Observe & Correct vs. Obsess & Condemn

After initially learning ThinWithin’s eating guidelines described in the first 2 chapters of the TW book, the concepts in chapter (Day) 4 helped me keep returning to those guidelines during the past 3 years, even after I overate or even binged and/or purged. Day 4 explains explicitly how to benefit from God’s grace even when we feel least deserving of that grace. This is what Day 4 told me:

Despite God’s loving guidance, we stray from His path. Despite learning TW’s simple plan for eating, we may begin eating before we feel hunger or ignore satisfaction and continue eating. So this chapter explains TW’s powerful tool for getting us back on track: OBSERVATION AND CORRECTION. Grace reassures us that God won’t punish us for our sins, when we confess and repent, because Jesus already paid the redemption price. Likewise, observe and correct means we don’t have to punish ourselves, because we can merely acknowledge our errors, accept god’s forgiveness and correct our behaviors.

Here’s how I understand the Observe & Correct process:

• At any time, we can choose to consider behaviors, beliefs and attitudes that don’t work for us;
• We resist condemning ourselves to OBJECTIVE LY observe behaviors;
• We identify what we can do to avoid the same behaviors in the future. Then we change those behaviors to ‘correct’ now. Many people want to do something now in order to undo a mistake. However the Greek word for repent (‘metanoi’) means ‘change one’s mind’. So we ‘correct’ by changing our minds or the BELIEFS that led us to overeat or start eating before we felt true physiological hunger.

This chapter introduces the “CANOPY OF GOD’S GRACE’, which means that our mistakes are ‘covered by God’s grace’, because we can observe our sins and seek His guidance to correct mistakes. He knows we are flawed, so He provided grace to resolve our tendency to stray. Once we honestly admit that we choose to over eat (rather than saying ‘it just happens’), we may experience shame. However accepting God’s forgiveness and applying his forgiveness to ourselves helps us lose the shame.

On the path of God’s provision we may go 2 steps back and one step forward, but ‘going forward’ even with detours or slips along the way is STILL progress. In the Observe and Correct process the Holy Spirit works on our heart and minds, rather than giving rigid laws. He convicts us of our sin by bringing sin to our awareness through the feeling of guilt and helps us discern proper corrections.

In order to begin using ‘observe & correct’, we may need to observe and correct how we previously reacted to our eating habits. Previously, we may have reacted to guilt about eating with either shame or denial, which brought more overeating, which brought more shame, continuing the whole overeating cycle. Rather than using ‘observe & correct’ we may have (1) obsessed (about our eating) and condemned ourselves as a hopeless sinner; (2) ranted and raved, often blaming someone else for our eating habits; or even (3) denied that our habits are even problematic.

This chapter uses the metaphor of a pendulum swing from ‘legalism’ to ‘license’ to describe how we react to eating mistakes using the ‘obsess and condemn’ approach. Instead of changing our eating habits to avoid repeating the same behavior, we may either (1) give up (or start over with a different diet) or (2) try even harder with more rigid dieting rules. The ‘legalist’ swing of the pendulum is the ‘try harder’ approach, which makes us view almost any mistakes as ‘failure’, and leads us in the other direction of ‘license’, where we give up and often wallow in self-pity and sinful behavior until we swing the other direction into ‘try harder’ perhaps with more rigid diet rules.

In order to escape the pendulum swing and return to God’s path of grace, we need to allow ourselves to observe and correct, even when we don’t like what we see. We need to ask ourselves ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen if we honestly admit our behavior?’ We can’t live long in denial of eating problems, because our bodies soon show evidence of over- or under-eating. It’s difficult to choose God’s path of observe and correct after we lived years of loathing and condemning ourselves or others have condemned us and we missed the idea of applying God’s grace to ourselves. So we need to accept the truth of Romans 8:1: “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.” Accepting that verse paves the way for accepting God's grace and the observe and correct approach to learning new habits.