Do Boundaries Make Your Life Better or Worse?

Many of us have grown up with the idea that we should be able to do what we want when we want. This philosophy usually works when we’re young because we have parents who pick up the slack.

If we don’t feel like doing our chores, they still feed us. If we don’t feel like studying, they still let us sleep in our beds at night.

Because life is easy, we tend to grow up with the idea that we should be able to do what we want when we want . . . without consequences.

This philosophy might be workable if we were able to live with our parents all our lives, but it doesn’t work real well otherwise. Because what happens is that we grow up and enter a world where actions have consequences.

If we buy whatever we want, we end up in financial trouble. If we flirt with whomever we want, we end with a marriage crisis. And if we eat whatever we want, we end up with a weight problem.

The question we need to ask ourselves is this: do we really want to do whatever we want? Is that really a good life when you think of all the consequences? Or have we been fed a lie?

Question for the day: Do boundaries make your life better or worse?

The Cure for "I -should-be-able-to-eat-what-I-want-when-I-want" Eating

They’re standing on a mountain, overlooking the kingdoms of the world, and Satan is asking Jesus a question:

"Jesus, do you really want all that (the cross) when you could be having all this (the delights of the world)?"

I can just picture him standing in his Carol Merrill pose, highlighting the delights that could be had if only Jesus were to worship him.

Unfortunately, he asks the same question of us. Right in front of the bakery or the ice cream shop or the kitchen cupboard.

If It Don't Come Easy, You Gotta Let It Go

It’s been more than twenty years since Tanya Tucker came out with her hit, but the song’s message lives on: If it don’t come easy, you gotta let it go.

She was talking about relationships, but how often are we tempted to apply the same principle to eating?

Bored with my boundaries? Gotta let it go.

Tired of renewing my mind? Gotta let it go.

Frustrated with the whole battle? Gotta let it go.

The song is fun, but I’m not sure it’s scriptural.

Think of what Jesus said to His disciples: If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow Me. *

That doesn’t sound like a Man who would say, If it don’t come easy, you gotta let it go.

We all have days we want to let it go.

Those are the days we need to renew our minds more than ever. Press into God. Let Him replace those song lyrics running through our minds with the truth of His Word.

And always remember: If it don’t come easy, it’s an opportunity to grow. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

To think about: Are boundaries usually easy to follow, or do have to give up something to follow them? Is Christ usually easy to follow, or do you usually have to give up something to follow Him?

*Matthew 16:24

P.S. You may have noticed I'm back to writing my blog. It's not coming easy, but I'm going to try not to let it go!

P.P. S. If you want to watch a good video by Francis Chan on growing through trials, check out this link: The Holy Spirit's Power and Our Effort - Part One.

How To Choose Boundaries

I’ve had a few questions lately about how to choose boundaries, so today I’d like to give some ideas that might help. If any of you want to share how you came up with your own boundaries, that would be great also. Please share your ideas in the comments section. I’ll be giving ideas for three different types of boundaries:

1. A set number of meals or snacks – example: three meals and one snack.

This may be a good boundary for you if . . .

• You like to eat meals with your family. Even if you’re not hungry, you’ll be able to sit down with them and eat a little bit.

• You like structure, order, and routine. This way you can plan out your meals and snacks and know when you can eat.

• You have a hard time telling when you’re hungry and when you’re full. With the meals/snacks boundaries, you’ll look at what’s available to eat before your meal and determine what a healthy amount is. Anything you eat above and beyond that amount would be something you would journal about.

• You tend to rationalize hunger i.e. tell yourself you’re hungry when you’re really not.

• You like to know when you can eat next.

2. Eating when hungry and stopping when full.

This may be a good boundary for you if . . .

• You have a hectic life and don’t have time for scheduled meals.

• You feel like it’s easier to control your eating if you eat only when hungry.

• You’re traveling and feel like nibbling all the time just because you’re on vacation.

• Would tend to use three meals and a snack as an opportunity to eat as much as you wanted at those meals and snacks and wouldn’t have a tendency to do that with hunger only boundaries.

3. Diets

This may be a good boundary for you if . . .

• You're faithfully doing one of the other boundaries and not losing weight even though you want to lose weight (and actually need to lose weight for your health).

