How it feels being overweight.

How it feels being overweight.

Yet does not one in a heap of ruins stretch out his hand, and in his distress cry for help?

Job 30:24

How does it feel to be overweight? It seems strange to ask such a private question in a public venue. It is part of the trap of being overweight. The more you look in the mirror and see the supersized reflection looking back the more you want to be hidden and invisible.  When you are overweight you feel embarrassed, ashamed, hopeless, afraid, and you want to hide. (Hide with a pizza but yes hide.)  You hide behind baggy clothes, or by sitting in the back of the room or just staying home. Even the way you stand is an unconscious attempt to hide. You put your hand over your stomach, cross your arms, stoop your shoulders, put your hands behind you to cover your exit (and your backside.)  Being overweight makes you continuously aware of yourself and you often loathe yourself.  You learn to like the dark. You want to stay home avoiding people and watching TV with the light low to hide your giant bowl of ice cream.  To be obese is to live conflicted because food is both the object of your love and the thing I hate. You wish you could never eat again (like an alcoholic who quits cold turkey) while at the same time planning your next meal.  Mmm turkey sounds good.  The comfort of food is immediate, it won’t judge, and you can always get more.  Like all false idols it easy and feels good immediately but gets hard and hurts over the long haul.  Relationally you begin to isolate.  Quit groups, stay home, give up.

Mentally and emotionally you live somewhere between indifferent and depressed. You joke about your weight to deflect the pain. In a world that glorifies the air brushed beach bodies we often focus on what happens when we are overweight around our middle or our backside.  We don’t spend enough time being aware of what is going on in our brain chemistry.  Fuzzy thinking, dark thoughts and depression are directly related to the things we eat.  Not to mention energy levels that shoot up and down leaving us falling asleep in the middle of the day.  Caffeine, sugar and processed carbs become a needed drug just to get by.  Thank goodness we now have energy drinks.  Sleep become harder and harder adding to the lack of energy and to the cravings for more artificial energy boosts that make us crash.  It is a nasty cycle.  Exercise becomes unthinkable because we are just so tired. Our thinking becomes darker so we eat more and blame our genes.  We only crave the cheap carbs and sugar because we find we don’t like vegetables.  What we don’t understand is we have programmed our bodies to only want more sugar.  Truth is our bodies would love, even crave, vegetables if we were not so addicted to sugar in all its disguises.  So our mental perspective, our emotional state, our spiritual condition and our physical functions are all working to keep us on a downward spiral. The easiest place to go is a bag of chips. ( just sugar in disguise.)  Life is about momentum and it is either moving you in a positive direction or a negative directions.  When you have been on a journey of a negative direction for a while it can seem hopeless.

We need a plan because the same momentum that is working against you can become the force that can renew your life physically, emotionally, mentally and even spiritually.