Loving Myself

So basically I've been praying and praying that the Lord could help me find a way to be healthier and to be able to lose weight. But again and again nothing really worked. I felt such compulsion to eat bad things and overate again and again. But lately as I've been praying more sincerly about trying to love myself more the Lord has helped me to realize that it is only through loving myself that I will ever be able to be healthy. I will have to love myself the way I am now and not just after I look the way I want to. I was grateful for this insight from the Lord and it was a new concept to me. Then I came across this article and it is so true for me! People are like, "dude, just don't eat all that crap and exercise, duh!" And I'm like people this feels like I'm a drug addict except the drug is food. I can't function or think about anything else until I get my fix! I am addicted to food and any addictions are unhealthy because they take away your agency. (Well you give up your agency if you have an addiction.) Anyway, I wanted to post this article so maybe friends would understand more why I am the way I am. And why I couldn't just eat normally.
Every overeater has heard them a million times: the admonishments of weight loss. You’ve got to stick to your diet, commit to the process, stay with it no matter what, discipline yourself to "just do it," and so forth. Yet such admonishments only add to your anxiety; if you were able to consistently be there for yourself, you wouldn’t be an overeater to begin with!



While overeating would be seen by some as an indulgence of self, it is in fact a profound rejection of self. It is a moment of self-betrayal and self-punishment, and anything but a commitment to one’s own well-being. Why would you be able to commit to a diet if you’re not consistently committed to yourself?

Your relationship to food is but a reflection of your relationship to yourself, as is everything in your life. There’s no reason to think that you’ll be capable of loyalty to a diet until you address your basic disloyalty toward yourself. Until your fundamental relationship with yourself is healed, then your relationship to food is doomed to be neurotic.

As committed as you might be to the process of weight loss, there will always come those moments when your self-hatred rises up like an oceanic force from the bottom of your subconscious mind, demanding to assert itself. That’s what makes addiction and compulsion so cruel: you could be committed to your diet for 23 hours and 45 minutes during a day, then ruin all your efforts in 15 minutes. What is not self-love carries within it the seeds of self-hate, no matter how small; wherever the mind is not filled with love, it has a propensity for insanity. And just a tiny bit of insanity is enough to do it—in about as long as it takes to open up a bag of cookies, you find a way to destroy your most cherished dream.

This lesson addresses your basic lack of commitment and compassion toward yourself, your lack of self-care that leads you time and again to punish and betray yourself. Only when you learn to commit to yourself will you stop your self-sabotaging behavior. It’s not enough to just tell yourself what not to do; you must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be.


Well, I know it was a lot to read so if you gave up reading it that's ok. And I also know I can't just not try at all and just blame everything on an addiction. So I am trying!!! But now I am being more realistic and realizing that I have to like myself the way I am right now in this moment. And I have to change the way I see myself to how God sees me. Then I feel beautiful. And when I feel beautiful, I can say no! Even though I still think about food and what I want to eat 24/7. Literally all the time. I am able to make better choices. And I'm not cutting out bad foods entirely, I'm just not bingeing anymore! It's a step. And in my heart I know that I can do it with the Lord's help. I know a lot of people who read this will not understand but just know that I am not making it up! But I have faith that I will get past this hurdle and trial just as I have a ton of other big trials such as depression (which took four years to defeat! and it may come back sometimes). I will also probably struggle with this for the rest of my life but I know I can get to a place where I am proud of myself and where I love myself!