Holy Spirit, My Personal Trainer

Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

1Corinthians 6:19-20 (NLT)

Do you struggle with maintaining a healthy weight? I am so glad you picked up this book. Chances are, it means you are a lot like me. For many years I struggled with the whole weight-gain, weight-loss cycle and tried a multitude of diets trying to conquer this stronghold in my life. As a Christian, I knew that my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit and I wanted to be healthy and free of excess pounds. It seemed almost impossible however, to lose the weight and keep it off. The harder I tried to do it in my own strength the worse I failed.

During all those years of yo-yo dieting, I did learn some truths which stuck with me. In the end, they helped me to realize that there was only going to be one way to lose weight and keep it off permanently. The times that I did experience some success during those frustrating years, were those times when I stopped blaming the food as being the source of my problem. The whole diet culture of our society focuses on the evils of the food we consume. I have learned that there is an even greater evil that is responsible for our weight issues.

Jeremiah 17:9 (KJV) says: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I am convinced that food is not our enemy. The lust for too much food is the real problem. That is not to say that we should not make healthy choices when planning our food intake. It simply means that we need to change our focus from making the food behave to making our hearts behave.

When we focus on food and exercise as being our savior from obesity, we exclude from our plan the One who can truly set us free. We may not see it as that, but in reality, we are doing the work our way and asking God to bless it. Instead, He wants us to allow Him to do the work of changing our hearts and our behavior. Losing weight God’s way needs to be a work of the Holy Spirit from start to finish. When He convicts our hearts that we need to honor Him with our body, the first thing we need to do is repent. We must admit that we have sinned by mistreating His temple and then ask Him what His temple care plan for us looks like. As we spend time with Him, He will reveal to us the perfect plan for our permanent weight loss and temple maintenance.

It is my prayer that as you read about my weight-loss journey with the Holy Spirit, that you too will experience what it is like to have Him as your personal trainer. Then you also will be able to say goodbye to all the striving that went along with your own futile attempts to lose weight. Get ready for the adventure of your life as the Holy Spirit leads you on to victory. May you be encouraged, blessed, challenged, and most of all, victorious as you embrace the truth of this book.