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JOIN Still Becoming Lenten 2023 Study

Laura Acuna and Amber discuss her 50 year journey with diet culture, overcoming shame, and the work she continues both personally and through her 31 Day Devotional Still Becoming: Hope, Help and Healing for the Diet Weary Soul.

Questions Discussed During Hope for the Diet Weary Soul:

1. Take us back to Laura as an 11 year old girl and share your experience with weight gain and the ideas that were formed in your brain surrounding body image and eating.
2. What were some of the formational things you started to believe about your appearance? How did it impact your brain?
3. From that point forward began a 50 year battle of what you term disordered thinking about food and eating habits.  What were some of the thoughts you had regarding food and dieting and how did it impact your eating?
4. So many of us have looked in the mirror and said horrible things about our bodies, only to wake up and say “I’m not going to do that anymore. I am made in the image of God and my body is good,” only to repeat the cycle again and again. Was this true for you?  When did your thinking begin to shift?
5. With that said, in your new devotional Still Becoming you write, “Disordered thinking leads to disordered eating-and when one is addressed the other follows?” Will you expound on that and maybe share a few practical tips to help us shift our thinking?
6. Why Still Becoming? And how will the devotional help the diet weary soul?
7. Where is the line when you cross into disordered thinking, disordered eating versus this is something that is part of taking care of your body?
8. Often a woman’s self-image goes far beyond issues with eating and exercise, but includes trauma and abuse, infertility, physical injury, and others. How do you encourage women to find rest and healing by focusing on what God has called good?
9. Let’s close with something I am SUPER passionate about and that is our culture’s negative view of a woman’s aging body. As Christians, how can we resist falling for this toxic and impossible standard of skinny, wrinkle free, and pigmented hair is the most beautiful?

Hope for the Diet Weary Soul Quotes to Remember:

“I entered the seventh grade, five feet tall and 100 pounds. And by the time I left the ninth grade, I weighed well over 200 pounds, I went from probably a size five to a size 20 in the span of about a year and a half. I describe it as a bomb going off in my life and everything changed.”

“I can remember walking in the door, and just being mortified that I had to go to Weight Watchers. That’s where all my mother’s friends went.”

“The shame was paralyzing and insidious….I didn’t even know who I was anymore.”

“Food went into two categories, good or bad.”

“When I doubt, I just say, ‘Does that sound like the God I know?’ When I hear that shaming voice, ‘Does that sound like God?’ “

“I began with the shame and replacing what the Shamer says about me. ‘You’re broken. It’s too late. You’re too far gone. It’ll never happen,’ with the truth from God’s word, which is that He is always healing. He’s always restoring. He’s always repairing.”

“Still Becoming describes the Christian journey, we are constantly growing, changing, becoming more like Christ.”

“It is not in His [God] character to attach what we look like to our worth. And not just our worth to Him our worth to the world.”

Scripture References

• 2 Cor. 10:5
• 1 Tim. 4:8
• Prov. 31:30

Resources Mentioned:

• JOIN Still Becoming Lenten 2023 Study
• Book: Still Becoming: Hope, Help and Healing for the Diet Weary Soul by Laura Acuna
• Still Becoming Small Group Discussion Guide

Related Episodes:

• 116: David & Krista Dunham | Eating Disorder Recovery
• 114: Heather Creekmore | Body Image