Maybe I should say, I've had too much. Too much of me, that is, and not enough of Him. I look in the mirror and scare myself. Who is that matronly blob of a woman with the flabby arms and big tummy? My face looks so young but my body looks so OLD. And this is not a new development.

I was slightly overweight all my life. My mother is tall, thin and leggy and was apparently distressed to have a short, stocky daughter. Although exercise was never part of the equation, my ...

Maybe I should say, I've had too much. Too much of me, that is, and not enough of Him. I look in the mirror and scare myself. Who is that matronly blob of a woman with the flabby arms and big tummy? My face looks so young but my body looks so OLD. And this is not a new development.

I was slightly overweight all my life. My mother is tall, thin and leggy and was apparently distressed to have a short, stocky daughter. Although exercise was never part of the equation, my calories were restricted for as long as I can remember - which I now know to be a cause of slow metabolism. My brother, a picky eater who had the nerve to be *under*weight, had all kinds of junk food available to him. I was given a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch. We ate dinner together, which was usually a meat main portion, cold veggies straight from a can and a salad of lettuce, cucumber, shaved carrot, onion and tomato. I was served what I was allowed to eat and that was that. No dessert - not even fruit. I wasn't even allowed to have dessert with everyone else on Thanksgiving (although my grandmother would save me a slice of pumpkin pie to eat with her in the kitchen). I distinctly remember my 10th birthday, when my mother took a Devil Dog from the box reserved for my brother, stuck a candle in it, lit it and wished me a happy birthday. No cake for a 10 year old who never got to eat sweets, even on her birthday?

Due to a lack of exercise, I remained chubby and went from restricted intake to actual diets. My mother put me on Weight Watchers and even some fad diets, the most memorable being the buttermilk and banana diet (blech!!) I started sneaking cookies from my brother's supply and learned to calculate that a frozen Queens bagel stuffed into my dresser drawer would thaw out in 25 minutes. Amazingly, my weight remained stable. When I was 17, I met a friend of my father's. She told me several months later that I didn't look anything like she expected. When I asked why, she said my father spent so much time talking about my weight that she was expecting someone morbidly obese instead of a lovely, only slightly pudgy, girl. As if being a teenager wasn't hard enough! Thank you, Jesus, for saving me just in time.

Naturally, when I went to college, all food bets were off. I didn't see any relationship between food and my faith. I gained about 30 pounds and my weight remained there until I had my second child. I gained 20 more pounds over the next 20 years although I finally learned to eat a healthy, balanced diet, and one day, looked in the mirror to see not the lovely, pudgy girl I always saw but an extremely overweight, out of shape, middle-aged woman I couldn't recognize as me. This was no way to treat the temple of the Holy Spirit. And that was when I realized that something really had to change.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. THEN all these things will be added unto you...God is so smart. You should check Him out for yourself!

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