Do you feel like you’re trying your best to live a healthy lifestyle, but you’re a bit all over the place and you’re not sure what to do, what not to do, or what to try next?

When you’re trying to choose a healthier lifestyle it’s so easy to get swept along in several different directions, leaving you flailing around and feeling like you haven’t got anything firm to hold onto. You know that you want freedom but are a bit uncertain which direction to take. That’s why diets so often appeal, because they give you some structure, something to hold onto, making you feel like you’ve got some degree of control.

But the problem with diets is that you can’t hold on to them for ever. Sometimes holding on is far too unrealistic and they can also affect your mindset. When you don’t get the results that you like, you want to let them drop or perhaps you believe you haven’t got the results you want because you didn’t hold on tight enough or follow them closely enough – it can all get really complicated!

In this week’s video and blog I share my thoughts on what we can focus on instead, when we’re trying to live a healthier life…

Like anything, as always, the answer is of course: Jesus, and what God would want from us. So, to gain freedom our focus must first be on having freedom in our choices. In the Bible it says that everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. So, what does that mean for you?

Making mistakes isn’t the problem; God has a plan B. He knows that we will make mistakes, that we won’t always do things the way that’s most beneficial every time. God can help us through those mistakes.  But bondage to those mistakes can be a problem, and that’s what God wants to set us free from.

First, take anything before God that you know you’re not free from, anything that holds you in bondage. Perhaps it’s over-exercise, perhaps it’s late-night binge-watching television, perhaps its emotional eating, perhaps its unhealthy habits. He cares, he wants to help, and he wants you to have fullness in all areas of life, including this area of looking after our body spirit and soul. 

Second, make sure in your other choices, that weight isn’t your focus. Weight is irrelevant really, unless we’re going to walk along the street and pick each other up! You might want to lose a bit of body fat, and you might prefer to look a bit different, but if you’re focused on God then those things will follow. So, concentrate on being healthy and balanced in your decisions and then the weight-loss, if you want that, will follow behind. Remember, it’s not so much the action that you take – there’s no “good foods” or “bad foods”, “right things to do” or ‘wrong things to do” – what’s more important is the attitude we have.

For example, I could finish what I’m doing now and go for a long walk. That could be done in a very healthy attitude: I’ve been inside all day, I need some headspace because I haven’t really processed some things, and I just want to get out and stretch my legs. Or, it could be that I’m thinking “I ate a cake for pudding at lunch and I need to get out and burn off 600 calories otherwise I’m never going to lose that weight that I’ve put on, and then I won’t be able to eat anything tomorrow”. Same action but completely different attitudes and mindsets. 

It’s all about aiming for a healthy balanced attitude, rather than focusing on weight and guilt around our choices, and to get there, we need to bring it all before God. Imagine a spirit level with a bubble in the middle: if that spirit bubble is in the centre, then everything is balanced and it’s the same for us. If our motives are to live a healthy balanced, free life with God at the centre, everything else will fall into place!

If you’d like some help or support our new-style Healthy Whole and Free course is up and running and you can join at any time. It’s delivered to your inbox in bite-size chunks, you get a weekly video with a couple of things to do every week for 6-months, along with some live teaching and coaching elements and a Facebook group for support and encouragement. I’d love to help you on this journey and work out what’s going on for you in this area so that you can move forward in freedom! You can find out more and sign up here!