Note: If you decide to go on a diet, you should be training yourself to follow one of the other boundaries while on your diet. For example, if you’re going to Weight Watchers and your lifetime boundaries are three meals and one snack a day, you would divide your points for the day between those four eating occasions. For example: 4 points for breakfast, 8 points for lunch, 8 points for supper, 3 points for snack. Then you would truth journal each time you ate more than your allowed points for each eating occasion.

One thing to remember with all the boundaries is that it’s impossible to find a set of boundaries that will be easy to follow if you’re an emotional eater. One set of boundaries may be more suited to your lifestyle and personality than another, but it still won’t keep you from eating when you’re stressed, bored, annoyed, etc.

What boundaries do is provide a structure to keep us from eating emotionally. You might say they keep us from eating whenever we feel like eating, because we feel like eating too often! Boundaries also provide a framework to know when to truth journal.

If you truth journal whenever you break your boundaries, the truth will start working its way into your heart, and there will come a time when you won’t feel like eating outside your boundaries. This doesn’t happen overnight, though. I just counted the number of lie/truth charts I have in a file for blog ideas and there were 17 of them – and I know I didn’t save all my charts!

If you’d like to read more about boundaries, look at the category headings on the left side of this blog and click on the link for boundaries. There are a couple of posts on rules and another one called “Not Even One Bite” that might provide helpful insight, as well.

My life is better when I stick to my boundaries

Belief: That looks good. I should eat it.
Truth: My life is better when I stick to my boundaries.

Where do I get the idea that life will be better if I do the things that aren’t good for me?

Well, the idea’s been around since the beginning of mankind. Just look at Eve in the garden with Satan. He convinced her pretty easily that life would be better if she did what God had told her not to do.

He was tricky, though. He didn’t say, “Hey, Eve, God told you not to do this because He knew it wouldn’t be good for you—that it would make your life worse in the long run. But why don’t you disobey Him, anyway? After all, isn’t five minutes of fun worth a lifetime of consequences?”

No, he didn’t say that. He wanted Eve to forget about the long-term consequences of disobeying God. And he made her forget by focusing her attention on how fun, how really fun, it would be to eat that fruit.

Don’t we see the same principles at work in our own lives? When we break our boundaries, what are we focusing on? The fact that breaking our boundaries will lead to discouragement, weight gain, hopelessness, health problems, lethargy, laziness, depression, and not being able to wear our cute clothes? Or the fact that breaking our boundaries will be fun and tasty for five minutes?

Obviously, it’s the second. What we need to do is start asking ourselves this question when we're tempted to break our boundaries: Is five minutes of fun worth a lifetime of consequences?

And of course, the answer will be no. Our lives are better when we stick to our boundaries - even when the potential boundary breaker is a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup blizzard. The more often I drill that into my head, the better off I’ll be.

Excuse me, I need to go ask myself a question.

I'll just break my boundaries, and then journal about it afterwards.

It’s been a busy week of canning and writing and school, but I thought I’d take a quick break to write a blog post. I hope you’ve all been doing well at sticking to your boundaries—I’ve actually been doing pretty well myself, so I pulled this one up from my (huge) file of past lie-truth charts.

Beliefs: 1. It would be so relaxing to have a lemon bar and listen to this beautiful music. 2. I was going to have one later, anyway (so it’s okay to have it now instead). 3. I’ll have one now and just journal about it after I eat it.

Truths: 1. True – although breaking my boundaries on a regular basis does not lead to a relaxing lifestyle. Having an eating obsession is stressful! 2. That’s like saying, “I’m going to get married later anyway, so I’ll just have sex now.” (Well, not quite, but I guess I was in a drastic mood the day I wrote this!) The truth is that breaking the boundaries once leads to a lifestyle of breaking the boundaries. My life is much better when I stick to them. 3. True (that’s what I did). Although, it would be much better to stick to the boundaries, it’s far better to plan to break them and journal about it, than to plan to break them and not journal about it.

The surprising truth is that even if you willfully break your boundaries, planning all the while to truth journal about it—and then actually follow through with it and truth journal—it will still be a good experience of replacing the lies you believe with truth. If your focus is on changing the way you think about food, the only real failure is when you break your boundaries and don’t renew your mind afterward.

But of course, it’s even better not to break your boundaries to begin with. (Not to mention the fact that if you did this on a regular basis, you might gain fifty pounds by the time the truth finally kicks in!)

