September 29, 2011

Tonight we had a GREAT group with three new members and a total of 10 people! Yay!

We read and talked about Romans 6. We talked about how overeating isn't really necessarily a SIN, but that God does want us to be good stewards of all the gifts God has given us - including our bodies. So overeating is certainly not doing God's will.

Probably the coolest part of the discussion of Romans 6 was what A read from the notes in her Bible:

Here Paul emphasizes that we need no longer live under sin's power. God does not take us out of the world or make us robots - we will still feel like sinning, and sometimes we will sin. The difference is that before we were saved we were slaves to our sinful nature, but now we can choose to live for Christ (see Galatians 2:20).

Our discussion went far and wide, including sharing some super recipes. Hopefully folks will add them here as comments!

We finally had wifi at our meeting, so were able to take a tour of MyFitnessPal.com and discussed a slideshow of Frighteningly Fattening Fall Foods.

What did you take home from tonight's meeting?

Organization - ha!

So tonight I tried to write down an organized outline for our meeting - so we could create a rhythm and a familiarity to the meetings. There are certain components that i thought were important to have - so I came up with this outline:

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
Meeting Outline

• Welcome & casual chat
• prayer
• Bible reading
• discussion
• prayer
• highs & lows
• prayer
• sharing tips/ideas/resources/motivation
• prayer
• good night

I'll be gone the next two Thursday nights, so this way, it will be easy for someone else to take over leading the meetings. 

September 22, 2011

Wow! That week went fast! I never got around to writing about our meeting last Thursday night. There were only three of us, but we were mighty! We read Romans 14:13-23 - focusing on verse 20: "Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for you to make others fall by what you eat...." Yes, I know that passage is not talking about dieting, but rather about ritual foods and the question of the validity of food laws after the time of Jesus. But, we took that into consideration, then realized that we could think about this - even the ideas of laws and relationships with other people - and apply it to our eating/overeating. Since we were a small group, most of the evening was spent in GOOD conversation about personal (very personal) issues which I will not share here. It was good to be in each others' company. It was good to have a place to be open and honest about what we may know we're doing wrong, yet we continue. We prayed for each other and for those that could not be with us.

First meeting 9-14-2011

We had our first meeting last night. 8 people were there. It was a great group!
We started with prayer and a little introduction to the point of the group.
We read Psalm 139
and heard that:

• We are fearfully and wonderfully made
• You can’t get away from God
• we are made in God's image
• God wants us to be healthy

A told us: Blame your elbow - if it doesn’t bend - it doesn’t go in!!

We all agreed that the accountability to each other was really important for success. 
We want to do this for our kids and (future) grandkids.
Some websites/resources:

• MyFitnessPal.com
• LoseIt.com
• SparkPeople.com
• The ELCA GO Challenge can be found here
• 2011 GO! Challenge tracking sheet (B&W)
• 2011 GO! Challenge tracking sheet (color)

I also mentioned the Pomodoro time management software - to be used to make sure you get up out of your (MY) desk. You can find that here.