Day 9

What a weekend! I'm down 17 pounds now. Yesterday I took a break from the blog, which I believe that I will continue to do in the future. My weekend was fun, restful, and productive... All good things.

Somehow today, I am extremely tired. Despite a nap yesterday afternoon prior to a good night of sleep, Monday came too soon and my body is out of energy apparently, and out first thing in the morning as well. I'm not sure what the culprit of this is. I've stuck to the fast, and maintained my routine. But today, I'm just dragging butt. I feel tired and hazy.

Yesterday I had one of those vivid full-color dreams during my nap of walking through a Macy's with my wife and clothes shopping together. I was able to pick out whatever styles I liked, and was un-inhibited by the normal size restrictions. We were having fun and enjoying our day together. I woke up from this all too soon, so I don't know what I ended up with walking out, but it was a fun dream.

It reminded me of how much a slave that I've been to my weight through the years. Thin people have trouble grasping the enormity of impact that being fat suffers on an individual, but obese individuals will know straight-out what I'm talking about here. I have lost opportunities. Relationships have been limited at times in my life. The ability to use your God-given personality to affect others' perceptions of you before they form their own opinions is greatly reduced. The card-deck of life gets stacked against you. As a result, an obese life spawns a bit of incredulence towards you from others, and the ultimate result of this quickly becomes skepticism of our ability to be fully accepted into normal society, and the opportunities can quickly falter from here. The obesity becomes a trap not just physically, but relationally, emotionally, and possibly spiritually as well with all of the relational limitations aggravating one's ability to find and identify with a spiritually-based group. Self-esteem dies a slow pain-filled death.

How difficult it is to live this way, and what a slave we can be to our weight and all of the surrounding barriers that it may create in our lives.

The answer for individuals in this state of slavery is freedom... An easy answer. What slave would not want to be free except that they were benefitting somehow from their destitution and complacency? So though the answer for any slave is freedom, the path to freedom is the difficult part. So how can we put our old self off and take on a new beginning? How do we find freedom from the slavery that surrounds our lives?

Proverbs 6:9 says this:

How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep- So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, and your need like an armed man.


This is a great depiction of what it's like getting fat. It is a slow laziness that happens over an extended period of time. No person ever ate a Big Mac and woke up the next morning all of a sudden being fat. It is a lifestyle and a thought-style.

I was watching a crazy tv show yesterday called "My 600 Pound Life". The episode featured a guy that was 675 pounds and followed him over several years through a gastric bypass eventually, and later being re-hospitalization after he had lost some 300 pounds but had some freak bacterial infection attack and pneumonia put him in a coma for about a year. The guy finally wakes up and appeared to be recovering, but I didn't watch beyond that. It struck me that he was surrounded by enablers in his life. His mother being the worst enabler. How were they enabling them? They were allowing him to be lazy, and his mother was feeding him food that was going to inevitably bring him to an early death. This poor guy seemed to hardly have a chance.

But reality is that he had the opportunity to take control of his life when his weight began to take over, but instead he fell into complacency and became extremely lazy. Eventually, he was such a slave to his weight issue that he broke a hole in the bottom of his porcelain bathtub just standing in it, and couldn't even walk to the mailbox outside their house, but had to get on a power-chair and attempt to roll across a soft-grass lawn getting stuck in the turf. How dehumanizing our slavery can be.

What are you a slave to today? What is it that is taking control of you, and not the other way around? Just like the Proverb says, we can allow our poverty to come over us like a armed prowler wanting to attack us and destroy us by just doing nothing- by sleeping through our attack.

In Luke 6:43-49, Jesus calls us to take action:

"For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, not do they gather grapes from a thorny bush. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. But why do you call Me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do the things which I say? Whoever comes to Me, and hears My savings and does them, I will show you whom he is like: He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock. But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great."

So as I repair a foundation in my life that I know will lead to inevitable ruin if I allow it to go untended into the future, I would encourage you to do the same. I want to have a life that bears good fruit, and a foundation that is firmly laid on solid foundation. I want to live that dream I had yesterday of shopping at Macy's and not being limited in my selection. I want to live many other great dreams too. And as I battle with the physical element of being overweight and the consequences that this will eventually bear, I know that I must also battle the surrounding elements of this condition: the desire to be lazy, the desire to eat poorly, the desire to be complacent. I am no different from the 675 pound guy that I watched, and can end up in his shoes through laziness and tolerance of poor behavior if I don't change my ways. One day at a time...


Until later~