Getting Back on Track

Writing is so hard I deserve another granola bar. Besides, Mischief (my cat) is sitting in my chair (where I would conceivably have another quiet time instead of eating the granola bar), and I’ve wasted the whole day again. The least I can do is have a little treat.

Do you ever feel a little silly when you truth journal? Yes, these are your thoughts, but you know they’re immature before you even write them down? Well, you can probably see I’m speaking from my own experience. I actually wrote that entry while I was eating the granola bar five minutes ago. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Normally, I stick to my boundaries well enough that I don’t take the time to truth journal when I break them, but because I’ve been breaking them for three or four days now, I decided I better go back to truth journaling. The combination of writing a new Bible study along with still dealing with the things in my last post is making me want to eat.

There’s still a part of me that says, “Oh, I’ll just be more careful tomorrow,” or “Maybe I need to change my boundaries.” But the truth of the matter is that what I really need to do is bring my thoughts captive to the truth.

So here goes:

Beliefs: 1. Writing is so hard I deserve another granola bar. 2. Besides, Mischief (my cat) is sitting in my chair (where I would conceivably have another quiet time instead of eating the granola bar), and 3. I’ve wasted the whole day again. 4. The least I can do is have a little treat.

Truths: 1. Writing should be a joyful act of worship—something I give to God, and I’ve lost sight of that. Forgive me, Lord. I need to expect that some days will be easy, and some days will be difficult, and some days I’ll write the whole day with nothing concrete to show for it. I need to accept the fact that writing isn’t an efficient occupation and do it anyway. 2. Mischief would be perfectly happy on my lap, or I could go outside for my quiet time. 3. I haven’t accomplished much, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. I’m imperfect, and life is imperfect. Some days will be like this. 4. The best I can do is see this day from God’s point of view so I can experience peace. I’d rather have the best than the least.

Wow. I had no idea all those things were going on inside of me until I started to truth journal. I thought this was going to be a simple blog about getting back on track after a few days of eating outside the boundaries, and in the name of efficiency I thought I’d write down the truths while I was writing the blog.

Instead, I spent ten or fifteen minutes on my first lie, and another ten minutes on the third lie. God obviously had some things to say to me about my attitude.

Did you notice that God used the thoughts that were at the top of my head making me want to eat to show me what I really needed to work on? As I looked at my thoughts through His eyes, I began to see things differently. His peace began to steal into my heart once again.

Do you see what bringing your thoughts captive to Christ does? It changes the things in you that need to change. It gives you peace. It did both of those for me just now. I often find—no, I take that back—I usually find that truth journaling is a time of intimate fellowship with God.

And you know what? It’s the only type of writing I do that’s always worth it.

Rules (Part Two): The Lies We Believe About Rules

1. I don’t like rules (and that’s a good reason not to have any).
Truth: If I only did the things in life I liked to do, my house would be so messy I’d hate living in it, my kids would be so spoiled I wouldn’t enjoy spending time with them, and I’d probably be writing this blog from my jail cell (because I really can’t stand doing my income taxes). Often it’s doing what I don’t want to do that that enables me to live the life I do want to live.

2. The rules make me want to eat.
Truth: My self-indulgent nature makes me want to eat. The rules are just a convenient scapegoat.

3. It’s not a big deal if I break the rules (after all, just one bite won’t hurt).
Truth: It actually is a big deal if I break the rules, because 99 times out of a 100, when I break the rules once, I end up breaking them again the same day—and we all know what that can lead to.

4. I can’t believe I broke the rules—I’m such a (failure, loser, etc.).
Truth: If I were capable of following the rules without ever breaking them, I wouldn’t have a problem with emotional eating! Of course I broke the rules—but that doesn’t mean I’m a failure. I’m a child of God who just broke the rules. I need to figure out what made me break the rules and press on.

5. As long as I broke the rules, I might as well eat whatever I want.
Truth: As long as I broke the rules, I might as well use it as an opportunity to bring my thoughts captive to the truth through Scripture prayer or truth journaling so I’ll be less likely to break the rules next time.

6. No one can tell me how much to eat.
Truth: Sad, but true. It’d be a lot easier if my mom were here to control what I eat, but since she isn’t I better set some rules of my own.

7. Rules are too restrictive (and that’s a bad thing).
Truth: Living without rules and indulging the flesh leads to slavery (which is incredibly restrictive). Following the rules will give me the freedom I’ve always longed for.

