Fit for the Kingdom: Physical Fitness, Nutrition and Spirituality

By Pandora N. Kinard

Ready or not here it comes! The battle for your life!!! You thought it was just all about counting calories and working out. This is a war that goes way beyond that; its a spiritual one. Satans weapon of choice? Food and habitual inactivity. If you have been wondering why you just cant seem to get it right, be consistent, stay motivated, eat healthy and get fit, you just found the answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496965721

Pandora N. Kinard

Weight loss client-turned fitness professional (National Academy of Sports Medicine ), physical education teacher (M.S Hofstra University), and minister Pandora Kinard has been in the health and fitness industry for over 13 years. Within that time, she has introduced lifelong fitness into the lives of people who like herself, thought it to be impossible, and is inspiring the next generation to be active and stay fit. Her own incredible weight loss journey and path to fitness was featured on channel 7 Eyewitness news (New York City), and in Women's World Magazine. Pandora is also an accomplished fitness writer authoring countless articles on health fitness for various publications. As a fitness expert and a minister, Pandora has lectured in many churches and other forums about the connection between physical fitness and spirituality, and is a highly regarded and sought after speaker, advisor, and fitness consultant who currently runs her own fitness company (Alpha Omega Fitness in NYC).

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© 2015 Pandora N. Kinard. All rights reserved.

Exercise Photographs by Eddie Ramirez

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/18/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6571-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6572-1 (e)

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Spiritual Importance of Physical Health

Chapter 2 Portion Control

Chapter 3 Let’s Get Moving

Chapter 4 Myths and Why Starvation Diets Don’t Work

Chapter 5 Strength Training

Chapter 6 Reading Food Labels

Chapter 7 Flex to Do Your Best

Chapter 8 Understand What You Eat and Drink Carbohydrates, Protein, Fats, Fiber, and Water

Chapter 9 Eat More, Weigh Less

Chapter 10 Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements

Chapter 11 Fitting Fast Food into a Healthy Lifestyle

Chapter 12 Putting It All Together

About The Author

For my daughter Ayva and all those who ever loved, supported and believed in me, from the bottom of my heart I Thank you.

Introduction

Fit For the Kingdom: Physical Fitness, Nutrition, and Spirituality

Keep alert and pray. Otherwise temptation will overpower you. For though the spirit is willing enough, the body is weak!

—Matthew 26:41

The struggle to lose weight, eat right, and do the things that make us healthy can be a difficult one. I know because I have been there, right where you might be now. I tried, and I gave up, tried again and gave up again. I wanted to eat right and exercise, but I just couldn’t get with it.

What I didn’t understand then was that the struggle that I was in involved a strategy formed by the devil long ago. It was his plan to keep me in bondage. The food was good, but I hated my body. The more I ate and stayed inactive, the more I hated myself. Not only did I hate myself, but I hated those around me who were thinner.

Food had overpowered me. It was the cause of my low self-esteem, and it was the cause of my hatred toward other women. It dictated how I spent my time, who I dated (I would only go out with a person if eating was part of the date), and it determined my level of happiness. Even when I set out to lose the weight, I had no idea how much I was being influenced and controlled by food.

Satan had used food as a way to set up strongholds in my mind that were preventing me from being the woman that God wanted me to be. Why? Because all my choices revolved around my self-image.

The food was not evil, but my overindulgence caused me to be in poor physical health, which gave me low self-esteem, leading me to devalue myself in every way possible, especially when it came to relationships. My personal self hatred led me to be with people who treated me poorly, which only served to deepen my low self-esteem. Do you see how Satan set me up? It’s like a domino effect, so don’t be fooled into thinking that your inability to do what you need to do to be healthy is an isolated problem. Satan can and will use food as a weapon, and this can have an effect on other areas of your life.

All of these issues had been getting in the way of my level of spirituality, and I didn’t even know it. The devil had declared war, and his weapon of choice was food. If he could get me to slowly destroy myself by overeating (and later under eating) and get me to hate myself and others, he was in control.

In the year 2000, the Lord helped me win my battle against being overweight. In a year and half’s time, I lost over eighty pounds. I went from a size 18/20 to wearing size 1 and 2, I was so happy that I decided to become a personal fitness trainer and a nutritional consultant, so I could help others.

