The Effects of Gratitude on Your Bathroom Scale

Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,  giving thanks through Him to God the Father. ---Colossians 3:17

Thirty minutes is not enough! I don’t’ know about you, but squeezing the federally recommended 30 daily minutes of exercise into my schedule has been no easy feat. And now, according to a March report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the average woman needs 60 minutes of moderate exercise a day to prevent weight gain. (Notice I said prevent weight gain and not “lose weight.”) It gets worse. If you’re clinically overweight (a body mass index of 25% or more) 60 minutes a day of moderate exercise supposedly has no effect on your weight.

Don’t shoot me. I’m just the messenger.

But I’m not disgusted by this finding—and neither should you be. There is tremendous hope because this confirms what we’ve really known all along. We eat too much and exercise will not cure it. But something else might: thankfulness.

Google tells me there are an awful lot of reasons why we overeat. I’ve narrowed them down to three categories in no particular order:

1. Boredom can happen when we feel like we have “nothing to do.” For some of us, though, it happens when what we have to do becomes tedious. That’s when I can think of nothing better than to invite a bag of nachos over for a party in my mouth. My eating is really a personal protest to my circumstances. I’m not hungry; but I’m not satisfied with the “now.” I want a food diversion—but what I need is an attitude change.

In this environment of unemployment, I rarely hear the term “dead-end” job anymore. That’s because most of us who are gainfully employed are just thankful to be so. Fostering a sense of gratefulness sometimes means considering what kind of loss I would suffer without the responsibilities I have in the moment. God gave me a husband, a home, children, a job and the opportunity to participate in His Kingdom through them. What does having them say to me about God’s blessings and goodness? (Sometimes, God takes them away and shows us how good He is through the losses). Focusing on how I have been blessed by God restores thankfulness to me for what I have to do. It also helps to fill my heart with passion rather than a discontent that nacho chips cannot cure.

2. Food therapy is a second reason we overeat. We’re so familiar with this that we have coined cute terms to identify the behavior. We “eat our feelings.” We turn to “comfort food.” We eat because we are lonely, angry, happy or nervous. Ultimately, we turn to food to help us. We don’t lift our eyes up to the hills—we place them on the freezer. Where does our help come from? Ben and Jerry.

It’s easy for me to dismiss this with laughter. But in a way, it’s not funny. What it says about me in the moment is that I do not believe my help comes from God, and therefore I am not grateful that He is with me; that He is my Healer, my Comforter, my Friend. I can give lip service to what I say I believe about God, but in moments of personal despair, are my lips engaged in praise or wrapped around a Twinkie? The writer of Psalm 50 instructs us to “sacrifice thank offerings” to God. Thanking God in faith for His help in our emotional despair is a sacrifice of faith. We are thanking Him for the help He gives us that we can’t see in the moment—rather than the food that we can see and taste. Doing this is saying, “God, I hurt right now, but I’m turning to you and I’m going to pour out my heart to you in detail about how I’m feeling. I choose to be thankful that you are here; that you are my helper; that you are my friend who never leaves me.”

3. Entitlement is a third reason we overeat. This is my default mode. I eat because I can. Because it’s “my food.” Because I bought it; I own it; I cooked it and I deserve it. Sometimes I think of it as my reward for the day. Oddly enough, when I say grace, I do not say, “Thank you Nan for this food.” So there is something wrong about my thinking—and what’s wrong is my ingratitude toward God.

My food is not my food—it’s food that God has given through His provision. The assumption that I can use it in the way I choose because it’s mine is at best an ungrateful assumption. While the rest of the world strives to protect its health by getting enough food to eat, our striving is in not eating too much. This is a clear stewardship failure on our part. Gluttony is not God’s intention, and the antidote to it is gratefulness for the food He gives us.

I’m not throwing in the proverbial towel on exercise. Although 30 minutes no longer cuts it for weight maintenance, it is still enough to protect us from heart disease. Losing and maintaining weight as we age, however, will always be dependent on how much we choose to eat--and that is a consequence of an entirely different kind of heart condition.