8. All I have to do is follow the rules, and then I can get this weight off and keep it off.
Truth: I’ll never be able to follow the rules in my own strength if this is a stronghold for me, so all I have to do is bring my thoughts captive to the truth about a million times (alright, that’s a lie—it only seems like a million times) until I believe the truth so deeply that I actually don’t feel like breaking the rules anymore.

9. There’s no use following the rules anymore today since I already broke them.
Truth: There’s no use trying to do this in my own strength today, now that I’ve already broken the rules. I know from past experience that the only thing that will stop me now is taking the time to renew my mind. I better carve out some time to truth journal or pray Scripture before I eat anything else.

10. If I can just find the right rule (eating when hungry, having lifelong boundaries, etc.) it will be easy to control my eating.
Truth: If I’m an emotional eater, I’ll never find a rule that makes it easy. If I keep carrying my thoughts captive to the truth, though, one day I'll start believing the truth and on that day, it will start to get easier.

All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Hebrews 12:11

Rules

I’ve been thinking about rules lately and how they apply to emotional eating. The question is, “Do rules help us or hurt us in our struggle with emotional eating? Is it the rules themselves that make us feel like eating too much or is it something else?”

Because we know we’ve been saved by grace, and not by following the rules, I think we have a tendency to think that rules aren't very important. But is that true?

1 Timothy 1:8-9a says this: But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners . . .

At first glance we may look at this verse and think, “Doesn’t that just apply to non-Christians? Wouldn't we be considered the righteous?"

Well, yes and no. Yes, we are counted as righteous through our faith (Romans 4:3, 5:1), but no, we're not always righteous in our behavior (Romans 3:10-12, 23). And where we're not righteous, we need the law.

I see this principle at work in my own life. I tend to be "lawless and rebellious" in the area of eating—I feel like I should be able to eat whatever and whenever I want. I don’t like placing restrictions on my eating. Because of this I need a law.

A naturally thin person on the other hand tends to eat only when she’s hungry. She’s not stamping her foot and saying, “I should be able to eat whatever I feel like eating,” because food isn’t that big of a deal to her. She can easily give it up. In her case, it would be legalistic to have rules about eating because she doesn’t need them.

Timothy says the law isn’t made for the righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious. That’s me when it comes to food.

Will the rules keep me from emotional eating? No, they can't save me any more than following the law can save me. Why? Because I'm not capable of following the rules (or the law) in my own strength.

Then, you may ask, if I'm not capable of following the rules, why should I have them? This is the answer - because they show me my rebellious ways and tell me when I need to go to God for help.

Let's see how this works with emotional eating. Let's say my rule is, "I'll eat only when I'm hungry." If it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and I’m craving something to eat even though I'm not hungry, my "rule" gives me a wake-up call. Barb, why do you feel like eating? Are you really hungry or are you going to food to satisfy your other needs? Are you willing to submit to God in this area of your life or are you going to insist on eating whenever you feel like eating?

If I didn’t have the rule, I might not notice that I’m eating for the wrong reasons. The rule itself doesn’t give me the power to eat the way God wants me to eat - but it does show me when I need to go to God to get that power. In that sense, the rule helps me.

Also - it's not the rule that's making me want to eat in the first place. I know it seems that way - after all, don't we start craving food the minute we go on a diet? Yes, of course we do, but we also feel like eating a lot when we're not on diets - we just don't notice it because when we feel like eating, we eat! It doesn't matter if we're not hungry, because we don't have any rules in place to tell us we can't eat when we're not hungry.

What the rule (law) does is point out the rebelliousness that’s already there in my heart - and it shows me that I need to go to God for help - because that's the only way I'll be able to follow the "rules."

Note: Although the rules themselves don't make me eat, the lies I believe about the rules often make me eat - and that's what I'll be talking about in my next post.

A Plan for Success

I said in my last post that I would tell you some practical things to do to change the way you think about food. That's true. I will. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to give some more theory before I do that! (If you can make it through the first part of the post, though, I'll give a nice practical list at the end.)

I want you to think back with me to your young childhood. How did you learn that eating for fun and comfort was a good idea? Did your mom sit you down when you were five years old and say, "Honey, don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't eat whatever you want whenever you want. Food is there for us to enjoy. Don't worry about the consequences. Just eat what you feel like eating. Oh, and would you like some ice cream?"

