Mind over matter?
Truth is, our thoughts are powerful. If you’ve struggled with losing weight, food addiction, or weight-related health problems, it’s not really about food. It’s about how we think about food.
Achieving victory requires changing behavior. But the heart of the issue is our mindset. That's why today we're tackling how to change your mindset about food.
We don’t think skinny or healthy to become so, but long-term weight loss necessitates changing our mindset.
Just like adjusting ingredients in a recipe can make it better, adjusting the ingredients of our thinking makes our lives better.
Research shows that what our mind believes, our brain and gut respond to.
So, are you ready to find the treasures of healthy living to not only lose weight, but have a changed mind and vibrant, abundant, energetic life?
Today you’ll not only learn 5 powerful tools to change your mindset toward healthy eating, but how to easily implement these steps for long-lasting life transformation.
Step 1: Journaling
Thoughts don’t change until they are recognized. Too often, we don’t think about our thinking.
Journaling is like tending a garden. Journaling provides the opportunity to dig deep and pull the weeds of bad thoughts that crowd out good thoughts. This is important for cultivating a healthy mind garden.
Journal your emotions, thoughts, and food. As you write what you bite, it becomes real on the paper. This helps us expose emotional eating and see why we are not getting results or vice versa.
Journaling Tool
The Hunger Satisfied Journal is a fantastic tool to help. This adds a new level of awareness as you write out the foods you eat and the emotions and thoughts around them.
This journal is a great prescription for recovery and a healthy lifestyle when you're looking how to change your mindset about food.
As you intentionally think about and record food, deep and hidden mindsets are revealed. You’ll want to pay attention to:
- Environment – where you eat, why you eat, when you eat
- Thoughts before, during, and after eating
- How you feel before, during, and after eating
These will help you identify eating patterns contributing to weight and health issues, along with negative emotions related to eating.
As you journal and write out our emotions, we also want to take note of the foods you’re eating.
Are you eating foods that promote health and healing, like those found in the Biblical Food Pyramid?
Or are you eating those which cause fatigue, disease, and depression?Think, Eat, Feel, Cycle
What you think impacts what you eat,
------------>which in turn impacts how you feel,
----------------------->which also affects how you think.
This cycle either works for you or against you. Let’s stop the negative cycle and turn it into an asset!
We need a mindset shift.
The Lord desires health. Yet, the enemy keeps telling us we’re not worth it.
So who are you going to listen to?
Surrender to?
The struggle is real.
But we’re more than conquerors in Christ!
Step 2 - Renounce counterfeit control over your mind.
Once you’ve started to journal thoughts and food behaviors for a while, the problem areas will start to surface.
2 Corinthians 10:4-5 says:
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ…
Even when you address physical challenges, there’s a spiritual element in how to change your mindset about food.
Reject Counterfeit Thoughts
In order to renounce counterfeit control over our minds, it is time to recognize thoughts and beliefs contrary to God’s Word.
Counterfeit thoughts include:
Those contrary to who God says you are.
Those where you are the centerpiece .
“Lord, I can’t do this.”
“Lord, can you take this away from me?”
“I’ve tried this before, but here I go again anyway.”
“Lord, is there another way?”
These thoughts (and others) feed into the enemy's control. Remember John 10:10 - The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. But no more! It is time to put him in his place - out of our minds.
Choose Life-Giving Thoughts
On the other hand, Jesus came that we might have an abundant life. (John 10:10)
God has placed before us life and death. (Deuteronomy 30:15)
We benefit immensely when we turn to Jesus and renounce counterfeit thoughts, and thus harmful beliefs and actions.
Examine your journal entries and do a mind review.
What thoughts are contrary to the freedom and abundant life God has promised?
Renounce each of them. Write every thought that’s not in agreement with who God says you are as well as a biblical truth that matches the abundant life He promised.
For instance:
Lie: I’m not strong enough to make healthy changes.
Truth: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.Step 3: Pray
- Receive strength from the Lord. When you take your thoughts, beliefs, and actions - even in relation to something you may have previously seen as mundane as food - to Him, He empowers you.
For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline. 2 Timothy 1:7
God already knows the areas you struggle in and what false beliefs you’ve adopted. And taking your struggles to Him is a key ingredient in how to change your mindset about food.
When we're ready to be honest with God and ourselves, God’s truth sets us free from deception.
Take your journal and list created in steps 1 and 2 and pray over them. Take each item of struggle, disbelief, and deception to God and surrender it to Him.
Step 4: Submit to God's Authority
This is how we overcome rebellion. When we’re experiencing consistent bondage and constant struggle with food, this is evidence we’re rebelling in this area.
