In
the year 2000, I had everything but a good relationship
with God.
In
2001, He took it all away…and I was devastated.
In
2002, I had nothing but a good
relationship with God -- and He had my full attention.
In
2003, I was standing at a major crossroads. I asked
God…day after day after day…for His clearest guidance.
Two years later it finally came. He said,
“Frank, you
cannot worship two masters. You can either do what
you think
will make you happy and prosperous…or you can do what
I put you
here to do. But you can’t do both, so pick one.”
I was
scared. I knew it would require a huge leap of faith.
But God said,
“Do not be
afraid, but have faith. You know that I reward faith.
That’s what
you teach people, you know? Do you really believe it?”
But I was still afraid. Then God said,
“If you will let go of what you’re holding on to,
I will let go of what I’m holding for you.”
I
did. And then He did.
He took my fear and gave me His perfect love.
And since
that time He has also given me a wonderful and loving
woman to be my wife.
Now I only worship One Master.
Now I am doing what He put me here to do.
And I would love to share it with you.
The Rest Of
My Story...
I am now (in 2010) 64 years young. Way back at the tender age of 15, I
accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior -- and then I promptly
forgot all about it, and Him.
But He apparently did not forget, because despite the incredibly stupid
things I did over the next 4 decades, He still managed to keep me alive
and healthy.
Looking back, I can now see how He was preparing me for this mission,
even when I didn't have a clue what was happening.
Truly, our God works in mysterious ways. So let me tell you the story of
my own transformation, how the scales have been removed from my own
eyes, and how I finally discovered my place in His Plan!
So let me tell you the story of my own
transformation, how the scales have been removed from my own eyes, and
how I finally discovered my place in His Plan!
Back in 1977, I first became fascinated with the workings of the human
mind -- and my own mind in particular. Why? Because my life was a mess!
Without going into excessive detail, it had become painfully clear to me
that my biggest problem in life was that guy in the mirror.
Now you need to understand that this was NOT a happy discovery. It was
infinitely easier to blame someone else -- anyone else -- for the
problems in my life. And over the years, I had become very good at
playing the blame game, so I really didn't want all those hard-won
skills going to waste!
But once the truth starts to become clear, it's hard to keep living in
denial. And even though there were many messes in my life, God had
already given me the gift of knowing that it didn't have to be that way.
So off I went, to see how many of my messes I could clean up.
And many years later, after participating in countless seminars and
workshops, reading hundreds of books on spiritual and personal growth,
working with a dozen therapists and counselors, and even getting
graduate degrees in both psychology and theology, I had amassed a LOT of
information about human behavior, and how to change it.
And as my own "Guinea pig," I made a lot of changes in my own life.
But why a graduate degree in theology? Because after decades of study,
it was very clear to me that we are created body, mind, and spirit.
Unfortunately, as far as traditional psychology is concerned, our spirit
isn't "measurable" and therefore doesn't really "matter." (Brilliant
thinking, eh?) But after working as a licensed psychotherapist, it was
obvious to me (and most of my clients) that our spirits play a very big
role in determining whether our lives are -- or are not -- transformed
in a meaningful way.
And since we are created body, mind, and spirit, and since all three are
inseparably interconnected, I didn't see how we could solve our problems
in life unless we engaged all three aspects of who we are in creating a
solution.
Yet physicians routinely ignore the effects of the mind, and
psychologists consistently ignore the influence -- or the existence --
of the spirit. No wonder western medicine sees drugs as the cure for
every problem! Don't even get me started….
Anyway, by 1999 I had a very good handle on how the human mind works. I
thought I knew all I needed to know to help people change their thinking
and their behaviors, and transform their lives. But apparently God had
other plans for me. And due to a series of unwise real estate
investments, I found myself on the verge of bankruptcy in late 1999.
You see, I had learned how to deal with the other problems life had
presented me with, but I had never had financial problems before. Now I
had them in spades. And I was waking up every night in a cold sweat --
wondering how I was going to survive.
Although I had an extensive background of spiritual knowledge, nothing
had prepared me for this. And even though I was attending a church, I
was not "really" a Christian, and I was certainly not thinking or acting
like I had been born again. As I said a moment ago, I had really
"forgotten all about it."
Well one day my small church offered a workshop on financial prosperity,
and from my point of view, the timing was perfect. So I attended it. As
it turned out, the workshop was terrible. I learned nothing useful and
was about to walk out even more depressed and anxious then I walked in.
But on a small table in the back of the room, near the exit, I saw
a little booklet on the subject of prosperity, and consisted
of both information and affirmations.
And I figured, even in my
desperate financial circumstances, I could afford $4.97. But looking
back, if I'd had any notion how that little booklet was going to change
my life, I would have paid 100 times as much for it.
So later that day, I sat down with her little booklet and read it cover
to cover -- which took all of 25 minutes. I liked her affirmations
(something I was extremely familiar with), but I was very put off to see
that every affirmation was in the name of Jesus Christ.
