And secular dieting can be very dangerous for women’s souls, for Catholic souls because you risk making mini gods or false gods out of the scale, your body or the food that you eat, believing that that is the ideal or that will bring you ultimate happiness. Or you’re okay or validated. As long as you weigh the magic weight, you’re eating the right food, or you look a certain way.  

And so only focusing on those aspects in secular dieting can really be dangerous and false gods for Catholic women. So I suggest that we do what’s called Catholic Weight Loss, and that just means you’re going to do it with the Lord first. Secular diets tend to focus on the physical and the emotional.

But Catholic weight loss number one, puts the Lord at the forefront so that you are focusing on the spiritual as well as, and while you are focusing on the physical and the emotional. So really, no matter what weight loss method you choose, whether or not you choose a medication or not a medication, or what plan you use, make sure that you’re putting the Lord at the forefront, that you’re inviting him into this process.

And he truly is the best place to start when you say, how should I lose weight, Lord, what is standing in the way of me being at my healthy weight? And he will bring you help. He will bring you a guide. He will bring you a program. He will bring you something, but start talking to him first. Okay?

The second thing is that you want to ask the Lord. Lord, what is standing in the way of me being at a healthy weight? So you’ll want to ask the Lord that specific question, Lord, what is standing in the way of me being at my healthy weight? And depending on what. He says that will determine your next move. 

So if what’s standing in the way of you being at a healthy weight is knowing what to eat, then some nutrition education would be the next step. If what’s standing in the way of you being at a healthy weight is being able to get through the ups and downs of life without stress eating, then learning some emotional regulation and some tools and skills around that, which is what I teach is what you want. 

If what’s standing in the way of you being at a healthy weight is a metabolic condition or a medical condition, then medical intervention is what you will need if what’s standing in the way of you being at a healthy weight. Is food noise and craving. Then learning how to handle food, noise and cravings and the root cause of those is what will help you get to your healthy weight, which again is what I help women with. 

If what Standing in the way of you being at healthy weight is simply unrealistic expectations. You know, sometimes I work with women and I say, how do you know that you’re not at your healthy weight? And they have pause for thought. And if what’s standing in the way of you being in a healthy way is truly unrealistic expectations or believing that your body needs to look a certain way, then you need to take that to the Lord. 

How do you know if you’re at your healthy weight? You are at your healthy weight when you’re living healthfully, which just means that you’re nourishing your body reasonably, moderately well in a balanced way, and you’re moving regularly, and you may be at your healthy weight right now.

So as a Catholic woman, you want to make sure that the Lord is always leading you in every area of your life, especially weight loss. And I say especially because that’s probably an area that you haven’t surrendered yet to him. The second thing is you want to ask him that specific question, Lord, what is standing in the way of me being at my healthy weight?

So let’s say that you as a Catholic woman want to practice a Catholic weight loss method, maybe the surrendered method. So let’s talk about what that would look like. So the Catholic weight loss method is very simple. Number one, it puts the Lord as our God. It makes God our God again, not the food, not the scale, not our body. 

And we practice four daily disciplines. This is called the surrendered method. The Lord is always asking us to trust him because we can trust him. And the surrendered method is a way that we can show the Lord that we do trust him with our food and weight. 

And I know that you’ve never done this before, so we ease into this. We take 63 days to learn this surrendered method in a program called 63, surrendered. The surrendered method is four daily disciplines. Checking in with the Lord in the morning saying the surrender novena, making what’s called an easy to stick to meal plan and checking in with the Lord in the evening.

So let me review what those four daily disciplines do and how that is your sign to the Lord that you are surrendering your food and weight to him and allows him to come in and reorder and heal your relationship with food, your body, weight, and yourself.   

So let’s talk about checking in with the Lord in the morning. During 63 surrendered, I have two questions that I have women ask the Lord, how will I take care of myself today? As well as what unexpected challenges. Do I anticipate and how will I handle them? 

Again, it is checking in with the Lord as well as ourselves and thinking about ourselves and our day. What I find so often is that women go into their day on autopilot and don’t even think about themselves, and we’re not doing this in a selfish way. We’re doing this in a very holy way because second to loving the Lord, your number one job on this earth is to care for one human first. 

Do you know who that is? Yeah. It’s you. Because you have not been entrusted to the care of any other human. So if you do not take care of you, no one else will. And the reason no one else will is not because they don’t love you, it’s because the Lord never gave them that role. 

