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Community—
The Connection Cornerstone

American Christianity is influenced by the culture in which it operates. We live in a society known for placing value on independence, self-sufficiency, and what is called “rugged individualism.” Historically, autonomy, individual drive, and self-motivation have been admired characteristics, yet this is not the biblical practice suggested for the body of Christ.

Relationship is characteristic of the Godhead—God is three in one. The Trinity enjoys fellowship. Relationship has existed from the beginning of time. Since the beginning of creation, God knew it was good for a man to have a helper, which is why He created woman.

While God’s triune relationship is often mysterious to our human understanding, we do know that God so loved the world that He sent His only Son Jesus to die and take the sins of the world for our redemption (John 3:16). Out of love, God found a way to relate to us through His Son. While on earth, Jesus was highly relational as He communed with His Father, chose disciples, spent time with sinners, and even gave of His time to play with children.

A central message of Jesus’ teaching was for us to live in unity with one another. When Jesus returned to the Father, the Holy Spirit was sent as Comforter. If we explore the beginnings of church history in the book of Acts, we find a record of how Christianity was practiced under the power of the Holy Spirit. As the church developed and spread, believers learned to live together, sharing freely with one another while maintaining meaningful fellowship. Even in the face of strong personalities and differences, the church found a way to listen and to submit to one another in Christian love. Because of the dedication of this early church in fasting and in prayer, people were released to do incredible miracles and extraordinary acts. Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the unity and love practiced in community, believers were healed. Now delivered, we must resist spiritual oppression. In Christian community, we learn to love, heal, and live together as one body.

Lose It for Life believes strongly in the connections made in Christian community. We need each other. As we encourage one another and lift each other up in prayer, we move forward in the Christian life in ways not possible as a lone sojourner. Relationships are important in order to meet our needs for intimacy and support, but also to grow and avoid relapse.

RISE TO THE CHALLENGE

In order to RISE above the challenges, we need connection and community. Add these goals to your program:

Reduce negative relationships that sabotage your success.

Increase connection with others, social skills, and community.

Substitute the healing of community and connection for the belief that you must go it alone.

Eliminate the lone-ranger mentality and toxic relationships that undermine your success.

FIGHT DISCONNECTION

When we are obsessed with food and weight, we often hide while feeling outcast and alienated from others. Embarrassed by what we weigh and feeling out of control, many of us feel like second-class citizens and pull back from active involvement with others. Instead of being our true selves, we do things to please others and hope they never see who we really are for fear they won’t like us. Maybe you’ve been bullied or rejected because of your weight. Consequently, you’ve pulled back from others in fear of more of the same. People who grow up in overly critical homes or homes in which they were teased about their weight often try to hide within social situations rather than connect.

Food obsessions involve time and energy that take you away from other activities. When you are overweight, you leave early, come late, sit by yourself, and refuse to share certain parts of yourself with others. There is an assumption that once the weight is gone, you’ll become a social butterfly. However, Cathy found out that “flying solo” wasn’t a good idea.

March 15, 2004—I wish I could say that after losing 119 pounds all my food issues are finally behind me. I guess somewhere in my imagination I believed that if I ever lost this much weight again I would surely be floating from social event to social event never desiring to eat junk food or binge again. It was going to be great! I guess this is a good time for a reality check! I was so wrong.

The truth is that some days now are just as hard as the first day I began this journey. There are days I make poor choices and fall off the wagon and, as crazy as it sounds, there are days I am tempted to go back to my old habits. Changing patterns and habits is hard. Maturing and dying to self is hard.

But letting go of God’s hand is detrimental. I’ve noticed that just when I think I have this whole food addiction thing licked—and I start flying solo—I tend to crash. But the Lord has been so faithful. He knows my heart. As I cry out to Him to help me change, He always provides a way of escape for me. How wonderful to have a Daddy who loves me this much.

I am beginning to understand that this will never be an easy feat. Good health—emotional, spiritual, and physical—does not just happen. It is truly a gift from God. We must do our part and allow Him to do His part. It’s a journey taken one day at a time.

—Cathy

When someone loses as much weight as Cathy did, one of the most common expectations is that life will be dramatically different. This is particularly true from a social perspective. There are assumptions that when the weight is gone, the dates will be many and the whole outlook will be different, including being able to socially engage for the first time. It will be magical, or so the person thinks!

