Sweets and scales: trading one high for another
This post is part of a series about re-thinking my relationship to food, which I call “The Saint Diet” to remind myself that the ultimate goal is deeper union with God. You can read all the posts on the subject here (scroll down to see them all).
When I first realized that now was the time for me to make some radical changes in my relationship to food, it was exciting. God was clearly leading me down a brand new path, and I really felt like this might be it, a path to finally breaking unhealthy attachments to certain foods that had plagued me all of my life. It sounded like fun to see what he had in store! And then I remembered:
Aw, man, but I’m pregnant!
And it got a whole lot less fun. In fact, if it weren’t for the overwhelming confirmation I’d received multiple times in Adoration that now was the time (along with my obstetrician’s agreement that this would be a good thing to do), I would have done what I usually do and shoved it all to the backburner of my life until pregnancy and breastfeeding were over. Being pregnant left me unable to use any of the tools from my old bag of tricks: setting exciting weight loss goals, imagining getting into those size 10 jeans, creating colorful Excel graphs tracking pounds lost per week, following strict diets laid out in books, etc. With all of this off the table, I was lost. How do you break unhealthy eating habits without spreadsheets and scales and diet books?!
I was praying about this one afternoon, and a clear answer came to me:
When you are motivated to do it during pregnancy, you’ll be motivated for the right reasons.
When I “heard” that in prayer, something big clicked for me. In fact, I realized that the thinking that “I can’t work on food issues now because I’m pregnant” was indicative of where my mentality went wrong in the first place. If the drive behind previous efforts had truly been to achieve a healthy detachment from nutritionally void foods, to treat my body as a temple by nourishing it with quality, nutrient-rich foods and break my addictions to those foods full of processed sugar and white flour that harm me spiritually and physically, I would have been more motivated to do it during pregnancy since that would benefit my unborn baby as well; but that’s not what was really driving it.
I didn’t realize it until now, but in all my previous efforts I was looking to replace one worldly high for another: I would give up the “high” of the rush of pleasure from eating a bowl of cookies n’ cream ice cream; but I would replace it with the “high” of seeing a five-pound drop on the scale. The satisfaction I got from my efforts did not come from a deep, still place of joy at letting go of attachments that hindered my relationship with God, but from seeing how effectively I controlled the numbers on the scale to meet my goals on my timetable. I was like an alcoholic who quit drinking by smoking pot all the time. I was still seeking a high in something other than God.
This also explains why I have never been able to achieve long-term changes in this department: because once my weight would level off and I’d stop getting that high from seeing lower and lower numbers on the scale, that old high of a sugar cookie or huge plate of fettuccini alfredo would start to seem awfully appealing.
By prayerfully examining all of this while pregnant, learning how to get motivated to make these changes when there’s no high available to me, I have learned more about my issues with food in the past few weeks than I had in the past 17 years combined.
I’ve learned that I can’t make the scale an integral part of any long-term healthy eating strategy, because I will be too tempted to become addicted to it as a new high in relation to food issues.
I’ve learned that the spiritual part of getting my food issues under control is going to be the hardest part. To let go of seeking highs in any form — to learn to eschew the pleasurable rushes that come with control and short-term payoffs and seek only the slow-moving, deep-rooted peace that comes with when we begin to break our attachments to those things that come between our relationship with God — will require a level of spiritual maturity way beyond where I am now.
I’ve learned that to truly free oneself from an addiction to an unhealthy substance is a slow, sometimes painful, often boring process that involves just taking it one day — sometimes one hour — at a time.
I’ve learned that I have so much more to learn than I could have imagined, and that it’s silly for me to think that I have all the answers right now.
I’ve learned that I cannot do this without God’s help.
I want to add the important disclaimer that I am not suggesting that these lessons apply to everyone. In fact, one of the biggest things I’ve learned lately is just how much the process of detachment is a completely unique process for each individual — especially when it comes to food. There is truly no one-size-fits-all approach. I’m only offering my experiences in case it’s interesting at all to people struggling with similar issues.
(Also, I should add that I’ve been going over all this in detail with my doctor, and would recommend that anyone who’s pregnant do so as well.)
