Candace Cameron Bure, Bianca Juarez Olthoff Share Power of Declaring Truth Over Life
By Movieguide® Contributor
Candace Cameron Bure and Christian author Bianca Juarez Olthoff explored how declaring truth over their lives transformed how they view themselves and their God-given bodies.
They shared how to get rid of negative thought “scripts” that hinder healthy lifestyles and productivity.
“I was morbidly obese at the age of 12. I weighed more than my dad, and I battled with my weight my entire life,” Olthoff said. “So around college I started doing like a tally count of how many diets I had been on since the age of 12, and I stopped counting after 40. So from age 12 to 22, I’ve been over 40 diets.”
Candace sympathized with Olthoff. The two women had many of the same diets in their younger years, and both struggled to lose weight.
“And what I realized is that I had used exercise as a coping mechanism for weight loss,” Olthoff continued. “So it was no longer something that brought like peace of mind or sanity; it was something that I used to kind of weaponize against my body.”
“I developed body hatred and disordered eating, nothing like anorexia or bulimia. So I never thought I had an eating disorder, but looking back retrospectively I had disordered eating.” She continued, “Food wasn’t a friend; food was a foe. And I used food as a reward, and then I used food as a punishment,” she shared.
Olthoff’s attitude didn’t change until she turned to Scripture. She realized that her body is sacred to God and that she should take care of it as he intended.
“My relationship with exercise has been something that is actually rooted in theology,” Olthoff told Bure. “So Paul, when writing to the Corinthians in Corinthians 13, He says ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple unto the Lord?’ And so it like hit me. I’m like, wait a minute. If my body is a temple unto the Lord, am I taking care of it? And I had so much hatred towards my body, so I wanted not to weaponize food and I know this works for some people, but for me, I just couldn’t live my life in teaspoons and measuring cups in daily ways.”
“The weigh-ins just felt like torturous and then my day and my energy and my attitude was dependent on the number on the scale like it was either could be a good day or a bad day based on how much I weighed,” Olthoff continued.
Bure said, “That still happens to me which is why I really try not to weigh myself anymore because it can make or break my day.”
Bure shared that she didn’t always love to exercise, but her attitude eventually took a 180-degree turn. She posted on Instagram recently that she feels grateful for “fitness and being able to move my body.”
Olthoff told Bure, “I realized that [what] will deter people from getting out or working out is these scripts that we write in our head—negative self-talk…When we talk about exercise, working out, going out, we will tell ourselves, ‘What I do won’t matter. I’m so tired. I can’t do it. I’m tired of trying, not seeing effects.’”
“When the scripts come in, we need to have a declaration,” the author continued. “So how do we fight the negative self-talk—it’s with a declaration. What I want us to do is to write a declaration for our own lives,” Olthoff challenged listeners. “We are independent from any of the negative scripts that we have written and so there’s power in declaration. It is making a statement.”
Bure shared an example of a declaration that actress and Christian speaker Priscilla Shirer declared over her sons:
Father, protect him and give him an awareness of your presence. Set purpose in his heart and a passion for you that cannot be quenched. Sever any influence or distraction that would lead him away from your best for his life. Let your Spirit rise up within him and fill him up to overflow so that he has wisdom beyond his years. Be his guide today and give him a sensitivity to where you are working and what you are doing. Convict Him of anything that is not pleasing to you and then give him the courage to live right and honor You. Make him a leader and not a follower, and let him rise up in the spirit of Elijah to be a truth-teller in his generation.
In Jesus name.
Amen!
Movieguide® recently reported on another conversation between Olfthoff and Bure:
Candace Cameron Bure and Bianca Juarez Olthoff are encouraging people to not feel “intimidated” to pray out loud.
“Prayer feels really overwhelming to a lot of people,” Olthoff began, and Bure quickly agreed…
“We made prayer feel like it’s something only the uber-elite spiritual warriors can do,” she continued. “But let’s call prayer what it is: prayer is a conversation with God of the universe.”
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