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I stepped on the scales last week and immediately looked around to see who might be standing on the scales behind me. Yikes! With all the celebrating of Thanksgiving and the subsequent Christmas gift basket season, I had packed on roughly the equivalent of a 2-year-old child. Not the cute kind either, but the mean foul-tempered kind that seems to always be screaming for something.

Ok, that's pretty much every 2-year-old.

Anyway, motivated by my own desire for health as well as a twinge of vanity and a big helping of "too-cheap-to-buy-new-clothes" I set out to get active in this season of forced hibernation. As God is my witness, I will starve!

I've done this before. About ten years ago I set out to reduce my size (again motivated by a desire to not have to buy bigger pants). I managed to drop about fifty pounds over the course of a year. My original goal had simply been to drop twenty pounds, but the more I read about "body mass index" the more I thought I needed to lose. According to these websites (Google the words "body mass index" yourself, I'm too weak from pushups to do it for you), for my height and gender I should weigh somewhere between 150 and 135 pounds. Well, who am I to argue with a website?

After months of diet and exercise I got down to 150 pounds. Dieting is one of those things that you start out doing just for yourself and end up doing for the amusement of everyone around you. I noticed an interesting progression in people's reaction to my diminishing size over those months. It went something like this:

I'm not sure what kind of people those websites are using as a reference, but 150 pounds on my frame was somewhere just to the right of "internment camp refugee." I can't imagine how I could have made it to the optimum weight of 135 pounds without lopping off a leg or subsisting on a diet of cardboard and water. Once I realized the 150 pounds wasn't manageable for me I put most of the weight back on again.

When it comes to diets I don't do well with any particular "plan." I tried the Atkins for about a week once. At first I thought it was going to be great—I've always considered myself to be more of a carnivore than an omnivore. I was eating steaks and cheese and living it up for the first few days. Then I killed a man at Denny's and took his plate of hash browns. Needless to day, I can't go back there again.

I managed to take a few pounds off again last year. The response from other people this time was more of the, "What's your secret?" variety. People kept asking if I was doing Atkins or South Beach. My response was, "Neither. I'm just not eating as much." This caused a lot of blank looks. "Not eating as much? Does that work?" It was almost as if the thought had never occurred to them that you don't need to constantly be shoving food into your mouth to survive. We're not hummingbirds, people; you don't have to eat your weight in Krispy Kremes each day.

Just my opinion here, but I think this is at the heart of what's wrong with most diets. We don't seem to get it that one of the keys to a healthy lifestyle is self-control. The Atkins Diet says, "You can eat as much meat and cheese as you want." Does that sound like a good idea? People eat huge steaks and then applaud their self-control because they didn't order the baked potato with it.

Most of the materials I read say that if you hold yourself at about 1200 calories a day you will lose weight. So that's what I try to do. Honestly, it's not easy. I'm a night owl and I tend to snack late at night out of boredom. Now, I know I don't need half a dozen Buffalo wings at 10:00 pm. And Atkins Diet or not, there is no way on earth that eating as many Buffalo wings as I want is going to be healthy. But the desire is still there. What I have to do is reach down deeper and try to find the self-control to not eat them.

Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I eat celery and pretend I'm waiting for the Buffalo wings. No . . . my body doesn't seem to buy that.

Speaking of celery, there are several web pages that list celery as a "negative caloric food." In other words, it takes more energy to chew and digest all those stringy fibers than the celery actually provides. If this is true, it should be possible to eat yourself thin by gorging on celery. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work if you put peanut butter or cream cheese on it, though.

Deep frying the celery is probably a "no-no" too.

And there again is the issue of self-control. How much self-control does it take to eat celery until you're not hungry any more? Well, not a lot. In fact, it takes more celery than self-control.

I'd hate to think that ours is the first generation to struggle with issues of self-control. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're not. You can go back to the Greek and Roman mythology and find such characters as Bacchus, the god of wine and good times. There's also Eros, the god of sexual desire and Aries the god of war and breaking things. Search the whole pantheon and you won't find one mention of Walter, the god of self-control. Why? The ancients didn't believe in self-control. Frankly, those stories are a lot more fun because of that.

That's why when you go to the Bible and read Paul's words to the Galatians you can practically hear them choking on their cena (their word for dinner…seriously…look it up). In chapter 5 he outlines the disciplined life with what he calls the "fruit of the Spirit" (which—by the way—are also negative caloric). "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)"

I like the way Paul saves self-control for the very end. It's a jab at them. These were Roman citizens, enveloped in the decadence of the Roman lifestyle. Self-control was as foreign to them as Greco-Roman cuisine and vomitoriums are to us. It was a quality that neither their gods nor their society encouraged.

Maybe we have more in common with them than we would like to admit. I don't see a lot of pleas for self-control in our society either. Instead we seem to find ways of getting around self-control by allowing other things to control us. Control your hunger with this diet, control your nicotine addiction with this patch, control your television with this remote and control your kids with these pills. How many of these problems could be solved with a little restraint and discipline? Eh, why bother? This is better living through chemistry. Why are we so afraid of a little self-control? Hear me out on this. How many dieters have you heard say, "Atkins didn't work for me."? It didn't work for you? The diet actually snuck up behind you, got you in a headlock and shoved Crunch bars in your mouth? How many smokers have you heard say, "The patch/hypnosis/nicotine gum/whatever didn't work for me."? Why don't we just admit that me didn't work for me?

Maybe it's because to admit that is to say that we failed instead of the diet failed. It's to admit that when we dug deep down we didn't have what it took to change our lives. It's easier to blame some distant doctor and his publishing house than to admit the problem is really way too close to home.

That's why I like to go back to those fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. Paul doesn't call them "The fruit of your own success" instead he attaches them to a source of unlimited potential—God himself. The fruit of the Spirit are the outgrowth of your relationship with a being of eternal strength and power. When you put it that way, self-control (along with all that other great spiritual produce) suddenly begins to sound doable.

That's what I really admire about recovering alcoholics. There is no patch for alcohol addiction like there is for nicotine addiction. There's no diet that breaks the habit, no pill that curbs your appetite. It's all about self-control and the support of others. There is amazing wisdom in those first two steps: 1. Admit you have a problem. 2. Believe there is a power greater than you that can restore you to sanity. What these people have had to come face-to-face with is the very truth that the rest of us deny far too often: there is no substitute for self-discipline.

There are times when we are deeply aware of what we lack. We are confronted with just how powerless we are to change the things that we don't like about ourselves. Paul's words in Galatians remind us that we're right; we are powerless. He also reminds us of where we can find the source of strength for our character—an undepletable source. In the midst of the insanity of whatever fight you're fighting there is a power greater than you that is willing to fight on your side.

I don't know what your fight is but I think all of us need to look at what it is we're really fighting. Are we fighting a symptom of our problem or are we getting to the heart of what we truly lack and truly need? We all realize that our bodies don't need a plate of Buffalo wings at 10:00 pm, but maybe that lack of self-control is pointing to a need that your body doesn't know how to express. Maybe it's pointing to something and someone greater than you've ever been able to comprehend. And maybe he's just waiting for you to step up and ask him to grow something new and amazing within you.

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