So this is foreign territory for me, tackling gluttonous, addictive, unhealthy eating habits without any of my usual substitute highs. On the surface level, it’s so much more mundane and, well, boring than when I’m getting on the scale every day and relishing the illusion that I’m totally in control. Yet without all the noise of my own controlling thoughts and immediate worldly payoffs, in the silence that’s left I am finally beginning to hear the still, small voice of God.
photo credit: amyliagrace
Learning detachment
This post is part of a series about re-thinking my relationship to food, which I call “The Saint Diet” to remind myself that the ultimate goal is deeper union with God. You can read all the posts on the subject here (scroll down to see them all).
Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time in prayer in order to get more clarity on what, exactly, God is leading me to with this clear call I’ve heard to rethink my relationship with food. After a lot of mental gymnastics and overanalysis on my part where I tried to figure out if this is about cutting out sugar or being more healthy during pregnancy or getting set up to get to a good weight postpartum or what, in prayer one day it became crystal clear that there is just one simple goal that I am being led to by following this path:
Detachment.
That’s it. I need to discern the unique path (a path that’s different for everyone) that will release me from the unhealthy attachment I have to certain nutritionally void foods and put food in general in its proper place in my life. The other things that I might want to see happen — reaching a goal weight after breastfeeding, cultivating a taste for nutrient-rich foods that are conducive to physical and mental fitness, etc. — will probably come as part of the process, but they’re not the main goal. They can’t be. Even though those things are very important, 17 years of experience have taught me that I cannot achieve those goals on a long-term basis on my own. I must have God’s help; and the more detached I am, the more room I give him to help me.
This is probably obvious to a lot of people, but it was a big breakthrough for me. To be detached from food (or anything) doesn’t mean that you think it’s bad or you don’t enjoy it, just that it has no power over you, that you don’t ever want it more than you want God. (Aimee Cooper has more on the subject of detachment in a great post here. The last two paragraphs are especially helpful.)
This is critical for someone like me to understand, because it’s easy for me to get derailed into sin or self-indulgence when I get too focused on the sub-goals that are part of the detachment process. For example, I might discern from prayer and talking to my doctor that I need to cut out foods full of refined sugar for some period of time, and that might be a good and worthy goal. But if I fall into the mentality of thinking that the entire goal is “to cut out sugary foods,” that too easily leaves me open to developing new attachments to other foods, overeating because I miss the pleasure of sweets, fixating on this one plan even if it’s clearly not doing what it’s supposed to do, developing a controlling, perfectionist mentality that will inevitably lead me to throw in the towel, etc.; whereas if I see the goal as “to cut out sugary foods as part of the overall process of becoming detached from food in general,” with an openness to carefully modifying the plan if it doesn’t bear good fruit spiritually or physically, it helps me approach it in a much more God-focused way and not get derailed into sin or self-indulgence when I hit roadblocks.
This is why I thought I’d go ahead and share my ramblings on this aspect of my spiritual life, even though I know many people don’t share my specific issues with food: because most of us have some worldly thing (or, for some of us, many things) to which our attachments stand in the way of our relationship with God. And this part of my spiritual journey is not about a diet; it is, I now realize, about detachment.
A moment of surrender
This post is part of a series about re-thinking my relationship to food, which I call “The Saint Diet” to remind myself that the ultimate goal is deeper union with God. You can read all the posts on the subject here (scroll down to see them all).
A while back I began researching Christian perspectives on dieting, and over and over again I came across the concept of turning any food issues you have over to God. I knew that many addicts recovering from substance addictions cite that as a key step in their recovery, it sounded like a good thing to do, and I even had begun to understand what “turning it over to God” meant in a general sense…but I wasn’t sure how to do it with food issues.
I took my best guess, and when I embarked on a new eating plan this past summer I decided to incorporate this advice and turn it over to God. My prayer of surrender went something like:
“Lord, I can’t do this without your help. I need your assistance to reach my ideal weight of 155 in 12.5 weeks with the three-phased, 17-step diet plan that incorporates the No-S principles with the South Beach Phase II eating plan with a twist of the French Women Don’t Get Fat philosophy that I came up with. Please give me the strength to make my Excel weight loss chart look the way I want it to. Amen.”
Basically, I thought of God’s role in the process as being my diet cheerleader. I had it all figured out, I knew what the perfect plan was based on my own intellect, and I just needed God to sprinkle some magic dust on it to make it all work out. (In other words: I didn’t get it.)