Then the weight comes off and reality hits. Where are all those new party invitations? Why isn’t the healthy, trim me getting invited out? The disappointment is that all this effort has not resulted in a new and exciting social life. Why? Because losing weight doesn’t necessarily change who you are inside!

When you spend your life as an overweight person, you learn to feel uneasy in social situations and avoid and withdraw. There is work to be done on the inside of the person too—to build confidence and to be put in new social situations. This means taking new risks, which is never easy. A person can still struggle with major insecurities even when his or her body looks healthier. So part of the work of losing it for life is to venture into the uncertain and unpredictable world of people and relationships.

YOU NEED THE BODY

It helps to remember the source of your true worth. Jesus Christ says you are already accepted, loved, and special. Other people may not always be so positive and affirming. However, there are those people who will be, and you must find them and make a connection. You need their support and encouragement.

One reason people struggle even when they know their relationship with Christ is vital to success is that they are not connected to a community of fellow believers. No matter how successful you are at doing this program, you need connections with people who can help when you feel down or want to give in and give up. As one woman who was losing weight confided,

People are always asking me for advice. I don’t want to give advice! I’m still dealing with weight loss myself. Yes, I’ve had some success, but I’m still working on issues and prefer to talk to those who are struggling. I don’t want to “help” everyone else in the way I used to. That was my old pattern and it took me away from doing what I needed to do to help myself. I think I can most help by being honest and saying this isn’t easy, but that one day at a time, I’m making it.

When you are the consummate giver and never expect to receive in a relationship, you tend to attract needy people who can suck you dry. And then, guess what? You feel empty and use food to fill that void again. This woman knew she needed others to help her and wasn’t in a position to be their expert. Community is so important in this journey because it links you with support and encouragement for these moments of difficulty. In the body of Christ, when you feel strong, you encourage another. When you are down, another person encourages you. This give-and-take is the basis for healthy relationships.

Revisit Social Skills

When you begin to take risks socially, you must also take a hard look at your social skills. Maybe you need to be more assertive, learn how to initiate conversation, or demonstrate a new interest in others. Weight loss will boost your confidence, but it won’t teach you social skills.

If you’ve spent a lifetime hiding and you come out of the eating closet, you may have to practice new skills. So today, make it your goal to approach someone you would like to get to know better. Find out an interest he or she has and begin to ask about it. Broaden your own interests now that you aren’t so obsessed with food and eating. Try a new activity and see how it feels. Certainly it will feel a little scary at first. That’s okay. It gets easier the more you do it. If you aren’t invited to the party, bring the party to you! That’s right. You throw a party and ask people to come. If you are tired of no social life, create one. Start small. Ask a few old friends to come and include one or two new ones. Don’t make the focus of the party food or drink (time to let go of that crutch). Instead, have a structured activity, like playing board games. Then relax, laugh, and enjoy the fun. The more you practice doing things that are uncomfortable, the easier they will become.

Don’t Alienate Yourself

Overeating can keep us from the very people we need support from. In addition to shame, fear, and embarrassment, or thinking we lack good social skills, we can stay isolated because of pride. We convince ourselves that needing others is too painful or is weakness. We really don’t need people to help us in life because we’ve bought the American idealism of doing it on our own. We have to gut it out, and our failure to do so is because we lack willpower, not because we need others along the way.

In some cases, our lack of experience with healthy relationships keeps us from trying. Growing up alone and isolated, we see no benefit in relationships. Our experience only brought hurt. Or in cases where relationship may have started out strong, we were betrayed or disappointed. People cannot be trusted. In the end, you believe you will be rejected.

Many of us just give up on relationships and fail to make the distinction between the benefits of healthy relationships and the needy and overly dependent relationships in which we may be entwined. The former are healthy; the latter are toxic. Because we fail to define who we are outside of our weight, we lack appropriate boundaries within our relationships and self-care. We want people to fill those empty places, even when we know this isn’t healthy. So we pull away altogether, deciding we are too needy and too messed up for this relationship.

Yet even with all our reasons for pulling back and protecting ourselves from hurt or pain, we still desire connection. We were created to relate to God and others. It is in relationships that we grow and learn about ourselves. Through our experiences with others, we define how we think and feel. Attachment is a basic need that never goes away but longs to be met. And while we try to meet that need through eating, the need is never satisfied.

