God diet: She dropped 100 pounds

Jackie Halgash lost 100 pounds when she got her comfort from prayer instead of eating.

“I used food for comfort all the time. I used food for when I was happy and when I was sad. I think pretty much any time I felt like eating,” she says on a CBN video. “I got to a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. I would get up in the morning and before I opened my eyes, my first thought was: what did I do last night? What did I eat? Oh, no! didn’t mean to! I meant to not eat after dinner!”

As a nurse, she knew how obesity jeopardizes health, but the feelings driving compulsive eating overpowered her mental understanding of health. She made rules for herself but always broke them.

Then she found a Christian weight loss program that brought the Lord into her eating.

“It’s a spiritual growth program and that’s the key,” she says. “It gave me the tools that I needed in my faith to be able to stop eating and bring the Lord into my eating.”

As she depended on the Lord, she ate only to being satisfied, not full. When she felt tempted, she called out to the Lord and dedicated that moment as a fast unto the Lord.

“The weight dropped off,” she says.

She dedicated it to the Lord: “Thank You, take this. This is a fast. Take this and I honor You because this is what You’re asking me to do.” Read the rest: God diet to drop 100 pounds

Groomed by pimp, girl rescued from anxiety by God

MySpace, Heather found just the sort of compassionate older friend to whom she, at age 12, could confide her troubles, things she couldn’t share with her own parents.

Then, he showed up on the evening news under arrest for intent to prostitute a minor. Heather’s profile popped up as one of his top eight on MySpace, a now virtually defunct social media.

“I felt like talking to him was a rush because it was a secret,” she recounts in a CBN video. “I saw the red flags on multiple occasions, but I ignored them because it was not what I wanted to believe. I could talk to him about school. I could talk to him about family. He was this unbiased person I could bring in. He was kind. He was someone I could confide in. I enjoyed talking to him.”

When the man was arrested, Heather feared she would be raped. She had no idea if he was in jail or released. All she knew was that he lived in her town.

Her fears grew into gnawing anxieties that dogged her for most of the rest of her life.

As a teen, she discovered anorexia and bulimia — and this gave her a sense of control.

“I was so anxious and afraid that I remember I wasn’t hungry,” she says. “I remember thinking, oh this is a great distraction. I felt powerful.”

Next Heather turned to “cutting” — the practice of slitting your wrists to toy with suicide and express desperation.

“There was an overwhelming release of tension with cutting,” she says.

During her sophomore year of high school, 11 loved ones died within eight months.

“I felt more out-of-control having people being ripped away from me, people dying too young,” she says. “I started cutting a lot more, a lot deeper.”

By now, she was receiving professional counseling — to no avail.

“I kept punishing myself for the mistakes that I had made,” she admits. “It distracted me from the sadness I felt. But more than anything, it helped with my anxiety.”

She attended college a few hours from home. The change of scenario did nothing to help her. Without her family watching out for her destructive tendencies, Heather indulged her coping mechanisms.

“I felt like there was nothing left that even the world could offer me and I was not going to get better,” she says. Read the rest: Grooming online of girls.

Shed stress, shed pounds

Maybe your problem is not sugar after all.

It might be cortisol. It’s a useful hormone that helps you kick into “fight or flight” mode.

Your adrenal glands dump into your blood system during stress. Its purpose was to — occasionally — heighten blood pressure and heartbeat when in danger of a predator or war in ancient times.

Nowadays, sabre tooth tigers, Black Plague or invading mongols are not a threat. No, your problems are worse- bills, deadlines, domestic friction, rejection, loneliness, competition, low self esteem, weight gain, sickness. Plus, the world is coming to an end (again)

We have more stress points than any civilization ever, and as a result our cortisol levels are puncturing the stratosphere. Excess cortisol cues hypertension, high blood sugar, inflammation, depression, insomnia, atherosclerosis and a bunch of other cools ways to die or live in misery before dying. This is serious! There’s even a full-blown academic journal dedicated to its study: The International Journal on the Biology of Stress.

We’re stressed about stress.

Of course, people develop coping mechanisms to lighten the overload. There are some that are escapist and some are counteractions: alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, binge-watching, oversleeping, social isolation, scape-goating, gaming.

One more: dunking donuts.

Or candy, or soda.

Sugar gives an instant pleasure from a dopamine release in your bloodstream. Dopamine is the happy hormone. It counteracts the cortisol and offsets it, if temporarily. It’s an tangible relief.