You have been entrusted, lovingly entrusted to the care of you. And that is why it is the most important thing for you to talk to the Lord about in the morning is how will you take care of the human that you are living as. You’re probably not already doing that.

And so we’re going to check in with the Lord there. The other thing that you’re doing in the morning is you’re saying the surrender novena. The Surrender Novena is a very powerful novena. It’s been exceptionally powerful in my life, and it has been for the over 5,000 women who have gone through 63 surrendered. 

Now, the third thing that you’re doing is what’s called an easy to stick to meal plan, and easy to stick to meal plan is well, easy to stick to. And the reason that we make it easy to stick to is because we are allowing the Lord to come in and reorder our relationship with food, which means that we must give ourselves unconditional permission to eat any food.

Because that is how the Lord designed food. That is why he gave you your taste buds because you like certain foods that I probably don’t like, and I know that the years, if not decades of dieting have told you that some foods are good and some foods are bad. But that doesn’t come from the Lord. His truth is that he created it and it’s all good. 

And so we get to practice for 63 days, allowing the Lord to reorder our relationship with food, and part of that is creating an easy to stick to meal plan. The easy to stick to meal plan has three food rules that you can eat, any food that you enjoy, that it’s food that you feel peaceful about eating before, during, and after you eat it.

So if you feel good planning four Oreos, you plan four Oreos. If you don’t feel good about planning a whole pack of Oreos, then you wouldn’t plan a whole pack. And the third is that you are anticipating your needs for the day, and that the food that you are planning fits into the rhythm of your day. 

All right, so we’re not planning big meals in the evening that are elaborate. If you don’t have time to cook them, then you would plan simple, easy to make things right, just anticipating the needs of the day. 

Now, throughout the day, you may make a food change, and that’s not a problem. A lot of people say, I don’t like to plan because I don’t know what I’m going to eat. Well, you take a best guess, and throughout the day, anytime you’d like to surrender a change, you surrender it to the Lord.

Which simply means, Lord, I surrender that. I’m going to make this change. Take care of everything. You write it down and then you eat whatever it is that you want to change. We don’t use that surrender time to judge, should I make a change? Shouldn’t I make a change? 

We’re simply creating a new pathway in the brain that says, oh, I would like to make a change. Pause, sacred pause. Connect with the Lord, write it down. No judgment. And then peacefully eat whatever you wanted to change. 

What you will notice as you go through the 63 days is that you may be making the same change over and over, which will inform you to just simply plan differently that there is a specific food that you would like at a specific time. So it just helps you plan easier.

The fourth discipline is that you check back in with the Lord in the evening. You ask three questions, what went well? What would I like to remember tomorrow? And what did the Lord reveal to me today? It’s that simple.

And it’s those four daily disciplines that pull you out of secular dieting, pull you out of diet mentality, allow you to connect with the Holy Spirit, allow you to connect with the Lord to reorder your relationship with food so that you can have peace around food as well as quiet the food noise, the cravings, the food noise in a real, permanent and complete way. 

Practicing these daily disciplines will slowly by, slowly, by slowly decrease your reliance on food, for emotional reasons, will quiet cravings and food noise, and allow the Lord to be your God again, not your weight. Not food, not the scale. That’s what the surrendered method does. It allows you to make God your God again and not all those other things.

So that’s what I say actually starts your first phase of Catholic weight loss. So now let’s talk about the phases of Catholic weight loss. What phase of Catholic weight loss are you in?  There are three phases. One, two, and three. So phase one is learning four daily disciplines where you are dipping your toe into this thing called Catholic weight loss.

Essentially, you’re letting the Holy Spirit lead you. In your weight loss efforts, you’re surrendering your food and weight to the Lord in a very concrete way. Most people dunno how to surrender their food and weight to the Lord, and I teach you how to do that. 

You do four daily disciplines. They are saying the surrender novena, checking in with the Lord in the morning, making it easy to stick to meal plan. If you don’t stick to the meal plan, not a problem. You surrender the changes so you can make any changes. And then the fourth one is checking in with the Lord in the evening.

So this is phase one where you’re just trying it on seeing if you like it. Does this work for me? Does this not work for me? Once you decide that this does work for you and you have done. Phase one, I like to do 63 days. It’s seven. Surrender novenas. Again, just wash, rinse, repeat. You’re doing the same thing for 63 days. That’s how the brain remembers. 

