I am so excited for you! You have taken the steps and really invested in yourself to start becoming the woman that you were meant to be and to start living your life in regards to food and the way you look at your body in the way God intended. I can’t wait to see how this journey unfolds for you. I wanted to start off with a couple of videos just to get you prepped for this program.

Now first off, I want you to think about your life before diets. I started my first diet at age nine. Maybe your diets started at the same time, maybe it was a little later, maybe college or to prepare for a wedding. I want you to think about that time before your diets. Think about what your life was like and how you responded to food. Did you have certain favorite foods, or did you not think about food at all? What kind of movement was part of your life before diets?

I know for myself, I really enjoyed my grandma’s homemade tortillas, and I remember being teased for not really liking pizza as a kid. I remember my dad sneaking the beaters after my mom was done baking a cake and sharing the batter with me. But beyond that, I don’t really remember food that much. I don’t remember the type of food or something surrounding food. I do remember memories of our family sitting around the table and talking to each other and memories like my dad sneaking behind my mother’s back to get the cake batter.

I want you to think about the way you thought about your body or if you even thought about it at all. I remember riding my bike for hours and not really thinking about what I looked like or even the clothes that I would wear.

And I want you to think about your habits with food and think about what kind of movements you enjoy. I always remember that our neighbors across the street had a trampoline and once in a great while they would invite us over to jump on it. And that was always the best time. I wasn’t thinking about, “Oh, I wonder what I look like!” or “Oh no, my feet are going to get dirty!” I never thought about that kind of stuff. It was just about the way the movement felt to me. That freeing feeling and joyful feeling.

Now, I want you to think of this and realize that this is the way God intended for us to live, and He wanted food to be a pleasurable part of life. He created us with taste buds. He created us to enjoy food. But He didn’t want it to become more than life.

And I want you to think back now to a time when dieting was successful for you. Maybe you went one of those crazy diets or a normal one and lost weight and felt good. And I want you to think about when that stopped for you. We know that diets can sometimes be successful, but at some point in your life that ‘successful’ diet turned into not being successful.

Because that’s what brought you here, when you realized that diets were not the way you want to go.

So think about that. I want you to think about any positive experiences you have had with dieting.

Now I want you to think about your life now. Because after you get rid of diets and decide “You know what, I’m not going to diet, I’m going to go about this a different way. I’m going to invite the Lord into my health.” I want you to think about where your life is now, A.D. (after diets).

I know for myself, when I looked at my life after I was finally done, at the end of my rope, at the end of wanting to do any diets, I remember thinking about how I didn’t trust my body and how I didn’t like my body. I didn’t really treat my body as special. I didn’t treat it as smart. It wasn’t just about my body and what I thought about my body but that translated into how I thought about myself. So I started feeling like I wasn’t smart. I started feeling like I didn’t really have anything to offer the world because of the way I felt about my body. I really want you to think about where you’re at right now and I want you to have some hope, because we’re going to change all of that. We’re going to start living the way God intended.

I think the key to living this kind of way is found in Matthew 6. Jesus is talking to his disciples about worrying about their lives and in verse 25 it says, “And Jesus said, ‘Is not life more than food and the body more important than clothes?’” And I started thinking about that phrase, “Is life not more important than food?” Because for the last 20 years that I had been going on diets, food was my life. And I know you feel the same way. Maybe it’s not a good life and you’re always measuring food, packing food, and worrying about what you’re going to eat. Or maybe it’s the opposite where you’re eating whatever you want, binge eating, or over eating and you know it’s not the way God intended for you to live.

So, like I said, God created us with taste buds, and he created food to be pleasurable, but he didn’t intend for food to be more than life. So I want you to think about this little phrase as we go about this little introduction. You’re going to download the worksheets and fill them out. And I want you to think about this little phrase, “Food was meant to be a side dish of life, not the main dish.” Think about food as a side dish in your life. It’s something that’s good, but it’s not the main course. It’s not the way God intended for us to be, constantly obsessing about food, constantly thinking about what we are going to eat next, how guilty we feel for what we ate last.

So, make sure you download the worksheet for these introduction videos, and fill them out because we need to figure out where we are starting out and realize the reason we want to give up diets, and the reason why we’re starting this journey.