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I thought my body was gross. I thought God didn’t give me a good one. God changed my perspective. Now that insecurity has become fierce respect for this wonder God has given me.

Now I’m convinced that we as women are jewels. Our bodies are of the highest value. And we should not put our jewels before swine. Your body should be adored by someone who deserves it. By someone who serves you, respects you and makes you feel worth it. Your husband (though he himself is a work in progress) is the only one who fits the bill.

Tips:

• Assume the attraction is there.
• Practice affirmations. I do this with my clients and this is one of the most effective strategies.
• Spend time journaling rather than eating. Eating allows us to numb ourselves from the difficulties of life. We stuff ourselves with food so we don’t feel.
• You are not being cocky by telling yourself you’re gorgeous. Your body is God’s work of art. He gets the credit. God made you beautiful. When you get compliments, receive it and give the glory to God in your heart. You don’t have to let that puff you up in pride, you can give that to God.
• It is a discipline to have confidence. And it takes discipline to get there.
• Write through the hard times, rather than stuff the hard time with food which make the enemy distract you from life and God’s voice.

Resources: Women Food and God (Though not a Christian book, amazing principles that we can apply through a godly lense can be gleened.)

 

 

Next week: 174-Body P3: Flaunt It, Don’t Ask For Approval

 

 

0:02
Welcome to the delight your marriage podcast. This show where you hear from amazing and inspiring wives sharing their struggles, triumphs, and advice for this journey called marriage. Here’s your host, belah rose.

0:19
All right, welcome back, I am excited to have you. Now if you are just jumping into the body series, exciting stuff, I would encourage you to go back to last week’s episode, the first series. In fact, if, regardless of where you are, I encourage you to go back and listen to the entire series, I’m going to go through kind of point by point, a cohesive structure. So I encourage you to just go through it the way that it’s presented on the podcast. So this one is about knowing your worth, and understanding the way God set up your body in the way that men are wired as well. So I think this is really important, in an interesting way. The way that I figured out that my body was valuable was by understanding a man’s mind. So that’s actually the big premise behind delight your husband is to understand a man’s mind. And that’s practical, you know, explicit directions, but also practical understandings of a man’s mind. For me, I had to go through that process. Before I could get to a place of like, wow, my body’s awesome. Because, as I talked about last week, I thought my body was gross. I thought God just didn’t give me a good one. I was like, What the heck, all these other women are beautiful with these tiny waist and these amazing boobs and Bud and, you know, the skinny legs, and I just had this like warped view of what I thought was beautiful. And yet, turns out, God did it on purpose. And what I learned was that my body is unbelievably attractive to men. I had no idea. None. I thought it was gross. And so when I started to learn that men are attracted to the female form, to the degree that they are, I began to change my perspectives. See, I think that women are so insecure, that they start getting attention from men, and they just go into that. That’s why there’s so much immodesty, I truly believe is because we don’t know how attractive we really are. If we had any idea, we would cover that beauty up is what I mean to say. We cover it up because we would realize that is that it’s just so valuable, that you don’t want to put your pearls before swine. They don’t deserve to see your jewels. Are you kidding me? They don’t deserve it, those, there’s people that are gonna, you know, slobber all over your beauty No. But you deserve is to be adored by someone who deserves it. Someone who serves you and loves you and makes you happy that one man deserves to see you. And I think when you recognize your worth, as as you’re your body, your physical attraction is so significant, you get to a place of feeling like, you have something valuable, that your body is valuable. So I don’t know where you are on this. If this is, you know, you’re to a place where you’re like, Well, I’m overweight. And you know, I’ve had three babies, I’ve got stretch marks and my boobs sag, and there’s no way that my husband would find me attractive. I gotta tell you, it’s, it’s not true. It’s it, he does find you attractive. And the more you find you attractive, the more he will find you attractive. So you need to just assume the attraction is there. You need to just tell God to give you that confidence that your body is amazing. Because it is he made it amazing. You are not being cocky by telling yourself you’re gorgeous. No, you are not being prideful by knowing that you’re beautiful.