I'm guessing she didn't. I bet it was more like this:

She gave you a treat when you were hurt, because she wanted you to feel better, and she knew treats did the trick. She let you eat all your holiday candy in a couple of days, because she wanted it out of the house, and she was tired of hearing you ask if you could have some. She said, "Let's go have some pizza and ice cream - we deserve it after all that yard work!" And you were happy to oblige.

Your mom had good intentions, but she didn't realize what her words were teaching you about food.

Now I'm not knocking moms. After all, I am one. In fact, I've done every one of those things with my kids. It wasn't until I wrote Freedom from Emotional Eating that I realized what I was teaching them:

Food will make you feel better. It's okay to overeat on holidays. You deserve a treat when you do hard things.

It would be wonderful if that same mom could sit us down and say, "Honey, I was wrong. It's really not good to eat whatever you want whenever you want. That won't make you happy. No, it's much better to have boundaries and stick to them. So why don't you just change your way of eating, and life will be much better!"

Well, it would be wonderful if we could change that easily, but I'm afraid it doesn't work that way. Why? Because we learned lots of lies about food growing up and it takes a while to "unlearn" them.

We learned those lies situation by situation, and I'm afraid we have to unlearn them the same way.

That's where renewing the mind comes in, and now we'll get to the practical part. I believe there are five things you need to do if you want to change the way you think about food:

1. Choose a set of lifelong boundaries. These boundaries must be flexible enough to fit into regular life, yet strict enough to disallow opportunities for emotional eating.

2. Make up your mind not to eat one bite outside your boundaries. This is very important, because it helps you develop the mindset that you only eat at certain times. What you want to do is train yourself to only think of food at certain times of the day (either at a meal or scheduled snack or when you're hungry). (And no, Pavlov's dogs do not come to mind.)

3. Renew your mind every time you eat outside your boundaries. What you're doing with this is re-thinking all those things you learned growing up. Truth journaling, lie-truth charts, and Scripture prayers all work well to renew your mind. (One note on truth journaling, it's far more effective to write it down rather than do it in your mind.)

4. Get someone to hold you accountable, not to sticking to your boundaries (although you can do that too if you want), but to renewing your mind every time you break your boundaries.

5. Abide in the Word of God. Self-control is a fruit of the spirit, and we get the fruit by abiding in the Vine, not by trying as hard as we can to muster it up only when we need it. Instead, we change our desires by replacing lies with truth, and we gain self-control by abiding with God and spending time in His Word.

If I were going to add one more thing to the list,it would be, "Don't condemn yourself when you mess up!" But I will save that for the next post.

Romans 12:2 and emotional eating

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Today I’d like to take Romans 12:2 and apply it to emotional eating. Let’s take it one section at a time.

Do not be conformed to this world.

I can think of many ways we conform to the world that cause us to eat too much. Here are a couple of them:

1. We’ve adopted Hollywood’s idea that we have to be gorgeous and skinny (and so we eat in despair when we aren’t).

2. We’ve adopted our culture’s idea that because we deserve to be happy, we should be able to eat whatever we want whenever we want.

Neither of these ideas are scriptural. God says it’s what’s inside of us that counts, not what’s outside (1 Samuel 16:7, Proverbs 31:30, Luke 16:15), and He doesn’t go along with the “you should get whatever you want whenever you want” idea, either. If fact, He actually expects us to give up things for Him (Matthew 16:24-25).

But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

The Greek word for transformed here is interesting. It’s a change that starts on the inside and is manifested on the outside. In other words, God’s not asking for an outward show of obedience. He wants to change our hearts, so that we actually want to obey Him.

How do we do that? By the renewing of the mind. We must change the way we think if we want lasting behavior change.

So that you may prove (test) what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

There are two Greek words that can be used for prove or test. Peirazo means to test with no expectation or with the expectation of finding it bad. Dokimazo means to test with the expectation of finding it good. Guess which Greek word is used here? Dokimazo.

That means that if we do die to self, get transformed from the inside out, and take on God’s thoughts rather than the world’s thoughts, we'll find that His will is good.

On the other hand, if we just go for the outward conforming—following a set of boundaries out of brute force rather than a heart that actually believes life is better when you follow the boundaries—we’ll find that His will is not good.

