But before we do, I wanna talk to you about when you mess up, have you ever messed up and then felt so horrible about it that you thought, well, you know what? The day ruined, I’m just going to give up. You never say give up, but I’m gonna throw in the towel and I’ll start again tomorrow, or I’ll start again on. Monday and I call this multiplying the mess up.

And what happens is that you lose hours, if not days of progress that you could be making in your weight loss journey. And having one mess up isn’t the problem. The problem is that no one’s taught you how to not multiply the mess up into hours or days. And so I have a very special workshop. That’s this Friday, April 17th. You can sign up for that.

There’s a link in the description of what to do when you mess up. So that you can be a woman who doesn’t multiply her mess ups, be a woman who actually takes a mess up and uses it to create momentum in your weight loss success and make more progress than you would have had you not quote messed up. So definitely get your spot in that workshop this Friday.

Okay, so back to our Lent, rebound. Like I said, what a Lent rebound is is that you return to the thing that you give up and it feels like you’re attached to it maybe a little bit more than you were before. So you’d gone through Lent and maybe you went back to the thing, say it was sugar. Say it was candy, you went back to it maybe a few times during Lent, but mostly you stuck with it.

And I hear this all the time where women say, oh, I can give up sugar for all of Lent. I just don’t know why I can’t do it any other time of the year. I’m gonna tell you why, especially why that rebound happens after Lent. The first reason is that. What you gave up, the Lord didn’t ask you to do it.

It was probably your idea that you thought, wow, this would be really hard. This is something I’ve been wanting to give up. This would be a great sacrifice. And before Lent, before you actually had to start doing the things, it sounded like a great idea.

And one of the things I really encourage. People to do is to sit with the Lord and ask him, Lord, what do you want me to focus on becoming detached from this Lent? What’s really standing in the way of me being closer to you?

And when you ask that, he’s so faithful, he will give you an answer. He might not give you an answer as fast as you want it, but he will give you an answer. Just remember that for next lent. So if you just chose something and you didn’t ask him, know that, then you are simply running on your own motivation and your own tools and resources.

Because had you asked the Lord, Lord, what do you want me to give up? He would have revealed to you the tools, the resources, and the support that you needed to be able to do that. You wouldn’t simply be doing it from your own motivation.

So when we do something from our own motivation, we are really relying on feeling motivated, feeling disciplined, feeling self-control instead of putting ourselves into a system. And so what I mean by that is. Like I said, if the Lord said, I want you to fast from this, he would’ve provided the tools, the resources. Maybe he would’ve given you a book or a support, a group to join, just like we have our Lent 63 surrendered.

He would’ve provided a way for you, and you would’ve locked into that. In fact, you wouldn’t have been motivated. To do whatever it is you did for Lent, you would’ve just felt a very calm, peaceful conviction. This is what I’m going to do. I agreed to it. The Lord asked me and I want to do that for him. And a calm, peaceful conviction is way different than human motivation.

Human motivation waxes and wanes. A calm, peaceful conviction from the Lord is just a lot steadier and whatever you are fasting from just miraculously, you feel less interested in it. So when you’re running on your own motivation, we tend to white knuckle through the hard times.

So if you’re fasting from sugar, the reason you have chosen to fast from sugar is probably because you felt like I’m a little too attached to sugar. I rely on sugar too much, and maybe I could lose a few pounds if I give up sugar.

And so with that mindset. You believe that sugar has been the problem all along, but when we remove sugar from your life, there’s a hole. There’s a reason that you had been using sugar to comfort yourself, to soothe yourself, to give yourself a treat.

And what we haven’t solved for. By simply white knuckling through not having sugar is the reason you were turning to sugar. And I just say that for no other reason than no one’s ever told you that. And I also say that because I want you to see, oh my gosh, it makes a lot of sense why I had a lent rebound.

I was turning to sugar for comfort, for a treat, for appreciation to make my life fun. To soothe myself when I feel sad and lonely, to comfort myself when I’m stressed and overwhelmed all of the things.

And when we don’t have ways and tools to soothe ourselves when we’re sad and lonely, we can white knuckle through not having sugar, but we still haven’t learned how to soothe ourselves when we’re sad and lonely, and therefore, when it magically becomes Easter. And we have the opportunity to feast again. We do it. In the spirit of feasting and then find that we become attached to it again.

And I don’t think the Lord asks us to fast from things during Lent, just for us to return to our old selves. I think the fasting is meant to create new in us. Is to create less attachment to things, more attachment to the Lord. And I think that would probably be the ideal definition of a Lent rebound is truly just returning to our ways prior to Lent.

But again, I’m not saying this to shame you or to have any regret. I’m simply saying that guess what? The Lord is always resurrecting you. He’s always creating new in you. He’s always giving you the opportunity to create detachment on the things that are not bringing his fruits, that aren’t making you feel good about yourself, that are making you feel bad.