What’s different about this book? I’m going to give you the advice you need to help your body, wrapped in the word of God to help your soul. This is not just a battle involving conquering the bad habits of the flesh but it is a battle against the thoughts in the heart and the mind that wage war against of our attainment of physical fitness. In this book I will go over many important concepts that are necessary for you to understand and follow in order to reach your weight loss and/or personal fitness goals. Along the way, the word of God is used in two ways to motivate you to the next level of health in your life and as a point of reference that creates a spiritual framework for understanding the different concepts in physical fitness and nutrition that this book unfolds.

But before you move on, I think it’s important for me to share the other side of my weight-loss story, what happened after I lost the weight (we know that Satan does not quit). You would think all would be well. I lost all of that weight, and now I could just live this happy slim-girl life, right? Wrong!

Once I lost the weight, I became obsessed with staying thin (now I was afraid of food).

It says in God’s word that He does not give us a spirit of fear (2 Tim 1:7), but there I was, afraid to eat. I could not see that it wasn’t the food, but how the devil was using it to control me. I ate healthfully, but I knew that I wouldn’t even allow myself to enjoy the occasional treat because I was afraid of gaining weight again. Then came the bingeing. I was depriving myself for so long that when I did get a taste of something I really wanted, I ate way too much and then felt bad, and then the self hatred slipped right back in. To this day, I still struggle somewhat, but now I know what I’m up against. I have learned that "we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Eph 6:12).

Satan and his kingdom are what we are up against, so it is important that as we strive to become healthier, we use the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph 6:17) as the foundation and as our weapon to counteract the strategies that keep us neglecting our health issues, poor physical condition, and our bad eating habits. As you read and apply the knowledge know that you are not in this alone:

I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest when I have preached to others, I myself have become disqualified (I Corinthians 9:27).

Chapter 1

The Spiritual Importance of Physical Health

The Lord Cares About Our Bodies

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

(1Corithians 3:16)

The first step to moving into a healthy, more active lifestyle is to realize that how we treat our bodies matters to God. In fact in Leviticus 10, 11, and 13, The Lord gives all types of instructions about how the body should be taken care of. In Chapter 11, God gave the Israelites very specific instructions about what they should and should not eat. These foods were referred to as either clean or unclean. With the exception that God was holy and he wanted His people to be holy(Deut 14:1–21), there is no explanation as to why God declared certain things that the Israelites could eat in terms of the animals, as clean or unclean, either acceptable or not acceptable, to be used as food. It is possible to speculate that as our maker and creator, God was sharing with his people the foods best suitable for their bodies.

The point of highlighting this set of scriptures is not to condemn anyone who eats anything that God had prohibited in the commandments he gave to the Israelites through Moses. After all, the Apostle Paul made it clear that those who think it is right to eat anything must not look down on those who won’t, and those who won’t eat certain foods must not condemn those who do, for God has accepted them (Rom 14:3).

These scriptures are important to mention, because I believe that they provide a perfect illustration of God’s deep concern for the health of his people.¹

Our overeating and under eating is definitely a concern of God’s because they determine what we physically can and cannot do. And for many of us, they are leading us down a very slow path of death.

The journey of losing weight, eating healthy, and becoming more active for the Christian must begin with the basic understanding of how our bodies, souls, and spirits are affected by our unhealthy habits and how physically active we are. I believe that it is the desire of God for his people to be as healthy as possible, and to be in the best shape we possibly can.

I believe that having a Godly perspective about eating right and being physically fit helps us approach our weight loss and health goals on a more spiritual level. This helps us move beyond vanity and brings us to a place where the goal becomes to please the Lord by taking care of ourselves.

I also believe tackling the problem from a spiritual rather than just a physical perspective breaks the strongholds of the enemy that are acting to keep us in an unhealthy state. Under this perspective, we not only deal with the physical aspects, but we look at how our eating habits affect our soul (thoughts and emotions) and vise versa, leading us down a path of constant defeat. This perspective shows us how we unknowingly make our vessels less usable for the Lord’s service by over- or under eating.

I don’t know about anyone else, but my journey to lose weight left me feeling defeated, which just caused me to eat more. I was not happy, and my unhappiness with my body and all of the other different emotions, to a certain extent, affected my worship.

Because our bodies belong to God he cares about we take care of them. If we neglect to consider the damage being done to our bodies through our unhealthy eating habits, we are in essence putting ourselves first, instead of considering how the Lord feels.

The Lord