Excerpt from Pastor Rick’s series on “The Invisible War.”
I’m so proud of you, those of you who joined The Daniel Plan in January. We started this plan, which is a one-year plan, to get in shape. We now have over 14,000 of you who have gone online and registered on The Daniel Plan. 14,000! Our church since January has lost over 200,000 pounds! That’s pretty amazing.
Think about that. That’s over 1,000 pounds a day this church is losing. That’s a good thing. But right now some of you are getting into the summer and thinking, “I’m not losing as fast as I thought I was going to,” or you’re getting discouraged.
This happened to me. I dropped 35 pounds pretty quickly. Then it got into June and I got really tired this month. All of a sudden I was just fatigued, tired, trying to do too much. I just got tired! And I didn’t lose anything during the month of June.
What did I do? Just give up? Of course not. You reconsider, re-collect, you lay aside whatever is holding you back. So I just did a little spring cleaning, a little self-evaluation. I looked and realized there were four things I needed to change.
- One, I wasn’t drinking enough water. When I first started I was drinking a lot of water. You can’t lose weight if you don’t drink enough water.
- The second thing, I wasn’t getting enough sleep. It was a very busy month for me. I was doing a lot of teaching and a lot of preparing of materials for our small groups that we’re going to be doing during this series. I was very busy and I wasn’t getting enough sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep your body starts holding onto fat.
- Three, I went to the doctor and got checked out and found out I had low thyroid. So they gave me thyroid medicine.
- The fourth thing was I’d stopped writing down the foods I eat in a food journal. When you stop writing it down before it’s a habit, guess what. You cheat! You start to think, “I only had a few…” But did you count how many you ate? Five or six handfuls?