The need for connection is not unhealthy, but how you meet that need can be. In God’s kingdom, nobody is more important than the next. You aren’t less because you weigh more. We approach each other with humility and must have the courage to be open to what we can receive from others. Yes, we can be rejected, but we can also find people who will accept and love us no matter what we weigh or how many times we fail. If we don’t allow bad relationships to derail our efforts, we can have meaningful connections and our needs will be met.

Healthy relationships include loving God, ourselves, and others. We don’t love with a puffed-up sense of importance. We love because God loves us and has purpose and meaning for our lives. As we surrender to that purpose and plan, we purposefully connect with others to accomplish what we can’t accomplish alone. Connection brings healing and healing brings joy.

When we are willing to be open, transparent, and vulnerable to others, we break free of the isolation that keeps us hidden in the dark. We feel God’s love because we aren’t moving in pretense. We learn to accept who we are because we are in process. We ask for healing so we can grow and give to others and find rest.

FOOD, MARRIAGE, AND FIDELITY

In some marriages, weight creates a sense of protection. We referred early on to the idea that being heavy can protect you from your own sexual impulses or the impulses of others.¹ People who aren’t sure they can resist sexual temptations may stay heavy as a way to control their impulsivity. Also, the fear of feeling sexually attractive makes some people uncomfortable, in part because they aren’t certain they can control their impulses.

How many times have you or someone you know complained that the necessary support for weight loss was lacking? Those around us and in our intimate relationships can actually sabotage our efforts. For example, the best way to prevent your spouse from losing weight is to demand that he or she do so. After years of working with couples, this fact is certain: when a spouse demands weight loss, weight loss undergoes a death sentence. Why? Because there is something about a demand that says you don’t accept the partner as he or she is. Acceptance is instead conditioned on the basis of weight. A demand to look different is often accompanied by criticism and comparisons, which usually signal deeper issues in a relationship that must be addressed.

Another interesting observation is the number of husbands who seem to sabotage their wives’ efforts to lose weight. In some cases, husbands worry that their wives’ thinner appearances will make them more vulnerable to other men. In other cases, if one spouse takes responsibility for a weight problem, there may be the expectation that the other spouse will tackle a specific problem, like anger, drinking, or gambling. We have also seen cases of sabotage because spouses are unwilling to have their routines and eating habits altered for the sake of their partner’s healthy desire to lose weight.

I (Dr. Linda) remember one woman I worked with whose husband brought home candy almost every day despite the fact that she was paying me to help her lose weight. Repeatedly, she asked him to stop bringing candy into the house. Yet he never stopped. At my request, he came to a counseling session. I discovered that he was worried that he would be asked to make changes in his own life if his wife overcame her weight problem. And while he didn’t like the fact that his wife was significantly overweight, he preferred to keep life the way it was—with the pressure off. He later admitted that he felt inadequate to make changes in his own life and secretly did not want his wife to succeed because he would feel more like a failure.

Weight-loss efforts can also be sabotaged because you’ve spent your entire life playing the victim. While this isn’t a role you probably desire, it may be a familiar one. To move out of the victim position would mean forgiving people and making other changes. Giving up anything you know well to move into the unknown is always a bit unsettling, but the gains are certainly worth a bit of anxiety. A lack of trust is at the root of this problem. You must trust that being obedient to God’s Word, as well as forgiving others’ wrongs and extending grace, will turn out to be beneficial to you and others in the long run. As we discussed in the last chapter, don’t allow bitterness to prevent you from moving forward.

Spousal support and the support of families and intimate others is very important when it comes to losing weight.² Talk about your goals with loved ones before you begin any program. Discuss whether there are hidden fears or relationship concerns about your losing weight. Then work together as much as possible. The best situation is when your intimate relationships can be part of your support system.

EMBRACE COMMUNITY

If you decide to be more vulnerable and open your life up to others, recognize that it won’t be easy or a positive experience 100 percent of the time. You’ll have times of frustration and you’ll learn who can handle your openness and who cannot. There are people who are not trustworthy, and you must be discerning about who you will open up to. Yet be careful how you do this! Paul addresses how we are to behave with one another in Romans 14:1–9:

Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don’t see things the way you do. And don’t jump all over them every time they do or say something you don’t agree with—even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently.

