyway, lovely topic. I think we all need to be a bit kinder to ourselves 🙂
I totally agree. I’ve done a couple challenges where I ate only whole foods for a month. It was tough to start but once my tastes adjusted, I really did like the food so much better. Now my family is a different story…
Hi Sara! I finally made it over from my Facebook shout out! Yes it may take me awhile to get to all the posts listed but I am on a mission so here I am, sista! So the first thing I see on your blog when I show up is the EC planner ( I am a planner nut), then there is your topic, Fitness (I have worked in Fitness my whole life- I did a fitness series last year- you might like?) THEN hello FAITH based. It is destiny for us to connect! Congrats on your weight loss victories past, present and future. I will look forward to connecting with you more (but yikes not sure about this month…lol) in the future! And Guilt does not play into my weirdly wonderful fitness…oddly enough…probably because I don’t let it. I am a guilt free former fitness fanatic, currently activity friendly, graced out goofy grown up. OK, just trying to get the weirdness factor up here. Let’s keep in touch!
Hi Dawn, Goodness, we DO have a lot in common! Thanks so much for stopping by! I will certainly stop by your blog and check out your Fitness series. It’s wonderful that guilt doesn’t play into your fitness. Maybe sometime you would write a guest post for me about how you manage that, since the most of us have problems in that area? Blessings! Sara
This would be where I struggle the most. I beat myself up with guilt which invariably leads to more guilt…lol need to break that cycle the most
Me, too, Lisa! This has been one of the biggest issues I have learned from my whole weight loss experience. It’s so counter-intuitive. I’m hoping I can delve into it further in this series and shed light on it. If you think of the overeating as a cycle and guilt as part of the cycle, remove the guilt and the cycle is broken. You remove the overeating. Of course it’s not that simple in real life. Real life is more messy. But it can work.