Fit To Be Untied: Fit To Be Untied: The First 17 Days

Getting Untied

I turned 40 two years ago (it’s easier to say it that way, okay?!) At first it was a novelty—at the time I was probably in the best shape of my life, so I didn’t think much of it. Then I took a people-oriented job that required I sit at my desk for 20 hours a week. The desk part was no different from the job I held before—it was the people part that had changed. In the last two years, as my social calendar filled and my friendships blossomed, so did my waist line. I have yet to find a social gathering without food. What’s more, I’ve found that, over 40, the extra 15 pounds doesn’t come off like it used to.

So lately I think a lot about food, fitness, and the failure to easily achieve what I want in my body by manipulating the first two. But I’m not alone. It seems like more people than ever before are obsessing over food, exercise and weight loss. By far my most responded-to posts on Facebook are those that have to do with food, weight-loss and exercise. And why not? Our food supply has been tampered by chemicals and hormones. We’re told by the FDA-backed corporations that these are harmless. We’re told by proponents of the organic food movement that commercial food is poison to us and our children. It’s hard to know who to believe since both industries are profit driven. If our food isn’t pure, it’s certainly abundant—and as a culture we are literally eating ourselves to death. We are more than 30% obese and our condition invites heart disease, colon cancer and diabetes.

On the flip side, we feel like failures when compared with the cultural icons of beauty. Whether fat or thin, most women simply can’t achieve the bikini bods that grace the covers of women’s magazines, promising a thinner you in 30 days or less. We don’t like our pictures taken. Ironically, some of us don’t even like to go to the gym because we think we are too fat. I’m not a trained medical professional. I’m not an athlete. I’m just an ordinary person caught up in all this mess and, like you, wanting out. It’s enough to make me seriously consider a theological commitment to the rapture.

Thus, enter, stage right (not too far right): the Christian perspective, without which we are left to the tyranny of extremes. When it comes to food, fitness and exercise, it is too easy to feel what in “religious talk” is called bondage. We can become obsessed, single-goal focused and short-changed on life. We can become tied to an ideal that we can never or probably should never seek to achieve. My goal is for something different. I want to be fit to be untied from this—and I’m not sure exactly how that looks, but I know it’s a journey that has far more to do my heart than just food and exercise. Will you join me?

Fit To Be Untied

Monday, January 24, 2011

Fit To Be Untied: The First 17 Days

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Monday, January 24, 2011

Fit To Be Untied: The First 17 Days

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