“If you don’t lose weight and keep it off, you’ll be dead in five years.”
Those brutal words from a cardiac surgeon served as a defining moment for Teresa Shields Parker, who, at the time weighed 430 pounds. But her solution in the natural—starting yet one more diet—provided only a temporary fix, she tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast. It took what she calls a “come to Jesus moment” for her to experience lasting change. Today, she’s lost more than 250 pounds and has kept it off since 2013.
That moment came, she says, during a meeting where she wasn’t even paying attention to the speaker, an alcoholic. “I was halfway listening to it, because alcohol has never been my problem,” she says. “But in the middle of his story, he said, ‘Alcohol is one molecule away from sugar. Alcohol is liquid sugar.'”
“And that was my come to Jesus moment,” Parker says. “That opened my eyes, and everything fell into place.” She asked a few more questions and, because this happened before anyone talked about food addiction, asked the speaker point-blank: “Can you be a sugar addict?”
“I don’t know the physical nature of it,” he told her. “But you can be addicted to anything that controls you.”
“I knew sugar controlled me,” Parker says. Many years earlier, the Lord had told her to stop eating sugar, but she resisted, sure she could come up with her own weight-loss plan. As she learned more about the spiritual aspects of her sugar addiction, she recognized sugar as a spiritual stronghold. And that’s when God took the barriers down.
To hear more from Teresa Shields Parker about how God broke the stronghold of sugar addiction in her life, listen to the entire episode of the Greenelines podcast here, and subscribe to the Greenelines podcast on your favorite podcast platform for more inspiring stories like this one. Check out Parker’s most recent book, Sweet Surrender, at this link, and be sure to check out her own podcast, Sweet Grace for Your Journey, also on the Charisma Podcast Network. {eoa}
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