Behold then!

Excessive obesity then is not just a product of the prevalence of added sugar in grocery store items. It’s not just a product an overly sedentary lifestyle. Lack of information about nutrition alone cannot be blamed — nor can the marketing fusillade of the food industry.

Our weight problem can be traced to unhealthy stress levels.

You don’t need to strengthen your willpower to resist that chocolate bar. You need to lower your stress levels. Read the rest of the article for practical tips to lower stress and thus shed pounds.

In other words, sugar makes you want to eat more food. (Why you don’t feel full.)

So the food industry only provides what people want. Right? And people want, time after time, what they crave. So sugar is sinking America’s health.

To be sure, there are many culprits — more sedentary lifestyles (read: gaming), for example. Also of surety, sugar is a huge villain.

That two of three adults are chubby? Um, yes.

Are we surprised that 30% of boys and girls under 20 are overweight in 2019 — up from 19% in 1980?

Is it any wonder that 160 million Americans are obese?

Sugary foods represent a double whammy for health. First the calories add on the fat. Then the overeating, induced by sugar, brings on the fat.

Consider a college grad student named Anthony Sclafani who was only being nice to lab rats under his care: As a treat, he’d give them Fruit Loops.

But then Sclanfani noticed they really loved the sugary cereals. So he started conducting experiments in the 1960s: Would rats abandon their wall-hugging rambles to venture into the dangerous center of the room for Fruit Loops? They did.

(And so do our teenagers.)

When he needed to fatten up mice for another experiment, he found the critters stayed slender no matter how much chow he gave them. They ate to satiety — feeling full — and no more. He remembered the Fruit Loops and quickly got fat rats.

Still more experiments. They loved sugar — even when they couldn’t taste it — and never stopped scarfing it. Sclafani has made a lifetime of studying sugar-indulging  rodents and his findings are frightening: sugar suppresses satiety.

The implications? The food industry has made lab rats out of us all.

What now?

Excess body fat leads hypertension, high LDL cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, cancer, mental illness and depression, and body pain.

It’s easy to slam the food producers. They fill up the supermarket with sugary items — up to 73% of grocery store items contain added sugar. Because we reward them for it.

So what is to be done? Read the rest on Medium:  how the food industry made rats of us with sugar.

Overcoming overeating in Christ

Michelle Aguilar was 18 when her mom told her she was leaving her dad. She was devastated. Wasn’t her life with Christian parents supposed to be perfect?

Michelle cut off communication with her mom and her insecurities grew. To internalize the rejection and depression, she turned to eating sweets to boost her spirits.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she says on an I am Second video. “I didn’t know how to deal with my pain or the confusion that I was going through. I think when you’re at a place where you’re kind of out of control with a lot of things, it’s an easy step to turn to food.”

She gained weight steadily, always hiding behind a million dollar smile. She reached 242 pounds.

As a Christian, “I knew I couldn’t turn to drugs or alcohol,” Michelle says. “Food was acceptable and it gave me a sense of control. (But) it becomes a guilt thing. You realize that you’re eating, and you’re feeling bad while you’re eating, and it’s just making it worse.”

Mom remarried and took Michelle’s two siblings. Michelle was left alone with dad.

Then a co-worker told her about The Biggest Loser reality TV show, in which overweight contestants worked out to see who loses the most weight, and the “biggest loser” wins $250.000. Michelle auditioned and was rejected the first time, but producers called to include her in the new season.

It had been six years since she talked to her mom. Dad suggested she participate in the program with her mother, who had also gained substantial pounds. Perhaps their participation might break down the walls between them. In this edition of Biggest Loser it was teams, parent-child or husband-wife.

“I really felt like God was saying, I’m going to give you an opportunity to start over and change from the inside out, and this could be the option if you’re willing to do it.”

But there were mixed emotions. Re-connecting with mom appealed to her, but Michelle viewed her as “the source of my pain, the source of my weight gain.”

She charged into a rigorous physical regimen like a would-be winner. But then she chipped her tooth. Her smile had always been her shield. It projected an image of self-confidence even when she was crying on the inside. It was her only defense against shame, and now it was gone.

“I felt like somebody had stripped away that armor, and said, “No, look at you. You’re smile is gone now. What are you going to do?’” she says. Finish reading how to overcome overeating.