As I sit down to write this week’s thought my life is in a mess…..  no, I don’t mean that I am cracking up, not even that my life is full of problems (though I have my fair share, as I’m sure you do).  My ‘mess’ is more immediate and literal – you see we are moving house!  As I systematically (who am I kidding?) go from room to room, sorting, packing, cleaning etc, I realise that there are many parallels here to when I first addressed all the issues in my life surrounding food.  Let me explain what I mean.

The first thing I realise is that moving involves sorting out my clutter.  It is less than five years since we moved here and it is difficult to believe that our home, over such a comparatively short period of time, has managed to acquire so much ‘stuff.’ Some are things which I picked up along the way but never got round to using; other things have long since outgrown their usefulness but I have clung on to them ‘just in case’ I should discover new purposefulness for them. I have uncovered other things which I have simply hoarded because of their sentimental value and yet which I have never looked at for years and probably never will… unwanted gifts, old letters and cards – and I am faced with the decision whether to hang on to them or simply let them go. And there are boxes (God knows what’s in them) stored in the attic which I simply moved with me from the last attic and haven’t got round to opening yet!

As we first seek to sort out our eating behaviour, we can be similarly shocked to realise how much clutter there is in our lives.  We thought it was all just a matter of  gritting our teeth and seeking to be have more self-control, but we soon come to realise, as we allow God to ‘sort us out’ that it goes much deeper than that! There are old thought patterns which we have carried with us from childhood, like always having to leave a clean plate or a fear that something dreadful will happen if we fail to eat a ‘proper meal’ at specified times. There are long-ingrained habits such as always having snacks as you watch TV or ‘cake and coffee’ when you go into town shopping.
Throwing out such inappropriate thoughts and habits isn’t always easy, but what positive value do they have in our lives? None – therefore we need to ditch them!

A second thing I notice, as I prepare to move, is that initially things look a whole lot worse than when I first started.  Even though I seem to have thrown out bags upon bags of rubbish, the house looks fuller than ever!  I am surrounded by piles of boxes and black dustbin bags and I am trying to remember which pile is for the Car Boot sale, which is for the Charity shop and which is ready to go on the removal van. It is at this point that I start to wish I had never started! Perhaps moving wasn’t such a good idea after all – at least I could have left well alone and kept my clutter securely hidden from view in some out-of-the-way cupboard.  And I haven’t even started on the attic yet!

It seems to me from looking back at my own journey on Fit For Life Forever and the testimonies of others, that things do often appear to get worse before they get better.  We start to look at issues we had never thought were relevant to our relationship with food: our fears and insecurities, our stress-filled lives, our inner emptiness and past, unresolved pain and suddenly, as it is all brought out into the open, it can appear overwhelming. Sometimes you can wish that you’d never opened the closet and simply left the skeletons there to play in the dark undisturbed.  But there is no turning back – you’re on the move to a new beginning and this is all part and parcel of the process. Stick with it!

In Ecclesiastes 3:11 we read that God makes ‘all things beautiful in His time.’ What you are going through is only a season, it won’t last for ever, and you have so much to look forward to. God is working out His wonderful plan and purpose for your life.  Once you have ‘de-cluttered’ - thrown out the wrong or inappropriate thinking, found healing for your damaged emotions and brought some order into your stressed-out life; once you have learnt to make healthy but enjoyable food choices and to listen to the needs of your physical body – you will become beautiful, not just physically, but with an inner radiance that shines out from your entire being.