By Samantha Taylor, Health & Fitness Expert
Did you know it’s actually a characteristic of following God to be able to have self-control? Some people say that “willpower doesn’t work” but that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about. Galatians 5:22-23 talks about how a “fruit” of the Spirit is self-control.
The word fruit in this scripture actually means a result or an effect of something. Chapter 5 talks about following God and walking in the ways of the Spirit instead of just following your flesh that has the cravings and desires. But that word self-control actually means in the Bible “to master oneself, to restrain, to have control over”.
I don’t know about you, but I struggled immensely with food and I had no self-control whatsoever. Until I learned that the Bible actually talks about having self-control and that it’s an effect or result of following after God. That really gave me hope because I was such a food addict and overeater, I didn’t know how to say no to unhealthy food.
I just thought if I had a craving for it, I had to eat it. But then I found when I overate, I was frustrated with how I felt afterwards and in the end, I was frustrated with my decision. There’s a difference between something tasting good and making you feel physically not well because you either ate too much of it or it’s just an unhealthy processed food that’s not good for the body.
So it was really empowering to learn that you actually can have godly self-control over yourself and your cravings. You learn to not just jump on impulse with any food that is before you, you actually stop and think about it and make a decision based on what you want as a result of eating that food.
Again, there’s a big difference of eating something just for flavor compared to eating things that are going to help you be healthy, feel amazing, easily maintain your weight AND taste great. From working on this, I really learned how to respond to a trigger or stimulus with certain foods and CHOOSING what to eat based on the whole experience instead of just reacting on impulse.
This had a huge impact on my food choices and more easily being able to choose foods that I was not going to regret later. Again, I’m not talking about making a choice just on the flavor. I’m talking about the whole experience that it brings to the table because after the flavor is over, now you have to deal with the aftermath of what the food is doing to your body. And you learn to ask yourself if the effect of that food is what you really want, after the flavor is gone.
After going through these principles, I realized that I had a dysfunctional, unhealthy relationship with food, almost a love-hate relationship of loving the flavor but hating the result of what I was eating. It was when I worked on having a healthy relationship with food and choosing the foods based on the outcome I wanted, instead of just being impulse driven, that my food choices really started to change.
If you would help with this, I did a recent Bible study on this topic and you can get it here. www.SamanthaTaylor.com/selfcontrol I also just launched my new you tube channel where you can get weekly inspiration here: www.youtube.com/@SamanthaTaylor333