A lot of women want their habits to be automatically healthy habits, and that’s what we do. We just keep doing the same thing so that your brain is connecting with the Holy Spirit with regard to food and weight all the time, all day, every day.

So once you have done phase one. Which just means I did this for 63 days. Not perfectly, but I invested 63 days and yes, this is what I want. Then we move to phase two. Now, phase two is when you are learning how to make what I call an easy to stick to meal plan and easy to stick to Meal plan means that you are eating any food.

You have unconditional permission to eat any food. I have three food rules that you eat, the food that you love, that you. Eat food that you feel peaceful about before, during, and after, and that it works for your day. We have practiced for 63 days making an easy to stick to meal plan and surrendering changes as you go. 

Now in phase two, our goal is to make an easy to stick to meal plan that actually works for our day that we can stick to without making changes. Not that changes are bad, but I want you to learn three skills during phase two. Those three skills are: I want you to be able to accurately and honestly anticipate your needs for the day. 

And when you can make an easy to stick to meal plan that works for your day, check, you have done that. The other thing is I want to teach you how to eat food without dieting. Eat any food that you love without dieting.

So, you enjoy your food, and I know that if you’re making an easy to stick to meal plan that you can stick to, you are not dieting. The third thing that’s necessary before you can move on to phase three is that you need to have tools to be able to emotionally care and support for yourself throughout your days that are not food.

So if you can make an easy to stick to meal plan and stick to it, that’s telling me that even when emotions come up, you have the tools to deal with them, with tools that actually meet your needs, your emotional needs, instead of using food. Is that incredible? So that’s what you learn in phase two. 

Now, phase three is where we move into intentional weight loss. Now before I get into phase three, let me talk about phase two. Phase two, I call it very surrendered. You have separated your food choices from your emotions. You are feeling a lot of peace. You have significantly less food cravings. You have significantly less food noise.

And although you may overeat at some time, and although you may emotionally eat sometimes the majority of the time, it is drastically reduced and I don’t really believe that we’ll ever get to 0% emotional eating. We’re human beings that eat several times a day. But if we can go from 80 to 60. To 50, to 40 to 30 to 20 to 15 or 10. I think we’d all say that we are really, really happy with that. 

And the truth is, is that the majority of women can get to their healthy way in phase two. They don’t even have to go to phase three. But let’s talk about phase three. Phase three is that if you have separated your food choices from your emotions, you are feeling peace with food. You are feeling detached from food.   

Phase three is. What I call intentional weight loss. I have a program that’s called the Weight Loss Lab, and this is where you get to open your eyes and become a scientist on your life, observe your life, and detect what could be holding up your weight loss. In prayer and observation, the Lord will reveal to you certain things that you could potentially clean up or you might need to solve for. 

Some of the things that women. Note in this phase of weight loss are things like standing and eating are things like having a snack when she returns home from being out, sort of that transition snack. It’s this habitual snack that maybe isn’t for hunger. 

And the only time that people go into phase three is when they want intentional weight loss or they’ve hit a plateau. So, hey, having a transitional snack is not a problem. Eating while you’re cooking dinner isn’t a problem. If it’s not a problem for you, if it doesn’t feel chaotic, if it feels peaceful, then that’s not a problem.

But if it’s holding up your weight loss, then that’s when in phase three, we start to clean that up. We start to discern, is this something I want to keep in my life? Is this something that perhaps could kickstart my weight loss? Is this what’s holding me up from being at a healthy weight? Phase three is really fun. It’s very experimental.

And I think the whole process is very fun and experimental. We get to learn about ourselves. We get to come out of this belief that we can even do life or weight loss wrong. We come out of the heaviness of secular dieting and have peace and freedom. Why? Because God is our God. Again, not all of this worldly stuff, the priorities of life start to become priorities. 

We start to surrender so many things, just not our food and weight to the Lord. So many other things. So those are the three phases of Catholic weight loss. You start with number one, you can go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com, and that’s where you start in 63, surrendered. 

So let me ask you, what phase of Catholic weight loss are you in? Because if you are a Catholic woman, I want to make sure that your weight loss is with the Lord because a weight loss with the Holy Spirit, this is where God becomes our God again.