You are making this blog more interesting all the time. I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere else before, but I think like Ben that the soul exists, but it is not us. It may be the sum total of all the lives we may have lived in the past. Sounds a little like the Buddhists doesn’t it? When we die, the soul moves on into another body and over the millennia perfects itself. This is God’s way of allowing all of us achieve the perfect life or perfect happiness or heaven or Nirvana, or whatever we want to call it. A loving God would want us to ultimately be perfected and be perfectly happy.
It’s not God that punishes us, but it’s ourselves that punishes us, whether it be guilt or hatred of ourselves or others or whatever. It’s a law of nature, just like gravity. But what is bad for one person may not be bad for another. I believe in situation ethics and what may be ethical for one person in a given situation may not be ethical for another person in the same situation. God treats us as individuals and not as groups of humans. I always like to say that God gives us individual instruction.
So maybe a soul does wait to be placed in another body. Maybe that’s the old idea of purgatory. Who knows. I believe that we have a mind to think with and it’s our responsibility to use it and think about these things. If we don’t, then we make ourselves less than human. Take the Republicans for example. (Just joking) There are some very good Republicans that I call friends, so please don’t take this the wrong way.
You do bring up a good point. My experience is that weight loss and weight gain often lag behind what we’re doing. So you were working hard, got sick, ate a lot, and lost weight, but it’s the weight you would have lost that week anyway. Then of course you cheated some and that weight came back the next week.
Now given that spiel, I think there are no limits to the bounds of moderation and sometimes we can do too much or too little and have to find the balance (moderation)
I was 277 when I came home from a visit with my family. I dropped to 272 over the next week or so and then jumped to 276 for no apparent reason. Yesterday I was 270.8. Who’s to say. I have found that my cheat days are wonderful and while I gain a few pounds after them, seem to lose a pound or two by time the next cheat day rolls around. That’s if I don’t continue cheating.
So keep at it. And you’re right, comments like, “You look amazing,” are a big help. Keep up the good work and know that you shall never give up. This is a life long thing.