Why Diets Do Not Work

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things…. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.
Colossians 3:1-5

America has been encouraged to lust after food. Food is always at the forefront of everything we do. Diets are everywhere we look, and on every diet, the dieter is asked to think about food content, consider the fat gram count, examine food pictures, discuss food and recipes in support groups, depend upon the scales (a focus on body and self), and prepare special meals. This focus on food makes it irresistible, for you fall in love with what you focus on. It would be like telling an alcoholic to examine all the alcoholic drinks, memorize the ingredients, drink only low-alcohol-content beverages, look at pictures of low-alcohol-content drinks, meet with support groups that discuss low-alcohol-content beverages and sample them all, hand out recipes for making your own concoctions, and then expect the addicted person to be less addicted or to abstain or drink in moderation at ten o’clock at night when no one else is around. Impossible. You will fall in love with what you lust after.

This worship of food has robbed us of emotional stability, comfortable clothing, and many relationships. The solution that Weigh Down offers is to trust God with the way He made our bodies. He has created the instincts of all animals, all infants, all children, all men, and all women with the ability to sense when they have eaten too much. Man-made rules have unplugged and confused this instinct to sense fullness and appropriate volume, and they have caused us to be greedier and to expect more self-indulgence than ever before. Dieting, which is the use of man-made rules, works only on making the food behave—not the HEART of man. This is big! All animals, infants, and children that have been untouched by the man-made rules still have the strong innate capacity to recognize and respond to correct volumes of food. Dieting—including fat gram counting, pills, bulimia, suction-assisted lipectomies, invasive surgeries, and excessive exercise—has created and exacerbated an excused greed that has grown to monumental heights in this country. GREED is at its zenith. Our plates of low-calorie, fat-free foods are larger, our demand for more has increased, the seats are larger, and the clothes are stretchier. The present volume that can be eaten in polite company would have been completely embarrassing at one point in our history.

We are not lacking for information now; we are hurting for motivation and heart-changing cultivation to employ God’s plan for permanent weight control. Keep God’s Word and the words in these posts by your bedside for morning motivation, on your desk at work for heart-grabbing temptations, in the kitchen to convict you into a wholehearted response to the heavenly Father, and by the nighttime reading chair for tearful conviction. God’s Word through Scripture will soften your heart, make you satisfied with less food as you find a deeper relationship with Him, and therefore bring you to permanent weight control.