Calories and Christ

New year new me right?! I have been working hard trying to be a bit more healthy.  I’ve surprisingly done pretty good on this front. What I have done is make this change something that I want to actually do.  I met a fitness coach on my travels in the van (he lives in a van too!) and he put me on living in a calorie deficit.  I had never heard of this before.  I heard people say it but I never knew what it meant.  He let me know and ever since then I have been trying to lose weight in that form.  It’s worked pretty well.  I get to eat whatever I want as long as I maintain my calorie and protein intake goals.  Now before you say anything about eating whatever I want, I have been trying to limit my sodium intake (I have high blood pressure) and also to eat products with the least amount of ingredients.  But I don’t always follow these rules or hit my goals.  I mess up sometimes.  But because my mind set has changed about how I eat and what I eat, I never stray too far and always return to my new normal of eating.  Grace and I say this is our life now.  And it has shown.  We have continued to lose weight as well.  We have continued to be able to do things that were previously more difficult when we were larger in size.  It's pretty awesome!

I think this is like our walk with Christ.  Christ has given us eyes to see the world in a new way.  Our perspective on what our life is has altered and can never go back. We call ourselves to walk and live up to the glory of the grace God has given us. And we do! But sometimes we fail. Sometimes we slip back into old ways.  Sometimes old habits creep back in.  But when those things happen we repent, confess, and get back to what God has called us to.  Just like when I go and eat just a little too many calories on that delicious cheesecake or indulge on a greasy cheesy pizza (instead of making those delightful treats in the van) I quickly return to doing what I should by creating those delicious foods with lower calorie and healthy substitutes (Below is a picture of one of our meals in our diet [I stole the recipe from my niece 🤫]). And we know we can see the change working.  Our lives everyday when we look back on who we were are looking more and more like Jesus who we follow. We are becoming more loving, more compassionate, more forgiving, more understanding of truth, more zealous for righteousness, more active in our communities, and more devoted to prayer and scripture reading.  Just like a steady loss in weight and other non scale victories still keep happening are evidence of my progress, those I mentioned above too are evidence of our being glorified in Christ which is being made to look in his image as we walk daily in him.