Made to Crave: Introduction and Chapter 1-2

Back in December, I remember hearing about a book called Made to Crave: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, not Food by Lysa TerKeurst. This sounded like the type of book I needed to read. For Christmas, I was given a Barnes and Noble gift card, so I bought the book in January. I finally started reading it and I want to share my thoughts as I go since I'm trying to live healthier.

The chapters are really short (and there's 19 of them!), so I'm going to share my thoughts in chunks.

Introduction Finding Your "Want To":
The intro describes why Lysa decided to go on this journey. I completely related to her description of knowing how to lose weight and how to be healthy. That's not the problem especially in this day and age. We have information at our fingertips. The problem for most people, myself included, is finding the WANT TO to get healthy. I found this quote pretty funny because I feel the same way:

"I've even asked God if it would be such a terribly difficult thing to swap the molecular structure of Cheez-Its for carrot sticks. They're both already orange. And, really, how hard could that be for someone who's turned water into wine?"

Lysa goes on to describe how this journey is about more than losing weight. It's about not desiring anything more than God. It's about sacrificing and denying ourselves. I completely believe that food can be an idol in life. The battle against idolizing food is a spiritual, physical, and mental battle.

Chapter 1What's Really Going on Here?:
Chapter 1 goes into how we are made to crave. Crave means to long for, want greatly, desire eagerly, and beg for. However, we often crave things we don't need instead of craving God. Satan wants to replace our craving for God with a craving for something else. 1 John 2:15-16 states:

"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world- the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has done- comes not from the Father but from the world." 

Lysa goes on to describe how Satan tempted both Eve and Jesus in similar ways. The difference was Eve gave into this temptation. She was saturated in the object of her desire. Jesus did not give in to the temptation. He was saturated in God's truth. This gives us a lesson in how to resist temptation. The more saturated we are in God's word and His truth, the more we'll be able to fight those earthly cravings.

Chapter 2 Replacing My Cravings:
I am one of those people who always says "I'll start on Monday" or "Oh well, I messed up today. So, what's more junk food?" There's always an excuse for why I'll start later. However, what it came down to was relying on food. Like Lysa points out in this chapter, food is a source of comfort, joy, and a reward. I turn to food when I'm bored, stressed, happy, etc. God should be who I turn to in those times, not food. Lysa has a suggestion for what to do when you have food cravings.

"Each time I craved something I knew wasn't part of my plan, I used that craving as a prompt to pray. I craved a lot. So, I found myself praying a lot."

She also points out that it's important to be thankful for what you do have instead of feeling sorry for yourself over what you don't have. I think that's an important lesson to apply to many things, not just food.

Have you read this book? Have you learned to battle food cravings?