*Note according to the study: Sixty minutes a day of moderate exercise will maintain the weight of the average over-40 year old woman as long as she does not overeat. Thirty minutes of intense exercise (running, swimming, fast cycling) will do the same.

Exercise will not make you thin

For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come. -- 1 Timothy 4:8 (NKJ)


It’s natural that anyone who spends 40 minutes in treadmill torture land will want to clobber me for stating that exercise will not make you thin. Why in the world would we submit ourselves to hamster-like hell if it wasn’t taking us at least a few steps farther away from the sales rack at Lane Bryant?

The fact is, exercise does help--but only a little, and not enough to make the kind of difference that most of us have in mind. When the Apostle Paul told Timothy about exercise, he had no idea how prophetic those words would become for us 2,000 years later. There was no such thing as Oreo cookies in first century Palestine.

Consider this: one Oreo cookie (less than half of a serving size, according to the package) is 70 calories. It takes 20 minutes of fast walking on a treadmill to burn the calories of one Oreo cookie for the average 150 pound person –as if anyone who loves food would eat only one Oreo cookie! And if we were eating only one Oreo cookie and this was our only vice, none of us would be concerned about weight loss. But weight loss entails some cold, hard facts.

You need to exercise off 500 calories every day off the calories you need daily to sustain your weight. If you are relying on exercise alone to help you lose weight, you need to do this every day, seven days a week, in order to lose just one miserable pound. I could gain a pound by accident. I swallow too much air and the scale goes up.

If you run a ten minute mile for 40 minutes you will probably burn something like 400 calories. So you’ll have to do that every day and supplement with at least a two mile walk every day or some other exercise that will make up the difference every day in order to burn your 500 calories. And then you must make sure that you eat no more than it takes to sustain your current body weight, even if you are hungry. If you go over the calorie limit just one day, technically speaking, you will not achieve your weight loss goal.

It is possible that you could lose one pound a week through exercise alone on a consistent basis. But possible and probable are two different things. Relying on exercise alone to make us thin is a recipe for disillusionment (a.k.a hitting the Haagen Daaz in disgust after a week, if we make it that long).

There are some compelling reasons to exercise. Helping with weight loss is one of them. I advocate exercise. It has changed my life, and I will write about that more another day. But more importantly, there’s a clue in what Paul wrote to Timothy that can help us far more than increasing our exercise time.

For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.

Paul wasn’t dismissing exercise; instead he was promoting something that is of far greater value—godliness. Contrary to the images that Saturday Night Live and Dana Carvey have forever put in my mind about godliness, it has nothing to do with the church lady. Instead it literally means “to worship well.” In other words, it means to reflect on and express outwardly the characteristics of God in our lives.

Godliness, Paul says, is also profitable for “all” things which help us both in this life and the one after. So if godliness helps us in “all” things, it certainly helps us when it comes to our health and our eating habits. What does it look like to be “godly” or to be “like God would be” in our eating habits? Can my food consumption affect my spiritual well being?

There are too many Scripture references about food to cover them all in this post—but when it comes to food consumption under the New Covenant (that refers to the Christian), Scripture deals most with the subject of how much we eat--self control or portion sizes--rather than what we eat.

2 Peter 1: 5-7; 2 Timothy 3: 1-9; and 2 Corinthians 10:5 are great reference points toward which to turn for thoughts about self-control and the consequences of lacking it. This is an incredibly convicting notion for a woman who loves to eat. Portion control is an indication of self control or a lack thereof, and ultimately how I worship God in my eating habits.

No amount of exercise will make up for a pattern of putting too much food in our mouth—exercise will probably not make us thin. Worse, it will never fix the spiritual consequences and implications of gluttony. But mastering self control through faith and knowledge (2 Peter 1:5-7) in this very personal, daily discipline of what goes in our mouths will--and those benefits will help us now and forever.