The Spiritual Battle with Weight Loss
00:00:00.000 | We're back with guest Paul David Tripp, the author of the book "Awe, Why It Matters
00:00:10.400 | for Everything We Think, Say, and Do," a book which easily made my top ten list for
00:00:16.500 | best books of 2015.
00:00:18.840 | And this week we're talking about awe and how it really does relate to everything in
00:00:24.940 | life, specifically to our spiritual growth, our Bible intake, our ministry aims, and even
00:00:30.760 | our news consumption, our anxieties, our weight loss attempts, our parenting methods, and
00:00:36.400 | our expectations of marriage and romantic love.
00:00:40.460 | And today we're going to talk about weight loss.
00:00:42.760 | Paul, the physical side of weight loss is going to happen in a lot of different ways
00:00:47.080 | for various people, but there seems to be a common spiritual dimension to weight loss
00:00:53.200 | that we all need to be aware of.
00:00:55.920 | And you mentioned your own weight loss journey briefly.
00:00:59.960 | Share with us what you learned in the process.
00:01:02.840 | You know, one of the things that I encountered in my own walk with God is how there are always
00:01:10.560 | areas of inconsistency that need to be addressed.
00:01:15.080 | And one of those for me was my relationship to food.
00:01:20.960 | I love how much of the glory of God in creation is edible.
00:01:28.360 | That's a sweet thing that God created a pleasurable world of food, but that pleasure of food is
00:01:36.680 | meant to be a finger that points me to God.
00:01:40.400 | It's not meant to be the thing that satisfies my heart.
00:01:44.660 | And so what was happening to me is, you know, if you gain a half a pound a month, you don't
00:01:48.540 | notice it, but that's six pounds a year, and in five years, you put on 30 pounds.
00:01:52.600 | And that's all the result of the pleasure of food having too much control over the way
00:02:00.320 | you think about a good evening or a good day or a good week.
00:02:05.400 | And so I've had to confess that, confess patterns of gluttony, and completely change my relationship
00:02:15.800 | to food to eat what I should eat for the maintenance of my physical body.
00:02:21.880 | The result of that is the loss of about 40 pounds.
00:02:25.360 | And for me, it was not about weight so much as, I mean, that was an issue, but living
00:02:35.080 | in a more appropriate way.
00:02:37.440 | - Yeah, so for a Christian who has tried diet fads, where do they start when it comes to
00:02:44.280 | the spiritual questions?
00:02:46.680 | - Well, here's the thing we all need to face when it comes to weight and diet, that diets
00:02:55.760 | don't work.
00:02:58.000 | One of the things that just makes me angry, I hope it's righteous anger, is this industry,
00:03:06.320 | this billion dollar industry that's making promises to people that are not true.
00:03:13.360 | Because diets don't address the cause of the gaining of weight.
00:03:21.880 | And because they don't address the cause, they don't actually work.
00:03:25.800 | I mean, you can't starve yourself forever.
00:03:28.800 | It's not healthy to eat packaged Franken food forever.
00:03:34.940 | It's only when your heart is properly satisfied with God that you now have the power to say
00:03:42.180 | no to other things that would tempt you to go there for satisfaction.
00:03:50.280 | - Thus we return to awe in God, which is what we talked about last time.
00:03:56.240 | So gluttony emerged for you.
00:03:59.040 | When did this root cause of weight gain confront you?
00:04:02.240 | When did you confront it?
00:04:05.240 | - You know, a couple of things.
00:04:06.240 | It was initiated by the wedding of my son.
00:04:10.880 | I thought, you know, I've gained a lot of weight.
00:04:16.720 | And I began to think about that.
00:04:18.640 | And what really hit me was as I began to eat in a different way, how hungry I felt, how
00:04:27.720 | sort of impoverished I felt.
00:04:30.760 | But I wasn't really hungry.
00:04:32.840 | It was just that I was so used to loading my body with so many more calories than I
00:04:37.080 | actually needed.
00:04:39.340 | And it was that going through that hunger that really alerted me to the fact that food
00:04:45.240 | had been too much present in my life.
00:04:48.840 | And I'm not hungry anymore.
00:04:51.380 | You would probably watch me throughout a day and you would think this man eats like a bird.
00:04:57.040 | But I eat what I need to eat.
00:04:59.280 | And I've, you know, kept my weight off for four years.
00:05:02.680 | And there's just no going back because it's not just that I eat different things, but
00:05:08.320 | the lifestyle of my heart toward food has changed.
00:05:12.680 | Very good.
00:05:13.680 | Thank you, Paul.
00:05:14.680 | And we're going to return tomorrow and transition to talk about awe and how it really helps
00:05:17.960 | to simplify the aim of our ministry work, all of it.
00:05:22.240 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:05:23.880 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Paul Tripp.
00:05:27.440 | We'll see you tomorrow.
00:05:28.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]
00:05:36.400 | you