Taking care of your health and fitness in American society today is very counter-cultural. Everybody's talking about how they SHOULD, but few ARE. There are so many individuals who struggle with excess weight, food compulsions and food addiction. Even with the abundance of nutritional and fitness information at our disposal we still are killing ourselves with too much food and inactivity.
Taking care of ourselves requires 4 things, I like to call them the “Four D’s”.
Decision
Coming to the place of realization that something has to be done.
Dedication
Making a commitment that you are ready to pursue a healthy lifestyle.
Determination
When temptations come against you, you have to prepare yourself through God’s Word to fend off disobedience and attacks of the enemy.
Discipline
Practice makes perfect. Have a plan, set a schedule, prepare, and keep practicing.
Deciding to take care of yourself is a process. You can start "hard core" and and change everything in your life to achieve a weight loss result. Some individuals will have a result that’s long lasting, but most will experience short term success. The average time individuals tend to stick with a very ridged diet is 42 days. It took me almost two years to loose 90 pounds. It was the small steps, the little changes, the daily obedience to walk in what God was asking me to do that has netted me the long term benefit of keeping the weight off for almost 11 years.
Don’t be hard on yourself and fall into condemnation. If you can walk to the mailbox today, do. Tomorrow walk there again and a few steps further. The next week walk to the end of the road and back. Just keep doing a little bit more each day. If you don’t eat any vegetables now, it would be counter productive to force yourself to start a vegetarian diet. Think about how to add one vegetable a day to start, then add two in a few weeks and grow to adding more from there.
We are an all or nothing society. But God sees things differently. His word says that “from glory to glory He’s changing us”. If you drink water today – GLORY! If you walk for 5 minutes – GLORY! If you read His word and receive wisdom – YES! If you let go of anger, hurts and unforgiveness – AWESOME! That is how you change your life, one little step at a time.
