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For people like me whose trap is chronic dieting and food issues, there are certain images and messages that are diet porn. And as innocent as these images and messages may seem, they’re designed by the enemy to pull us into idolatry–even after we’ve found freedom with God.

Please understand that I’m not making light of the awful industry of pornography and the bondage it creates for those who worship at its altar. Rather, I’m using something we can all identify as evil to open our eyes to diet porn.

By the way, the definition of pornography applied to this context is: explicit videos, photographs, writings, or the like, whose purpose is to elicit arousal or attention.

What am I talking about? Here are some examples of diet porn for me.

People’s Weightless Success–On the phone with my sweet mother yesterday, she told me that my sister has lost 30 pounds. In the past, I would’ve dropped whatever I was doing and pursued the plan my sister was using.

In fact, do you remember the HCG diet craze? People were consuming less than 500 calories a day and ingesting pregnant woman urine (or something like that). And they were losing so much! I had just talked to a woman who’d lost a huge amount (and later gained it all back, sadly). She was like me in her search for the answer–was this for me?

I remember lying on my bed, crying out to God. I was so tired of not losing weight but God had called me to stop running from one diet to another. And yet here I was faced with diet porn–a diet that promised everything I wanted. This was spiritual warfare as I cried out to God to help me not do this diet. I wanted to be faithful to stop the cycle of dieting–since that’s what God had called me to do. But, oh those results! God gave me victory over that challenge that day, but it was seriously a battle! I had years of patterns to overcome.

Ads That Promise Results–Oh my goodness, they’re everywhere! Online, commercials on TV, Facebook, magazine ads, emails, mail–you name it! It’s an industry that has made billions of dollars promising that if we would just worship at their altar, they could meet all our needs.

I’ve wasted thousands of dollars on these idols. And they NEVER gave me freedom. They NEVER met my needs. They were false gods that lured me in. And yet, they still capture my attention. It’s diet porn!

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None of this makes any sense unless we see things biblically. So let me try to paint a picture of what I believe is true.

1. God wants our worship–and He wants us to have no other gods before Him.
2. Throughout the Bible, the journey is of a people who continually go after other gods.
3. God continually pulls people back to Himself.

It is the story of the Old Testament. And it’s our story.

God wants us to look to Him to meet all our needs–not the world’s system of diets. God wants us to worship only Him.

Diet porn is the enemy’s tool to get us to worship other gods.

I believe this very strongly! And if we don’t believe this, we’ll never be free. God has a better way!