Dieting is in the 'Jeans'

I saw a guy in the airport the other day, and he was wearing Western clothes. From the back he looked like a little bitty guy, but when he turned around—oh boy—in front it was like a crane swinging around. He had a gut, man! I mean, his belly was full. He must’ve had on jeans with a 30-inch waist, and they were skintight. I don’t know how he did it, but he had gotten them on under that belly! He must have had trouble just breathing!

Now, what did he need in his life? A diet? No.

Diets don’t work because they have a terrible name: diet. Die—t.

That’s not good! The minute you think about going on a diet, your body sends signals to itself that say, Famine! Famine! Eat! Eat! Eat! Store! Store! Store it in the back where no one can see it! Store! Store! Eat! Don’t say the word diet.

Here’s another word your body doesn’t want to hear: fast. When you think about fasting, your body says, No! Eat—hurry! Your body says, Famine is coming! It’s cutting us off!

Now, when you feed your body too much, do you know what your body says? Your body starts thinking, Boy, we must have some trouble ahead. Store it up! There must be some hard times a-comin’, Jack. He wouldn’t put this much in here otherwise. I don’t know what’s going on, but I guarantee you one thing—ooooh Lord! recession is coming. Build fat! There ain’t no use to burn it. Slow the metabolism down. Don’t burn this stuff, because it’s going to get bad in here, Jack.

That’s exactly what your body is saying when you’re overeating, because it wonders why you would do that.

Your body sends you a signal when it’s had enough. It’s called a little burp.

Do we listen? No, because we don’t eat to get full. We eat because it tastes good.

We say, “I think I’ll have another little bite there. And another little bite there.” After a while the body is going, Hey! We’re choking down here, man! In fact, it doesn’t know what to do, so it says, Man, I can’t move. Let’s get sleepy. Your body says, Hey, I can’t handle this. Shut him down. If he doesn’t shut his mouth, he’ll kill us. Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Is that true? Oh, yeah. But once you regulate it and you give it what it needs, you never have to worry about fat anymore. Yeah, but some of you say, “Oh, I can’t do better, Jesse. I’ve tried all of those diets.

"My weight problem is in the genes.” Yeah, your problem is in your jeans all right, and it’s trying to bust out over the sides, too!

Have you ever seen women wearing jeans with fat hanging over the top? You say, “How come you don’t stuff that in somewhere?” And they say, “I tried to put it in, but it pops right back out!”

The same thing happens with men. But what they do is pull their fat up above their belts, and then they think they’re not fat. If they didn’t pull the fat up above their belts, then they’d have to change pants sizes. So instead they say, “What I’m going to do is put my pants under that belly. I wear pants with a 32-inch waist, but I have a 94-inch belly. Oh, no! I’m not buying pants any bigger than this! You can forget that, Jack! Just put them underneath the fat. Way underneath!”

Listen! You can’t let your body boss you around like that. You've got to show it who's boss!

You’ve got to tell it what to do, not let it tell you what to do. No, you just say, “Body, you’re going to do what I tell you to do!” See, quit being dictated by the flesh, by what the appetite says. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not. If it were easy, everybody would do it, and everybody would be as skinny as they wanted to be.

You can eat all you like if you want, but it’s not going to be helpful to you. Listen to what Paul says about that in the Bible: “Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything (1 Corinthians 6:12 NIV).This principle can be applied to eating as well as other appetites we have. The very next thing Paul says is about food and the stomach. He’s telling us that we should keep our appetites under control so we don’t have to go on a diet or -- worse yet -- “hide” all that fat up above our jeans.