5:01
because God made you beautiful. He did that. He didn’t have to do that. No. Well, you are, is when you receive compliments, give the glory to God in your heart and say thank you. You don’t have to like grovel and be like, Oh, this is a terrible shirt, or Oh, did you see my rolls or Oh, I feel fat, you don’t have to say any of that you can receive that compliment, you can receive that you are beautiful. And give the glory to God. You don’t have to keep it. You don’t have to let that puff you up and pride. Every compliment you receive, receive it. And then in your heart, give the glory to God. And if it’s a safe person, or however you want to handle it, you could be like, Thank you praise God for making me this way. I mean, if they know your heart, and you’re not, you know, whatever. But the point is that God made you gorgeous. He gave your body worth, he made your body beautiful. This is a long time coming for me. And I still struggle with it. It is a discipline to have confidence. I really do think so I think that it gets easier, and becomes more second nature. But it takes discipline to get there. And you might just think, Well, I’m not one that is that way, I’m just not, I’m not confident about my body. And I hear you. But at the same time, at the same time, it’s a discipline. So I want to kind of circle back to this idea of maybe I’m just someone who isn’t beautiful, because I’m so overweight, I have been there. And I still struggle with that, at times. It wasn’t even that long ago, I had this like kind of skin tight, sleeveless shirt on. And then I had this big shawl on top of it. So no, so no one could actually see the skin tight shirt. And my son, we had some friends over and my son was just being goofy and decided to, you know, take my shawl and run with it. And so I had no more shawl. I was thankfully my bedroom at the time. So I had no more shawl. But I was not going to walk out into polite company with the skin type thing on. And so I put on a another shawl. And I gotta tell you, I actually found myself being really embarrassed. Because I felt like it was clear to everyone that I was insecure about my body. And the truth is, maybe I was trying to be modest. Or maybe I was just insecure. Maybe I just didn’t want them to see the parts of my body that I don’t want to show anyone. So yeah, I struggle with that, too. And in, you know, what I had to do is I had to spend some time journaling about my insecurity. I did, because it was a hard feeling to have. And it made me want to eat. Because a lot of times, if you’re like me, that’s how we deal with our hurt feelings that makes us want to eat, we want to numb ourselves from that pain. And it’s funny because I was just looking at my journal, kind of flipping through for something else. And I saw that journal entry and I was like, wow, that’s kind of hilarious. And also kind of really cool that I kept myself from having a binge by journaling, something that was important, and actually processing it through actually going there, actually recognizing the pain, because so often we stuff our selves full of food, so that we don’t feel the pain. But now suddenly, if we feel the more familiar pain of, you know, being angry at ourselves, for stuffing down the pain with food, and then

8:57
it just exacerbates the pain we had in the beginning. But when you recognize the pain is not going to kill you. The pain of trying to prevent experiencing the pain is actually worse.

9:15
There’s this great, great book that I have been processing through the last three months my most recent season that God has taken me through it’s called Women food and God it’s phenomenal. I have probably read it. I read it once I listened to it, I bought the book. Previously I had it just from the library, but now I have actually kind of an accountability partner that she and I write back and forth talking about different processing that we’ve done and whenever I feel like I’m kind of getting off track with my food perspectives, I come back to just read a couple passages in that book and it really frees me from a lot of the you know patterns that I had in my thinking with my relationship with food, and how it brings me back to a place of peace and freedom from that obsession. And from the cycle that I had been in, when a hard thing happens, I emotionally eat, and then that makes me even worse. And then it just keeps the cycle going. So that’s called Women, food and God, I will say, as a caveat, it’s not written from a Christian perspective. But it is written in a way that if you put it in the lens of Christianity, it’s really cool. It works really well, because it’s kind of this idea of food and dieting, and our body being skinny. And these kinds of things are an obsession that distracts us from what makes that matters most in life. And I think that makes so much sense with what the enemy is trying to do with humanity is distract us from what matters, and actually Poulos into the place of depression and despair and binge eating and social media and isolation. Instead of processing the pain of loneliness and processing, the pain of losing someone that you love, or processing the pain of a marriage that feels like it’s falling apart. Instead of running to your obsession with food, you know, of the guilt tripping and the anger and the frustration and then the nother binge or purging or however you are unhealthily eating, and having that relationship with food. Instead not be obsessed, not be thinking about that if you had a good day or a bad day, or suddenly your genes are tight, and everything in your life seemed to have gone wrong, and it’s falling apart. Instead, recognizing that what matters most you are God’s creation, the Holy Spirit is in you. And God’s gonna take you through those hard painful moments. And taking a moment to pull out your journal and right through the hard times, and recognize that you’re not alone. In that process. You’re not alone. Thinking through that pain, and just writing answers to questions that you have for yourself. Like, what am I really hungry for? Am I really craving chocolate when I’m not hungry? Or am I really craving? Friendship? You know, am I responding to, you know, that time recently that I felt humiliated by binge eating? Or am I really responding to that, that person that that I felt embarrassed about? You know, write yourself questions and answer them or just process. It’s a struggle. It’s not easy. I’m, you know, working through it, it’s a daily thing, because it’s not like alcohol, where you had this horrible addiction, and suddenly, you’re like, oh, never again, not touching alcohol again, get it away, you know, not going to go to bars, don’t invite me to your parties. Or if I go, I’m going to drink soda. Like you can’t do that with food, because you got to eat, it’s part of life. But the cool thing is, and that’s actually what she really points to, and women food, and God is it’s actually an opportunity into life, it’s an opportunity to stop numbing yourself and start recognizing, when you see that you’re being pulled into those negative obsessive food habits, that you’re numbing life, that you’re not fully engaging with life. And like I said, I’m on that journey, too. But I will say that I have had so much more freedom than I’ve ever had. And

