The screen glowed in front of me. I had been sitting at my kitchen table long enough that my coffee had gone cold, which tells you everything about where my head was.
I was thirty-eight years old, staring at a website for a diet program. Clinically proven plans. Personal coaching. Before-and-after photos of women who looked like they had found the answer I had been searching for.
My finger hovered over the button.
I had been here before. Not at this particular website, but at this particular moment — the one where you convince yourself that this time will be different. That this plan will finally be the one that sticks.
I prayed about it. I asked God to guide me, to show me the right direction.
Then I kept stressing anyway.
· · ·
That year had taken something out of me. What started as recurring bronchitis turned into a months-long battle with my asthma and three rounds of steroids. Then came a hysterectomy — a relatively smooth recovery, the doctors said, but recovery nonetheless. Which meant stillness. Which meant less movement. Which meant a body that felt less like mine with every passing week.
My body was in disarray. And my thoughts about my body were too — critical, loud, relentless in a way that made it hard to separate what was true from what I had simply repeated to myself so many times that it felt true.
But underneath the medical facts was something harder to name. This wasn't really about one hard year. I had been in the cycle for a long time.
You know the one. You find something that works — a program, a plan, an approach someone you admired recommended. You commit. For a few weeks you feel almost righteous about it: the discipline, the structure, the sense that you are finally doing something. And then, slowly or suddenly, it unravels. The results fade. The motivation disappears. And you are standing in the same place you started, maybe a little more defeated, asking the question you are so tired of asking.
Why can't I fix this?
· · ·
So I called a friend who represented the program. A believer, someone I trusted, someone who had seen real results with her clients.
I told her everything. The weight gain. The health setbacks. The feeling of being untethered from myself. The desire to just get back to something that felt like me.
I told her I wanted to start immediately.
She listened to all of it. And then she said something I was completely unprepared for.
"Tiff, take a week and pray about it."
Wait — what?
I want to be honest about my reaction, because I think you might recognize it. This was not what I wanted to hear. I had already prayed. I had come to her after the prayer, expecting the next step to be a credit card number and a start date. Her words landed somewhere between confusing and mildly irritating.
Sit with that for a second. I called a woman whose business it was to enroll people in this program, and she would not take my money.
She had made a commitment to the Lord about how she offered it. She had watched too many people lose weight and then lose the results, because the motivation underneath had never been deep enough to sustain the change. "It's a life change," she said. "You need to hear from the Lord before you jump into it."
· · ·
And then something happened that I've come to recognize over the years as one of the particular gifts of walking with the Holy Spirit.
It's a feeling I can't fully explain — a kind of heightened awareness, like someone has just turned up the volume on a conversation you were already having. The words in front of you carry more weight than they should. Something inside you goes still and says: pay attention.
I didn't just hear my friend's words. I heard something behind them.
Not yet.
Okay, Lord. You have my attention. Now what?
· · ·
I didn't do the program.
And I want to sit there a moment, because it wasn't a clean decision. I didn't hang up the phone and feel peace wash over me. I wrestled. I went back and forth. I pulled that website up more than once over the next few days.
The urgency about my body hadn't disappeared just because the Holy Spirit had spoken. The mirror still said what it said every morning. The clothes still fit the way they fit. And every part of me that had been trying to solve this for years just wanted to do something.
But underneath the wrestling, something was shifting. Quietly, almost imperceptibly — like the moment just before dawn when the sky isn't light yet, but you can tell the dark is losing.
God wasn't only redirecting me away from a diet program. He was redirecting me toward something I hadn't been willing to look at directly.
For we live by faith, not by sight. 2 Corinthians 5:7
My body issues were not really a body issue. They were a faith issue.
Every time I had stepped on a scale. Every time I had stood in a dressing room under fluorescent lights cataloguing everything wrong. Every cycle of trying and failing and trying again. None of it had been about discipline or willpower or finding the right plan.
It had been about trust. About whether I actually believed God was the authority over my body, my worth, and my definition of beautiful. About whether I was willing to bring the most personal, most vulnerable, most daily struggle I had — and lay it at His feet instead of solving it myself.
It was never a discipline problem. It was a foundation problem. I was building on sand and wondering why nothing held.
· · ·
Putting down the program was the first act of surrender in that particular battle.
Not a dramatic one. Nobody saw it. There was no altar call. It was just me putting down the thing I had been reaching for and deciding, for this one battle, to be still.
Small. Quiet. And the beginning of everything.
The answer I needed was never in a meal plan. It was in a Person.
· · ·
I'm writing this in late October, which means the ads are about to start.
Sometime in the next few weeks the campaigns begin — the ones pre-selling January to you before you've finished Thanksgiving. New year, new you. Clinically proven. Before and after. And somewhere in December or early January, a lot of us will find ourselves at a kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee and a finger hovering over a button.
I'm not going to tell you not to click it. That isn't the point, and caring for your body is not the problem.
I'm going to tell you what my friend told me, because it cost her a sale and it gave me my life back.
Take a week. Pray about it first.
And while you wait, let me ask you the question this whole journey started with. Not about your weight or your goals or your plan for January.
When you look in the mirror — what do you see?
Not what you wish you saw. Not what you're working toward. What do you actually see, right now, today?
Whatever your answer is — that is exactly where this begins.