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Archives: February 2009
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Archives: February 2009
Mike P's Guide to Weight Loss!
By Mike Pilavachi
If you were at the summer events in 2008 you’ll have noticed that I’m currently less of a man than I was in previous years. Six stone less to be precise (and believe me, I want to be precise). I no longer have anywhere to rest my hands and am in desperate need of new illustrations (thin jokes for some reason just aren’t that funny).
I know you’re dying to know how I did it; even if you’re not, I'm dying to tell you so here goes: it was easy. An absolute breeze. There are three principles that if you follow I guarantee you will end up with a body like mine. And if you believe that you’ll believe anything. The truth is it’s been some of the hardest months of my life but they’ve also been some of the best.
It started with a scare; I had been choosing not to think about my body shape for longer than was good for me, then a while back I started to feel really ill and totally exhausted.
Some of my friends decided I should go for a medical. I knew before I went it wasn’t going to be good news but the doctor really put the boot in. My blood pressure was described as catastrophic, my good cholesterol nonexistent, my bad cholesterol was off the scale. In case he hadn’t made himself clear he told me I was in the top 1% of the population for a heart attack.
For the first time I was faced with the reality of what I was doing to my body. So I left the clinic, sat in the car and prayed, “God you have to help me, I can’t do this on my own.” From that day I began. I had to make decisions right at the beginning about what I could eat and what I wasn’t going to touch and if I hadn’t made those decisions then, I would never have survived.
I said goodbye to some very old friends, knowing that I wasn’t going to enjoy their company for a long time. It was goodbye chocolate. Goodbye crisps. Goodbye sugar. Goodbye cheesecake. Goodbye Burger King. And hardest of all: goodbye Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I had the goal in mind and like Paul I was forgetting what was behind and pressing on towards the prize.
I messed up a few times but instead of doing my usual trick and telling myself ‘I'll never do this, it will never work, I’ll just eat today and not think about the consequences,’ I decided to have grace for myself and kept saying ‘Never mind. Start again’.
I had a few friends who I became accountable to and who were under strict instructions to keep encouraging and challenging me. I would phone them when I was severely tempted and say ‘please pray. I’m about to go on a food binge.’ The response was invariably ‘I’m on the case, you can do it.’ It’s actually really hard to then eat to excess when you know that there are people praying that you won’t.
And it wasn’t just my friends I needed; I know it sounds corny but I had to rely on God in a way that I’ve never had to before and, if I'm really honest, in a way that I wasn’t really sure was possible for me. It became less about a diet and more of a spiritual quest.
For years I have felt condemned by my overindulgence without looking at its causes. This time instead of avoiding the pain, I faced it and discovered more about myself than I really wanted to know. Food had become for me a sex substitute, a companion when life was lonely, a reward when I felt I needed one and too often a substitute for pursuing Jesus.
I didn’t even recognise my hunger for him, thinking I wanted food when what I really wanted was intimacy with God. I found it hard to come to God in my weakness. Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery ‘neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more’ but I had managed to turn it round to ‘go and sin no more, so that you won’t be condemned.’ I had missed out on God’s unconditional love for me in that place.
There have been other lessons along the way; I’ve learned that it matters what I put inside myself and the truth that we are what we eat. Spiritually we can either feed on the cheesecake of indulgence or the tuna fish, spinach and broccoli of the word of God (tuna steamed not fried of course).
I also realised that it’s not just about input, it’s about output. I joined a gym and the treadmill that began as my enemy gradually became my friend. Bizarrely the more I did, the more I wanted to do.
We cannot follow Jesus without actually following him; we cannot be passive, coach-potato Christians. We need to exercise on the treadmill of serving, loving, caring and proclaiming God’s word. The more we do, the more we get fit spiritually so we are able to:
“work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in [us] to will and to act according to his good purpose"
Philippians 2 v12-13
And so the lessons I've learned are firstly that I can’t do it on my own, I need to do it with God knowing that he gives us ‘grace to help us in our time of need’.
Secondly I need others to encourage, correct and challenge me.
Thirdly I need to watch what I digest and how I exercise and lastly I need to keep on this journey of discovering with God why I respond in ways I do and to begin to address the routes of bad habits rather than gritting my teeth and trying to change the bad habits myself.
Losing six stone was the easy bit, now the big challenge is putting these lessons into practice in the whole of my life and my walk with God.
About the writer...
Mike Pilavachi heads up Soul Survivor and the church Soul Survivor Watford. He's a Man United fan (shame) and looks a bit like the old Greek singer Demis Roussos.
Soul Survivor is a Christian charity that puts on events for young people. Our registered charity no. is 1080720. We are also a company limited by guarantee in England & Wales. Our company registered number is 03991111, which is nice. Thanks for caring.
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