Since I did
not see myself as a "real" Christian, I didn't see how I could speak
those affirmations with integrity. And since my integrity was about all I had left, it was a pretty tough
place to be.
On the other hand, it was pretty clear that what I was doing was
definitely not solving my problem. Oh, I was already doing plenty of
affirmations. But none of them were in the name of Jesus Christ.
But then I thought to myself, well OK, I'll just do the affirmations her
way. I mean, what have I got to lose? It certainly can't be any less
effective than the way I'm doing them now.
So I took the dozen or so affirmations out of her booklet and put them
all on a single page. Then I read the page full of affirmations --
declaring each one in the name of Jesus Christ -- twice every day. It
felt kind of…weird.
But on the third day, a Sunday, I awoke to a very strange sensation: NO
anxiety. Zero. Zip. Nada. None!
Now, you have to understand that I had been living in a constant state
of anxiety -- all day, every day -- morning, noon, and night (all
night). To say this was a shock to my system would be a huge
understatement.
But the total absence of anxiety was a shock I eagerly embraced. And for
the first hour or so that I was awake, I simply accepted my peaceful
state, barely giving a thought to what might have produced it. Even
though I was enjoying a change -- a transformation--of major
proportions, my brain was not yet awake enough to think about the source
of my transformation.
But it soon became obvious, even to the skeptical Frank. Only one thing
had changed. I was now doing my affirmations in the name of Jesus
Christ.
Well, I had been through enough statistics courses and experimental
design classes to know that, when only one variable changes, and the
outcome also changes, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure
out what caused the change. I had to admit (not an easy thing to do at
the time) that the name of Jesus Christ is what had made the difference.
And it got me thinking, hmm… Could there really be something to this
Christianity stuff?
Almost immediately after that revelation, I received what I have now
come to call a "divine download." I received information that was new to
me from a source I could not clearly identify. But I faithfully wrote it
all down just the same. (This "divine download" eventually became the
Life And Love Self-Assessment -- LLSA -- that is now part of the Weight
Loss God's Way program.)
As I mentioned, this was all happening on a Sunday. A bit later I was
off to church. Coincidentally, I had just started reading the New
Testament a few weeks before, for reasons that were at the time not yet
clear to me. And a certain Scripture drifted into my mind, "Whatever you
shall ask for in my name…" Hmmm….
Anyway, during the service I realized that, although the reference
materials were all from the New Testament, no mention of the Bible or
any book of the Bible was ever made during the actual service. When I
later asked the pastor about this, I was not happy with his answer. In
my heart, I knew it was time for a "real" Christian Church.
So the following Sunday, I attended services at a large evangelical
church that I had been to once before, but had not been… ready for. Now
I was very ready.
At the end of the service, the pastor asked if anyone wanted to receive
Jesus Christ as his personal savior. I knew I did.
And from that moment on, my life has never been the same. I became a
dedicated Bible student and pursued biblical knowledge with the same
enthusiasm I had always pursued psychological knowledge.
Now a few years earlier, I had stopped by my old grad school library
because I wanted to do some research. I had previously signed up for a
time slot on the research computers, which are connected to a database
of all the research literature.
I arrived about 15 minutes before my scheduled appointment with the
computer, so I picked up a magazine to read while I waited. I don't
remember what the magazine was, but I will never forget the title of the
cover article: "Diets Don't Work!"
I thought to myself, yeah, I know diets don't work. But for some reason
it really got me to wondering: what (if anything) does work? And it
occurred to me that I had a golden opportunity to find out, because I
was just about to sit down at a computer that could give me some
accurate answers to that very question.
I also knew that the answers I'd get from these texts would be the best
and most accurate information available anywhere -- just the facts,
uncontaminated by the agenda of anybody who was trying to sell me
something.
So I got on the computer, promptly forgot all about whatever it was I
had originally intended to research, and entered the key words "weight
loss" and "success." In short order, several hundred research articles
and studies came up on the screen. So I selected the 50 or so that
seemed to best answer my question, and printed them out.
Why was I doing this? I really didn't have a clue. But as it turns out,
I was opening the door to the next stage of my life. You see, I was
already in my 50s, and I thought it would be a wonderful thing to create
an information product that could, in turn, become the basis for my next
career.
So one day I sat down with all of the studies and did what's called a
"factor analysis." My goal was to determine, from these studies (47, as
it turned out) the factors were found to consistently lead to weight
loss success.
Eventually, I was able to identify 12 specific factors that were
consistently found to be associated with lasting weight loss. So I
labeled them (surprise) "The 12 Success Factors."
Although it was not obvious to me at first, I soon noticed that all 12
of these Success Factors had something in common. They all had to do
with our thoughts and beliefs, as opposed to our diet or exercise
programs.
But I have to confess, the importance of this discovery was not yet
clear to me at that time. Only later did I come to understand why it is
SO much more effective to change your thinking then to change your diet.
Why is our thinking so much more important than our diets for creating
lasting weight loss success? Because each of these 12 Success Factors
represents a specific category of self-sabotaging beliefs we can have.