God has placed us under authority in many arenas. We’re often under the authority of our spouse, the government, a boss, etc.
However, the most important and preeminent authority in our lives is God.
As you submit to God's authority, you’ll see how He designed your body as a glorifying example of His love especially for you.
His love includes:
Foods that bring healing
Thoughts that bring freedom
Actions that glorify Him
There’s nothing as freeing as living in complete agreement with God’s Word of who you are.
God’s authority isn’t oppressive. It’s freeing!
Submitting to Him allows you to more fully know truths like you are:
Loved
Worthy
Royal priesthood
Holy
Temple
Made in God’s image
God made you uniquely you, loves you, and desires you to be your best in Him.
Step 5: Take Personal Responsibility
Step up.
Take action.
Know God is with you.
Don’t listen to words or thoughts that aren't in agreement with who God says you are. Remember, you renounced those.
When the old eating habits and thoughts try to define you, throw them out with the other trash!
We’re truly repentant when we change our ways.
When you fail in food goals, don't top it with guilt or quitting. Give yourself grace and move on.
Pray for renewed strength and lean on the Lord for the strength to have a healthier relationship with food.
Make a plan. One of the most powerful things you can do is prepare your hearts and minds for everyday living with food and for special occasions and events.
Determine what the boundaries are and stick with them.
Defeating Feeling Deprived
Watch out! Deprivation likes to come in when we make changes. However, feeling deprived is a choice.
We can choose:
a. I feel deprived that everyone is eating that ice cream and cake and I get this lonely apple.
OR
b. I can feed my body well, and it’ll respond with an amazing feeling of no longer craving unhealthy foods.
My mind is so free from addictions. I love the new me.
You can say this, too!
It starts with healthy choices. Choose what will bless your body, then let the body God designed work for you and not against you.Step Into Freedom
As you follow these 5 steps, changing your mindset about food, you step into freedom.
Everything has a cost. We will either:
a. Eat poorly and out of control, paying with health problems, foggy brain, and fatigue.
OR
B. You’ll eat well, sacrificing in the short-term for long-term good health, vibrancy, and energy.
Freedom isn’t a result from doing whatever we want, but from not being bound by fleshly desires.
When you aren’t caught up in the eat, regret, shame, eat cycle, you’re free to enjoy food as God’s abundant gift for health and healing.
Always remember all foods created by God are written as a prescription for
your health.
As you focus on the Lord and go through these steps with Him:
Old unhealthy habits are broken.
Old thoughts are discarded.
You are free from the bondage of food addiction!
Christ died to set us free from all mindset issues contrary to God’s Word.
Bad eating habits are a choice and the thoughts that go with them can be changed.
In our Inner Circle Coaching group, we walk through these tough issues and help people discover for themselves how God works, how He helps us, and His desire to set us free.
We have a bracelet that says: "That’s not me anymore."
We say it...
- out loud
- to the food
- to our thoughts
Food doesn’t control us anymore.
THIS is how we step into freedom. One moment, one thought, one choice at a time.
We take proven steps to new pathways of thinking.
A Shifted Mindset About Food
A path is worn through woods by consistent travel. If you neglect a path, it’ll overgrow and be unusable.
The same is true in your brains.
New thoughts need nurturing and feeding.
Thoughts are a choice. God instructed us to take our thoughts captive and gave us the ability to do so.
Spiritual bondage grows from seeds planted in our minds. Freedom happens by uprooting those seeds and planting seeds of truth.
That’s what these 5 steps are all about!
No longer trapped by:
- Negative thinking
- Food addiction
- Self-indulgence
- Eating related health problems
Instead, set free by:
- Having a healthy mindset
- Freedom from food control
- Self-discipline & mindful eating
- Abundant health through lifestyle change
How’s that for victory?
Defeating Triggers
Lastly, let me address continual struggles and triggers.
Patterns take time to change and there will always be temptations and triggers. This is not a quick fix.
Triggers are things that tempt a return to past behavior. However, they no longer have power over you.
Say that out loud with me: “PAST BEHAVIOR NO LONGER HAS POWER OVER ME!”
As you renounce negative, destructive thoughts and replace them with positive, life-promoting thoughts, our brain pathways change.
Your new steps, by the grace of our loving heavenly Father, bring an experience of the abundance mindset around food resulting in long-term success and life-long victory.
I know that this article holds a lot of truth, I am living proof of this( at least some of this) I became anorexic at the age of 22. My thoughts and all the negative body shaming from my spouse caused this to surface in me. I went through a time where I could not swallow food because I kept going back to a negative statement made to me, “ You would be beautiful if you were not so puggy “ I was a size 8! But I realize now that this was not at all the case, as God sees us all as beautiful, made in his image!