Why? Because we haven’t been changed from the inside out. We’re still essentially hanging on to our own will fueled by our own set of beliefs.

We may be conforming to a set of boundaries on the outside, but inside, our hearts are telling us that we should be able to eat whatever we want whenever we want. Sooner or later, our hearts will win out, and we'll be eating like crazy again.

No, for lasting change to take place, we must be transformed from the inside out.

In my next post, I’ll show how this is played out in a practical way—how to change the way we think, so that we actually want to stick to our boundaries.

Not even one bite

When I first started writing my Bible study, I checked out all the books I could find at the library that contained information on emotional eating. In the process, I discovered a whole new section of books that I hadn’t seen before.

Did you know that in addition to the “diet book” section, there’s also a section of books on eating disorders and compulsive eating? I read some of those books, and they were very enlightening.

One of the common threads that ran through the books was the admonition to stick religiously to an eating plan. To eat even one bite off the plan, the books said, was to put yourself in dangerous territory. It could lead to a binge.

I remember thinking at the time that this was the missing ingredient in my own struggles with food. I had my eating plan already in place at the time—a simple plan of allowing myself three meals and one snack each day.

The problem was that I sometimes had a bite here and a bite there that wasn’t on "the plan." While these bites didn’t add up to many calories, they still weren’t good for me. What they did was weaken my boundaries—the boundaries I had put in place myself to protect me from emotional eating.

Unfortunately, weak boundaries often lead to broken boundaries. What begins as a crack in the dam soon becomes an all-out flood—and I had my share of “floods.”

The books made me see the necessity of following the plan exactly. In other words, not one bite outside the boundaries. Not even a lick of the fingers. Nada. Nothing.

I determined to be more faithful about following the boundaries, and you know what? It made a difference. A big difference. Sticking rigidly to the plan made it easier to actually follow the plan.

Whether your boundaries are hunger or meals, I encourage you to follow them exactly. Don’t eat even one bite outside your boundaries—because even though it's hard to stick to your boundaries, it's a lot harder to stick to them after you break them than before you break them.

Broken Boundaries

It’s never more important to remember we’re in a spiritual battle than when we’ve just broken the boundaries big-time and feel like giving up. Listen to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5:

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

In other words, getting out of bed the Monday after Thanksgiving with a new resolve to stick to my diet this time (!) is not going to solve the problem. Chances are, I’ll break it again by the end of the week if not by the end of the day. Why? Because strongholds can’t be destroyed with determination, self-control, and diets.

What does the passage say? We break strongholds by destroying the ways of thinking that aren’t in line with the truth and bringing our thoughts captive to Jesus Christ.

That means, first of all, that we need to cling to God and His Word if we want to experience success. That’s where we’re going to discover what the right thoughts are. In addition, we need to examine our thoughts to see which ones need to be taken captive. Why don’t we do that together?

The Lies of Broken Boundaries

1. I can’t do it.
Truth: I can’t do it easily, I can’t do it without failing from time to time, and I can’t do it if I only use the weapons of the world. However, if I continue to take my thoughts captive to the truth and rely on God’s strength and the power of His Word, He will break this stronghold in my life.

2. It’s too hard.
Truth: Hard things aren’t necessarily bad things, and I can do all things through Him who gives me strength(Philippians 4:13).

3. This will be like all the other times.
Truth: This will only be like all the other times if I don’t use my divine weapons.

4. This doesn’t work.
Truth: This doesn’t work overnight. It takes time for the truth to kick in. If I replace the same lie with the same truth day after day after day, one day I’ll hear the truth as soon as I hear the lie. And one day I won’t even hear the lie. That's when I'll know that it works.

5. I’m going to gain my weight back.
Truth: If I continue to use divine weapons to fight this stronghold, eventually I’ll lose weight and keep it off. In the meantime, I need to have a little talk with those “Hollywood” thoughts that are running through my mind. It’s presumptuous for anyone to tell me I need to look a certain way to be acceptable, when God tells me that looks don’t matter, and I’m acceptable as I am. (This may be another area of my mind that needs to be renewed!)


I hope you ate within your boundaries this Thanksgiving, but if you didn't, don't beat yourself up. Carry your thoughts captive to Christ and keep pressing on. Think of it this way - it's the truth that sets you free . . . and each breaking of the boundaries is a perfect opportunity to learn a little more truth.