And you can change that at any time. Let me give you an example from our community. So I was coaching a woman today and she had said that she initially wanted to give up sugar for Lent. And in our programs, if you wanna give up a food that’s fine, but you don’t have to.

In our programs we do what’s called an easy to stick to meal plan and that easy to stick to meal plan. You are allowed to plan whatever food you want. So she said, I’m not going to give up sugar. I am simply going to learn how to eat an amount that I feel good about. She said that, will be more of a sacrifice to truly learn and practice planning one or two cookies and then sticking to that.

Her sort of boundaries that she put was she would plan one cookie, or if she was at someone’s house and they offered dessert, she would eat dessert. And what’s so great is as I record this, we are seven weeks after Lent started. We’ve already gone through Easter week and so Lent is over. And now I asked her, well, how’s your relationship with sweets? How does that go?

And she said before she wouldn’t be able to stop with just one, and now she can. And I let that be the evidence that when the Lord truly calls you to do something, whether it’s give up sugar or just moderate it, he provides the tools and the resources, which he did. She was part of this program.

And therefore she now is a different woman than when she started Lent because he did that. He gave her the human tools and resources that she needed so that his grace could come in and heal her.

And I want you to know he is always, always, always going to do that for you. If you are not talking to the Lord about your struggles with your food and your weight. I want you to talk to him, and you might find that you are that person that has lots and lots of food noise. And the food noise because you’re thinking about it so often. It’s leading you to eat.

And I’m gonna do another podcast about the difference between the kinds of eaters. I like to call that maybe the emotional eater. And then you look at the way that you eat. And so because you’re eating so often or so much or you feel out of control with your eating, that’s stressing you out.

And then there’s another kind of eater who eats. Moderately, let’s say quote, normally in air quotes, and then something happens in life, they’re stressed out and then they turn to food. So everything is fine until they’re stressed and then they feel out of control with food. The other person feels out of control with food and that is stressing them out.

My point is that if you fall into one of those camps of women, either the stresses of life are causing you to eat or you are eating and that’s stressing you out and affecting your health no matter which camp you’re in. And maybe you vacillate between the two. Totally fine too.

Talk to the Lord about your struggles with food and weight. If you’re not doing that, there’s a huge missing piece. He will nudge you. He will prompt you. He will bring you information. He will bring you a program, he will bring you something, and that he will just gently say, this is what I want for you. I want you to try this.

I just promise you, he is so faithful because I see over and over and over and over the women in our program, when I talk to them about how their Easter went. All of them said that they experienced the Lord’s resurrection in a new way. They felt resurrected themselves. They were able to feel how agonizing his crucifixion was and feel how loved they are.

And it feels silly to talk about that. At the same time that we’re talking about talking to him about your weight loss struggles. But my point is that he loves you so much. He wants to be fully integrated into every area of your life. He loves you so much that he would die on a cross, that he would be scourged for every single one of your and my sins.

He would take them on so that we could be redeemed and we could live in heaven with him forever, for eternity. He loves you that much and any area that you are not talking to him about, he’s just standing there saying, let me take that burden from you. Let me take that. Let me take that fear. Let me take that anxiety.

It is just so incredible. You have no idea what’s waiting for you on the other side. You have no idea. So I hope that you simply hear if you are back. With sugar. If you’re back with whatever it is that you thought you’d give up for Lent, and it feels like it’s just stuck on you again, it’s not a problem. He wants to free you.

And when you’re ready, he’s going to nudge you and he’s going to provide you with something. I think a beautiful next step if you are watching this in time, is to come to the workshop I have Friday. What to do when you mess up. We are gonna talk about just a few mindset hacks that will really help you not multiply your mess ups.

This was something that I learned really early on was the concept that a mess up doesn’t have to be hours and days, and it’s really one of the keys that me, as a former binge eater, a binge eater, hide and like go through jars of peanut butter and chocolate chips.

I have been able to maintain my healthy weight for 12 years because when I do overeat and it happens, I don’t multiply the mess up. I am able to just restart at the next meal and not skip a meal to make up or plan less the next day. I don’t do any of that shenanigans. I’ll tell you exactly what I do, what works for me in the workshop.

Get signed up, get your spot, share it with friends. If you can’t be there live, just listen to the replay. But it is time that when you quote mess up, it just stays one mess up. Okay. So if you’re experiencing a Lent rebound, no, it’s totally normal. You just weren’t supported. It’s not a problem. You can get support now.

You can go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. See what programs we have and definitely get signed up for that workshop. Okay, I hope this has been helpful and that you see that you are a very normal human being and that you don’t need to multiply the mess up.

All right, everybody. Have a blessed day.