14:13
if your question is like, but am I going to lose weight if I, you know, live this way. And the truth is, if you start eating, only when you’re hungry, then your body is going to respond by putting you at your natural weight. It’s going to respond by giving you what you should have. You know, what you as a human need to have on your body to be healthy. Because your body knows if you eat when you’re hungry. And not when you’re not. It knows. Um, yeah, it’s a great book, women food and God. If anyone has, if any of this resonates with you she’s wildly adept. I think it’s the word at written word. It’s beautiful language. And every time I pick it up, I’m just floored by how much it sounds like she’s reading my mind and writing about how to kind of get free from it. But as I said, you know, put it in the Christian lens and give God glory for the help that this woman Janine is, is, you know, supporting. So encourage you

15:30
in that way. All right, join me next week, we’re going to be talking more about flaunting, not seeking approval. So that’s a little bit more about sex, specifically.

15:48
So it’s about flaunting, not seeking approval. Oh, no homework for this week. Check out women food and God at the library. See if they have it. If not, I would order it, if I were you. Otherwise, encourage you to write out the affirmations I’m going to give you and practice them every day in the mirror with enthusiasm and excitement. The first affirmation is, my body is beautiful, because God made me beautiful. That’s the first one, I want you to be enthusiastic when you practice. Write that out. Number two, I want you to say my curves, turn my husband on like nothing else. And say it while you’re moving your hips a little bit, my curves, turn my husband on like nothing else. And then the last one, I want you to say, I am worthy of attention. Because God gave me worth. I am worthy of attention, because God gave me worth. I want to remind you that you have got to exercise your faith, to make changes in who you are. You’ve got to practice different ways of thinking you have got to change the patterns of thoughts that you have been given or given to you because of childhood or, or culture or society or whatever. You are worthy. Because God made you worthy because he said you’re beautiful because he decided to live inside you. And he only lives in beautiful things. And he built your body. He designed it you are his masterpiece. Now I really hope you engage this week with this material. Because truly, only if you do the work will you change only if you do the work. Once again, TV series don’t change your life, because you passively receive them. But if you do a course, if you write and think and consider and pray. That’s what changes you when you do the work. When you engage when you articulate your own beliefs. When you think about it, when you pray about it. When you write out what you’re thinking. It’s very, very different than just receiving someone else’s thoughts or considerations, etc, etc. My last thought once again, is to make love this week. Don’t let the week go by without connecting unifying with your husband. It’s very important. There’s too many women that I coach that are on the brink of divorce, or it’s pretty much too late because they let this vital piece go. I understand that there’s lots going on in your life. But make it happen this week. Don’t let it go by the wayside. Check out my podcast why sex matters to him to really understand what’s going on in his heart and brain in thoughts. But do it this week, at least once, twice, three times wherever you are on the scale of however much you do it. Do it more this week. Connect with your spouse this week. God bless you. I will talk to you next week. I’m looking forward to it.

19:24
Thanks for joining. If you’ve been inspired by the show, would you help spread the word. If you take a moment to review and subscribe others can find us more easily. Find out how to delight your marriage.com forward slash iTunes. Until next time, live with love, wisdom and passion