Then, a couple weeks ago, Yaya was here to watch the kids and I found myself with a large block of time to get some writing done for the book about my conversion. I’ve been stuck on a particular part for a while, so I decided to take a pen and paper and work through it at Adoration. I was so excited: hours of free time to sit in the beautiful Adoration chapel, to be in the Lord’s presence, and even to write — what a great day!
On the way out I stopped by my mom’s house to drop something off, and she offered me a small bag of gourmet Chex Mix-style snacks that she’d received in a fancy Christmas gift basket. I knew that this was exactly the type of processed food that I should be avoiding. But I was awfully hungry, and I didn’t have anything else handy to eat, and it did say “whole grain” somewhere on the bag, and it was a special Christmas basket treat…the rationalizations continued from there. I took the bag and decided to just have a couple bites until I could find something better to eat. As always happens with simple carbs like this, in a blur “a couple bites” somehow turned into “shoveling one handful of food into my mouth after another.” My body was sending me ridiculous signals as if I would instantly die if I stopped eating, desperate for the “rush” these crunchy little pretzels and chips gave me. I arrived at the Adoration chapel with an empty bag.
At first everything was wonderful. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind for a while and cultivated a still, receptive, prayerful state of mind, simply basking in the palpable peace of the Lord’s presence.
And then the crash started.
That familiar old angry fog descended upon me. I couldn’t think clearly. Things I hadn’t even noticed before like the lady behind me breathing heavily or the sound of cars driving by outside began to seem absolutely intolerable. I felt angry. Writing seemed like a stupid waste of time; actually, everything seemed like a stupid waste of time. My head hurt. I would have traded my car for a Coke or another bag of chips. Mainly, I just wanted to go to sleep. Even though I was well rested and had felt great all day, my energy level dropped off a cliff and instead of praying or writing I found myself staring at the row of chairs next to me, wondering if anyone would care if I just curled up and passed out.
I was in such a bad mental and physical state that 90% of my resources now had to be used to just not go to sleep on the floor or turn around and yell at the lady behind me for breathing. The still, small voice of God that I had been so connected to when I was in a calm state was still there somewhere, but I had to strain to hear it through the crackling static of the fatigue and irritability that now consumed me.
Though I go through this every single time I ingest simple carbs, the effects were far more noticeable in Adoration. There in the silent chapel, stripped of the distractions of day-to-day life that vie for my attention, the full weight of what I was doing to myself hit me. Not only was I obviously throwing my system way out of balance and undoubtedly doing slow but steady harm to my health, but I was doing something else that might even be worse:
Throwing away hours out of my life.
The opportunity for hours of prayer and reflection was now gone. I did muster up some prayers and manage to scratch out some writing, but it was all while functioning with the limited resources of my body’s survival mode, where growth is impossible. This was God-given time out of my life that I could never get back, and I’d thrown it away over a bag of snacks. What was worse was the knowledge that I did this almost every single day.
It was at that moment that I think I finally understood the concept of surrender.
All sorts of hidden reservations that I hadn’t even realized I’d been clinging to (“I would never do a diet plan where you can’t weigh yourself,” “I would never cut out all sweets,” “I would never give up wine or chocolate,” etc.) were washed away by the tidal wave of my sudden awareness of the damage my actions were doing. I still had the usual exasperation with myself for getting into this state, but I was also now filled with a profound humility; thinking back on the almost two decades of yo-yoing through this same cycle almost every day, knowing that these foods are bad for me yet never managing to get them under control despite repeated earnest efforts, I fully understood what it meant to say “I cannot do this on my own.” A herd of sacred cows was ushered out — the insistence upon seeing results on my timetable, the desire for total control, the vain fixation on fitting into those cute size 10 jeans, the refusal to consider giving up favorite foods for the long term — and what was left was just a clear, open space; a space that finally had room for God.
I have no illusions that it’s all fixed now and my struggles with this issue are over; in fact, I know that the real work is just beginning. I also understand (and am surprisingly at peace with) the fact that it could take weeks or months or even years to see any real improvements. The change that has taken place is not one of the problem going away, but of my mentality toward the problem undergoing a cataclysmic shift.
I asked myself recently, “What makes me think this time is different? What makes that I’ve really ‘surrendered’ anything unlike my previous failed attempts?” And I think the answer is: because I finally want God more than I want control.