Now it is well established that our beliefs determine our behaviors. So
as long as a person continues to have their self-sabotaging beliefs, it
will be extremely difficult for them to stop their self-sabotaging
behaviors -- especially where food and eating are concerned.
Ultimately, this fact would form the foundation of my new approach to
weight loss, though none of this was really clear at the time. But by
this point I had a very good idea of what really led to weight loss
success -- as opposed to the kinds of Diet Industry "solutions" that are
endlessly hyped on TV and in magazines.
And this awareness set me up for the next step, because a few days later
I came across a list of "The Top 10 Things Americans Are Doing To Try To
Lose Weight." I took a good look at that list. Then I looked at my list
of the 12 Success Factors. Then I looked back at the top 10 list… and
again at my 12 Success Factors.
And you know what I discovered? There was no overlap! Not a single thing
that was on my list of 12 factors was on their top 10 list! I was
astonished. Was I the only one who had ever bothered to actually do this
research?
Or -- could it be that the Diet Industry was simply selling whatever
they could sell, regardless of how effective it might or might not be?
At the time, I thought that question was almost too cynical to ponder. I
have since discovered otherwise.
So now I knew what worked -- and I knew that wasn't what most people
were doing. But the third piece of information is what really pulled it
all together for me. I heard the results of a US Department Of Health
survey that said 96% of all weight-loss efforts fail, and we gain back
95% of all the pounds we do manage to lose.
This study also showed that childhood obesity had doubled and adolescent
obesity had tripled in a single decade! Although I was not prepared to
tackle obesity in children and adolescents, it was now crystal clear to
me that there were literally millions of adults in desperate need of a
solution -- and that I might just be able to provide them with that
solution.
Keep in mind that I had just spent more than two decades studying human
behavior change, and I had developed some very solid skills in those
areas. Now it was finally clear how I could put those skills to use, and
provide a useful and desperately needed service at the same time.
So out of this combination of established psychological facts and new
revelations, I created my very first weight-loss program. It was
secular, not Christian. And it wasn't very complicated; it just stuck to
the basics. It was only 132 pages, and only contained 49 Success
Exercises. But it was a great start, and I began marketing it through a
major health and fitness web site.
Unexpectedly, I soon found myself getting requests for coaching. Well, I
thought, I have already been a licensed psychotherapist. So coaching
should be pretty much a natural for me. At the time, I had no idea that
coaching could be so much more effective than psychotherapy, if properly
done. But now I know that it absolutely can -- and it is!
Back to my newfound Christianity.
Curious and knowledge-hungry person that I am, I had started ordering
tapes and books from every TV ministry that seemed to have a message I
wanted to hear. And that was just about all of them.
Remember that I had already identified these 12 weight-loss Success
Factors. And after working with quite a few coaching clients, I had made
an important discovery. If you take care of the "top four" Success
Factors, the other eight will take care of themselves.
By that, I mean that if you find and correct the self-sabotaging beliefs
associated with the first four Success Factors, you will automatically
correct the self-sabotaging beliefs related to the other eight Success
Factors. So now, my clear mission was to help people find and fix their
self-sabotaging beliefs in those first four categories.
Now, with my psychology background, there was no mystery to me about
where our self-sabotaging beliefs come from. They come from the same
place that all of our beliefs come from: the influential people who are
around us when we are growing up.
This includes our parents, our relatives, our friends, our teachers, our
preachers, and anyone else who had access to our tender young brains.
Right or wrong, good or bad, our hungry little minds were absorbing
information from every source we were exposed to.
And as kids, there was nothing we could do about it. So from this
"secondhand" information others were constantly cramming into our
receptive young minds, we put together our view of life, our view of the
world -- and our view of ourselves.
And if we had somehow developed low self-esteem or a poor self-image, I
had no doubt about where it had come from. And it was definitely NOT
from He who created us. It was from the world.
As you can probably guess, those Four Success Factors were already very
high in my consciousness. And as I listened to the various tapes I had
gotten from the TV ministries, something remarkable started to happen in
my thinking.
It was slowly dawning on me, as I learned more about Christianity and
the Bible, that virtually everything I had learned about human behavior
change in more than two decades of study was already right there in my
own Bible, and primarily in the New Testament.
And the more I listened, the clearer it became that both psychology and
Christianity were giving me the same fundamental message: to change your
behavior, to change your experience of life, you must first change your
thinking!
Or as Romans 12:2 so eloquently puts it:
"Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be
transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test
and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will." (NIV)
(or)
"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and
acceptable, and perfect, will of God." (KJV)
Believe me, no psychologist ever said it better than that!
And this remarkable Scripture became the cornerstone of the Weight Loss
God's Way program, accompanied by another 200 or so foundational
Scriptures that underscore and confirm all of the other great Truths
that allow this program to be the life-changing tool it seems to have
become.
So let me close this very personal message to you with a simple summary
of what our loving Father has done in the life of His boy called "Dr.
Frank"…
Peace be with you,
"Dr. Frank"
Dr. Frank B. Smoot, MA, DD