For instance, a person who has been around for a while might well be convinced that he can eat anything on the table, while another, with a different background, might assume all Christians should be vegetarians and eat accordingly. But since both are guests at Christ’s table, wouldn’t it be terribly rude if they fell to criticizing what the other ate or didn’t eat? God, after all, invited them both to the table. Do you have any business crossing people off the guest list or interfering with God’s welcome? If there are corrections to be made or manners to be learned, God can handle that without your help.

Or, say, one person thinks that some days should be set aside as holy and another thinks that each day is pretty much like any other. There are good reasons either way. So, each person is free to follow the convictions of conscience.

What’s important in all this is that if you keep a holy day, keep it for God’s sake; if you eat meat, eat it to the glory of God and thank God for prime rib; if you’re a vegetarian, eat vegetables to the glory of God and thank God for broccoli. None of us are permitted to insist on our own way in these matters. It’s God we are answerable to—all the way from life to death and everything in between—not each other. That’s why Jesus lived and died and then lived again: so that he could be our Master across the entire range of life and death, and free us from the petty tyrannies of each other. (MSG)

If we allow Jesus to be our Master who can “free us from the petty tyrannies of each other,” dynamic things will happen. We all have differences that can divide us if we let them. However, we are called to unity and we should work out our differences in Christian love and maturity. The unity that results will create an atmosphere for healing. Make it your goal to find people with whom you can be authentic, and whom you can trust to maintain confidences and to pray with you. Work on your differences with others and learn to live in Christian love.

Relationships are work because they often act as mirrors to our problems. In intimacy, we see our weaknesses and need for God’s help. As we grow, we become aware of our separateness, but also our need for each other. As we learn to define who we are, set boundaries, deal with conflict, and manage differences, we grow if we stay connected to others in the process.

What should we look for when it comes to building relationships with one another? Ephesians 4:2 says, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” We are to pursue community with one another and be patient and humble in the process.

Jesus recognized the need for community in His darkest hour. He took His disciples with Him to pray as He faced the biggest challenge of His earthly life—the cross. As He hung on the cross, He thought of others and even welcomed a thief into Paradise! He also arranged for John, the beloved, to care for His mother. And in those last moments before His death, He cried out from a sense of estrangement, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). For a brief moment, He felt abandoned by the Father and became a curse for us, as Paul reminds us in Galatians.

Jesus is all about community. He tells us that people will know us by our love (John 13:35) and that we are to love one another. When you face any difficult change or trial in your life, support and community make the difference in your ability to survive and come through the trial. Seek wise counsel from those who can help you. Be responsive to your pastors and leaders who will provide spiritual accountability. Take advantage of counselors and therapists who can help you sort out the complexity of weight loss as it applies to you and your specific life. Be persistent and have the courage to be open in relationships with others.

As you seek a more intimate connection with God through your church, you may find that you redefine your weight problem as a fruit problem. Fruit is the visible part of our lives that others can see. Galatians 5:22–23 describes what builds healthy relationships in our lives: “But the fruit of the [Holy] Spirit [the work which His presence within accomplishes] is love, joy (gladness), peace, patience (an even temper, forbearance), kindness, goodness (benevolence), faithfulness, gentleness (meekness, humility), self-control (self-restraint, continence). Against such things there is no law [that can bring a charge]” (AMP).

Do you evidence the fruit of the Spirit is in you when it comes to dealing with other people? As you submit yourself to God’s growing and pruning process, ask Him to put you with others who are committed to bearing this type of fruit also. Healthy communities bear this kind of fruit. Look for it.

All praise to the God and Father of our Master, Jesus the Messiah! Father of all mercy! God of all healing counsel! He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.

—2 Corinthians 1:3–4 (MSG)

What fabulous verses! God comes alongside us when we go through difficulty. That in and of itself is reassuring, but there is even more—God will use us to help someone else who is going through a hard time as well. In God’s economy, nothing is ever wasted, not even pain!

We can never know God’s plans or His gain from our loss, unless we give Him our misery and allow Him to transform it into a mission for our lives. Once our loss and pain point us to God’s grace, we can also lead others into His grace. In doing so, we partner with God as He accomplishes His purposes. After we emerge from our own despair, become transparent, and candidly share our victories, we will be in a position to share our struggles and God’s power to overcome, attracting others into His grace.

God’s church is our earthly home. Embrace the love and support He has instituted for you and build on that connection for life.