Diet is an ugly four-letter word!  It’s slavery. It’s bondage. Nobody wants to
diet. We impose diets on ourselves because we have to, not because we
want to. In thirty years working weight loss clinics, I have yet to hear
someone say, “Cathy, I am so excited about dieting. I love to diet!”
Because we serve a God who is freedom-oriented, it stands to reason that
everything within us will rebel against becoming enslaved to dieting. We were not
created with a slave nature. Our spirits cry out for freedom, and diets are a perfect
example of slavery. They cause us to starve when we want to eat. They make us eat
things we don’t like. They interfere with our social lives. We yearn to dive into
whatever’s being served at the ever-present social occasion, yet we can’t do it. If we
do, it’s called “cheating.” Then we have to deal with the guilt of cheating on a diet that
didn’t like us anyway … cheating on something we don’t even care for. It couldn’t
possess a better name. The word “diet” brings dread into the hearts. It is called “diet”
because we “die” trying to stay on “it”.There’s a major difference between healthy eating and dieting.  Healthy eating is
what we need to do to remain healthy. In today’s world, even the average five-year-old
knows what foods are junk.  These foods are usually fattening.  Yet we still eat them –
lots of them.  We beg for more, and after we stuff ourselves miserably, we vow to never
eat it again.  Why is this? Why would an entire land of culture, wealth, and education
remain overweight when we are told we must lose to live longer?  It doesn’t make
much sense.  And then there are diets, some of which are equally senseless.  Men and
women die trying to stay on them every day. The last heart attack that took place in
America probably happened to someone who was forewarned to watch their “die-it”
and paid no attention.
At a young age, I wanted answers to these questions. Managing a health club, I
saw so many women cry over their weight. Yet the harder they worked out, the more
they remained the same size.  I was asked every day to help people lose weight. They
weren’t really coming to the gym to improve their cardiovascular system; they paid to
join with the dream of developing a slim, trim body. I was certified in exercise by a
reputable company, and trained in proper nutrition. I studied hard to learn over one
hundred floor exercises, and was later trained in Nautilus. This will date me, but I
began in “figure salons.” They were always exclusively female. They were geared
toward individual satisfaction and fulfillment of health goals. I led several classes a day
of target exercises, where we focused on problem areas, exercising them into firmness.
Helping women fix those pesky “saddle bags,” jiggling stomachs, and drooping
buttocks was my job. If you had flabby arms, or sagging breasts, I was the gal to call. I
was hired to write a newspaper column on fitness. I believed in my work, yet was
frustrated to find that overweight people stayed overweight; exercise could only do so
much, and it wasn’t enough.