Just Writing It Down Isn't Enough

I've been recording my daily calorie intake in a smart phone app called MyFitnessPal for just over a year now. And when I first started, I saw some great results. In the first six or seven months of 2012, I lost over 40 pounds!

But then something happened. With the application, each time you lose 20 pounds, the program "recalculates" your plan. With more weight lost, you need to make changes to your eating habits if you want to continue to see similar results.

The problem was I had grown accustomed to my daily intake of 2050 calories, so when the plan shifted to just over 1900 calories each day, I continued to record my calories, but wasn't too concerned if I was over.

I'd seen dramatic weight loss to that point, and began to simply "go through the motions" so to speak. In this new paradigm, weight loss was no longer the primary goal, seeing how many consecutive days I could record my caloric intake became my driving force.

And as you can imagine, simply logging my intake of calories each day didn't continue to produce the results I sought when I started the program. In fact, on the 1-year anniversary of my tracking my daily calories, while I had a net weight loss, I was no where near my lowest weight of the year.

Looking back over the log, at the 1-year mark, I was back to where I weighed in April 2012. All of my "work" between May and September of 2012 (the date of my lowest recorded weight), was lost as I steadily began to gain back the pounds.

Today, 385 consecutive days into tracking my daily caloric intake, I am still gaining weight, not losing weight.

It is that way our Christian life too. While reading the Bible daily and praying are great, they are necessary for growth, James 1:22-25 tells us that simply hearing the Word of God isn't enough. We must DO what we've learned.

So, just as recording each thing I eat at every meal every day of the past year hasn't resulted in a continual loss of weight; simply reading the Bible and praying every day isn't enough for my spiritual diet. I must reduce my calories if I want to lose weight. And if I want to grow spiritually, I must also take action and put into practice the things God is teaching me during my time with Him.

Only then will I be "blessed in what I do" according to James 1:25.