Did you learn shame around food and body image in your childhood? Who first taught you you were “fat”? What kind of pain did you experience in your family that you could only soothe with food?
If these questions are on your mind, there are answers. There is hope.
Free Webinar:
Family Table
Making Peace with Intergenerational Disordered Eating
Wednesday, May 10 at 8pm Eastern Time
Are you experiencing the overlap between your food addiction and your experience in an abusive or dysfunctional childhood home? To help us prepare for the upcoming Mother’s Day and Father’s Day holidays, Erin is offering a webinar exclusive to CIR+ members. Join us on Wednesday, May 10 at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time/5 pm Pacific Standard Time and sign up today!
The webinar begins on Wednesday, May 10th, at 8:00 pm EST/5:00 pm PST.
Presentation — 25-30 minutes Small-group Breakouts — 20-25 minutes Q&A — 15-20 minutes Participants are welcome to arrive up to 15 minutes before the start of the webinar for discussion and stay around afterward to connect with others in a “parking lot” meeting.
Learn how to let go when you can’t stop holding on!
We’ve all heard the advice:
Take your thoughts captive! Be transformed by the renewing of your mind!
Sounds great, but what happens when, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t let go and let God? In this free webinar, Catholic author and mental health advocate Erin McCole Cupp will share three tools that helped her heal her obsessive thoughts about food (and relationships), lose 100lbs, and live in food (and relationship) freedom today!
Free Webinar:
Let Go & Let God:
Break Obsessive Thought Patterns & Get Your Mind Back
Thursday, May 4 at 7am Eastern Time via Zoom
Can’t attend that day/time? A recording of Erin’s presentation will be made available to all registrants!
Catholic? Asking yourself, “What should I give up for Lent?” It might not be food. Here are five signs you might be treating Lent like a diet.
1: You binge big-time on Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday/Fastnacht Day/Pancake Day/Whatever because that’s the only way to gear up for fasting on Ash Wednesday
If the lead-up to Lent is an exercise in gluttony because you’ll “be good tomorrow,” you’re losing sight of the fact that you’re already good. Fasting doesn’t make you better.
2: Your penances are mostly if not all food-related
If you focus your Lenten penances on “making my food good” or “eating better” or “fixing my relationship with food” to the exclusion of penances that help you grow in self-control (rather than food-control), you might be treating Lent like a 40-day fix-it program.
3: You’re relying on the scale to evaluate whether or not you’re being “good”
If your Lenten penances are about making yourself weigh a certain number and not about God’s redemptive power to save, you might be missing the point of these 40 days.
4: When you slip on your Lenten penance, you go overboard, thinking, “Well, I’ve already messed up. I might as well enjoy myself.”
This is a big one, and it’s common. It’s also the spiritual equivalent of, “Well, I’ve broken one of my bones. I may as well go break the rest of them.” If all your slips become slides, you might be treating Lent like a diet.
5: You try to “balance” your slips with even more restriction, which is even more difficult, so you slip again, so you try to “balance,” so you slip again…
There’s balance, and then there’s putting ourselves on a roller coaster. We may climb aboard that roller coaster unconsciously or compulsively, but it’s still intentionally. The intention is to make space in our lives for gluttony rather than making space in our hearts and souls for relationship with God and with God through other persons.
In this talk, I go into ways to identify unhealthy patterns disguised as “penance,” and I offer tools to and alternatives to use Lent less as a diet and more as an invitation into deeper relationship with the God of our restoration.
Act fast! A webinar cohort is forming to start with the free intro webinar on Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 12noon Eastern. This might be your time!
If you missed that deadline, check out the Filled with Good free intro and automatically get on the list to receive other discounts as they come along.
My experience tells me that authentic Catholic self-care manifests in three ways.
[Disclosure: This is a super-fast summary of a webinar I gave for the members of Catholic in Recovery+ in November of 2022.]
#1: Inclusive Self-care
Inclusive self-care is the stuff we do to keep ourselves living in virtue: hygiene, nourishing ourselves with food rather than numbing, regular reception of the sacraments, exercise not to punish ourselves but to live fully in the bodies God gave us.
#2: Exclusive Self-care
Exclusive self-care is the stuff we avoid in order to keep ourselves living in virtue: overindulgence, self-destructive thoughts, people who treat us badly and show no sign of repentence.
#3 Trinitarian Self-care
Trinitarian self-care is the stuff we do to cultivate nourishing relationships in our lives. God is a Trinity. God is infinite relationship. If we are made in God’s image and likeness, we can only thrive in thriving relationships. Pope Saint John Paul II put it best when he said, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”
Which of these types of self-care is most difficult for you?
If you’ve been searching for a Catholic diet plan, Catholic spiritual weight loss program, or just been growing increasingly desperate for relief from emotional eating and compulsive food behaviors and want to lean on your Catholic faith as your path to a new way of eating with peace and joy, check out my course Filled with Good: Theology of the Body for Food Addicts.
Here’s a demo of how this conversational prayer tool works in the moment to derail my cravings for food that isn’t part of God’s plan for my physical reality.
If you’ve been searching for a Catholic diet plan, Catholic spiritual weight loss program, or just been growing increasingly desperate for relief from emotional eating and compulsive food behaviors and want to lean on your Catholic faith as your path to a new way of eating with peace and joy, check out my course Filled with Good: Theology of the Body for Food Addicts.
Mary, gentle mother,
you who have known nothing but total communion
with the God of our beginning,
our middle,
and our end,
we ask you to take us under your mantle.
We pray the words you said to all of us
through St. Luke the Evangelist:
The hungry he has filled with good things.
Mary, teach us how to be hungry
as you knew how to be,
so that we may be filled,
as you are, with good things.
In your precious son’s holy name, we pray.
Amen
If you’ve been searching for a Catholic diet plan, Catholic spiritual weight loss program, or just been growing increasingly desperate for relief from emotional eating and compulsive food behaviors and want to lean on your Catholic faith as your path to a new way of eating with peace and joy, check out my course Filled with Good: Theology of the Body for Food Addicts.
Erin McCole Cupp 