foodFORthought

It was in Australia that I first came across a concept in becoming dead to yourself and following God; so unexpected, so controversial…does God want me to start eating organic?
Now, before you tune out, browse/scroll down to gauge interest level or click away – please read on – I’ll start at the beginning.

In high school I weighed 175lbs on average, sometime pushing 180. I ate at every scheduled mealtime without fail and usually helped myself to seconds and dessert. I wasn’t necessarily a fat kid(maybe I was); but I was unhealthy and disillusioned about eating while my proportionate distribution of weight helped disguise it.

 

Simply put, I was a glutton.

 

It hit me hard one evening when my family went to the local Applebee’s – we ordered and when our meals finally came, I realized after the first bite of my food that all my feelings of hunger were false because it was mealtime and were quickly erased with a single swallow. And it was then that the really disgusted me that as I had time and again before, I would still proceed to finish the entire plate. I felt sick to my stomach. Loathing my sad scope of reality, I vowed from that moment on to change my habits.

I didn’t eat for 2 days.
I was waiting to actually get hungry again.
For real this time.

When I did finally get hungry, I was surprised (and quite sad) at how little actually filled me up.
I LOVE food. I ENJOY food. And it’s important to know as you read this, I still do.
As much as it saddened me to only eat maybe a small sandwich to satisfy my hunger, it was gratifying to know that I was starting to regain control of myself and my desires.

This went on for about a year and a half. Only eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full. My diet consisted of whatever I wanted really, type of food didn’t matter as long as I had the quantity under control. And at the end of this period of my life, I was down to a weight of around 135lbs.

In my years since the glutton days, I’ve found that when you start paying attention to your body and the foods you put inside it, it starts to effect more aspects than the simple reasons you started for.
I stopped eating McDonald’s maybe 5 years ago after a greasy fried chicken one night. Wendy’s followed a few years later after loosing an appetite for their fries. Slowly but surely almost all fast food has become undesirable due to it’s lack of health and taste (although Tacobell might always have a place in my heart despite not having eaten there in maybe 4 years).

I look carefully at how much sweets I consume. I generally eat a lot of fruits and vegetable. Granted it’s always an issue of balance, never anything completely out of scale. I eat a lot of breads and I love dairy. I’d say I had a relatively balanced and healthy diet before leaving on the race.

Then I got to Oz and found myself in this out-of-his-mind conversation with a hippie/world traveler and self proclaimed mango tree dr. He was trying to sell me on some crap that the food we eat is poison and death to our bodies because we’ve killed the grains in it and that’s why we suffer from things like lust. His mental process may have been a bit skewed, but as I reflected on his words (and looked for a friend to get me out of the conversation) I couldn’t get the story of Daniel in the bible out of my head. –the guy that was thrown into a den of lions and didn’t get eaten– yeah, him.
See, he made this promise not to defile himself before God and he really kept to it as he lived his life. When the Israelites where captured by Babylon during Jeremiah’s time in the bible, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, ordered for the most healthy, strong, well versed, gifted and good-looking men of the captives to be brought to the palace to serve there – this man Daniel was among them. They were to be trained for 3 years to prepare for their new jobs and given a ration of food and wine from the king’s own kitchens. Daniel was determined not to defile himself by eating the food and wine given to them by the king and he asked the chief of staff for a different diet of vegetables and water. When the chief was unsure, Daniel challenged him to test his diet against the rest receiving the kings food and wine for 10 days to see who was stronger. As it turned out, after the 10 days, that Daniel looked healthier and better nourished than the others and everyone was switched to a diet of vegetables and water.

The crazy man in Oz with his theories about dead grains and lust may have been a little out of balance, but he did have a point; what we put in our bodies really does effect our outcomes. And as I’ve been praying about further changing my eating habits, I’ve also been altering my brain’s diet. Why not start with education?

In Malaysia, I watched the documentary Food, Inc.
I bought an amazing book by Jonathan Safran Foer titled Eating Animals in Thailand.

I’m learning where balance comes into play.
I’m learning how to be educated on many sides of the issue.

I don’t know if I’ll go organic or not (though that term is quite misleading in the world of industrialized food these day). After reading about where our food comes from, I’m thinking about give up chicken. But I don’t yet know the end of altering my nutritional habits. I DO know that God cares about what we feed ourselves. I want to be like Daniel and live undefiled by what goes inside my body. And this issue is too important to our health, our ability to do ministry, our ability to function and think. We need to be concerned about what God would have us eat and explore what that means.