Comfort Food

This became a lifelong habit, and as you might expect, led to a weight problem for me. Over the last 20 years, I have gained and lost the same 30 pounds. Back in the Fall of 2008, I remember feeling so hopeless about my weight and had lost all hope of ever losing it and keeping it off for life. There, at the bottom of the valley, is where the Lord met me, restored my hope, and revealed truth to me that would forever change my life. He showed me that I would never keep the extra weight off until I addressed the CAUSE of my over eating. For almost 30 years, I had developed a reflex habit of turning to food whenever I started to feel uncomfortable emotions rising up in me – frustration, loneliness, anger, worthlessness, sadness, hopelessness…and the list goes on. The bottom line is, I didn’t like feeling those negative emotions, and I just wanted to “stuff” them down with food so I wouldn’t have to deal with them.

God shows emotion throughout the Bible, and we are made in His image (Genesis 1:26), and therefore we are also emotional beings. Now the truth is, emotions in themselves are neither good nor bad, and they are given to us by God for a purpose. I once heard someone say that emotions are our warning light to “check under the hood”, as in a car. For years now I’ve been trying to ignore my warning light, hoping it would just go away. Well, we all know that just because we ignore something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are hurts and lies underneath those emotions, and the ONLY way to be free of them is to let them come to the surface (instead of trying to stuff them down with food), and let the Lord reveal what is behind them. Once the wound is exposed, then the Lord can heal it. And once it is healed, it will no longer try to “bob” to the surface like a buoy that keeps coming up no matter how many times you try to push it down under the water.