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.
The Saint Diet: some thoughts on food and sin
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).
I mentioned back in November that through prayer and spiritual direction I was dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that there are ways you can structure your lifestyle to make it more conducive to holiness (e.g. getting enough sleep, eating healthy foods, not getting overcommitted, etc.). As I detailed more in that post, I found that over and over again I felt drawn to focus on what I am eating and how it’s impacting my spiritual life.
Ever since then I’ve paid close attention to how food affects me, and the results were shocking: I knew that there was some connection, but I was amazed to see just how much what I eat impacts my life — particularly my spiritual life.
Never has it been more clear than this week.
Yaya is in town for a week, and our house has been full of cookies and biscotti and caramel popcorn and all sorts of other tempting Christmas goodies. The combination of the usual little tensions of a week-long in-law visit with simple carbs has made me realize that what I eat is having a tremendous impact on my ability to live out the Christian beliefs I profess.
Here is an example of two different occasions this week when I was in frustrating situations, noting how I handled each one and what I’d eaten in the hours beforehand:
THURSDAY MORNING, 11:30am
Breakfast: White bagel, sugar cookie, handful of caramel-drenched popcorn
Anger Level (scale of 1-10): 8
Ability to Remain Calm and Charitable (scale of 1-10): 2
Internal Dialogue: [deleted due to explicit content]
FRIDAY MORNING, 11:30am
Breakfast: Steel-cut oats oatmeal, two apple slices
Anger Level: 1
Ability to Remain Calm and Charitable: 8
Internal Dialogue: “Sure, Yaya and I have different ways of doing things, and occasionally the way she phrases her constructive criticism makes me feel defensive, but how insignificant is that compared to all the ways she helps us? And, for that matter, she often has good points, if I’d only be willing to listen in humility. How blessed am I to have a mother-in-law who is willing to cook and clean and take great care of all the kids to give me a break, even if I find her methods a bit unorthodox at times?”
Thursday morning I was an angry, bitter troll of a person; Friday morning I felt calm and peaceful and was able to take it all in stride and count my blessings. And what I ate in the hours beforehand had a lot to do with it.
These two examples are consistent with what I have observed over and over again in the past month. I have realized that my tendency to sin — to lash out, to indulge in self-centered behavior, the think angry or uncharitable thoughts, to turn away from God — is tremendously impacted by my diet. Eating healthy won’t make me a saint, of course; but it will remove a lot of the mood fluctuations that leave me extremely susceptible to temptation to sin.
I think it’s not a coincidence that this realization comes to me while I’m pregnant.
Because of my tendency toward vanity, it’s always been hard for me to make any healthy eating plan as much about health as it should be; too often good intentions to improve my health eventually become more about size eight jeans than overall wellness. But, at 28 weeks pregnant, this time my motivation can’t be weight loss. I have to want to change my diet for the impact it will have on my health (and by extension the baby’s health) and my spiritual life, and nothing else.
So this is what’s on my mind as a new year approaches:
Though I’ve never been seriously overweight, all my life I’ve had an unhealthy attachment to unhealthy foods and have repeatedly failed to do anything about it on a permanent basis. I think that part of the reason for that has been my inability to extricate vanity from the process — though there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look your best, with me that too easily slips into indulging in the sin of vanity. And when your motivation is rooted in sin, it’s going to be impossible to make deep, lasting changes in your life for the better.
Now that the option of weight loss has been taken off the table, I’m left to approach my relationship to food with a completely different state of mind. I’m left to pray not about how I can lose that last 10 pounds, but about how I can find the foods that will give me energy and stamina to lose some bad spiritual habits. My motivating visual now is not the image of me in a beautiful dress, but the image of me in a beautiful state of mind.
My New Year’s Resolutions almost always involve some great desire to change my eating habits, and this year is no exception. But, for the first time, weight has nothing to do with it. I want to get serious about cutting out unhealthy foods and eating a diet based on fresh fruits and vegetables and lean meats and whole grains because, without vanity clouding my eyes, I can finally see what food is doing to me — and it’s worse than just not being able to wear that size “medium” sweater.
I haven’t quite figured out what my specific plan will be, but I’m ready to change. And I think I’m finally ready to change for the right reasons.
The Saint Diet
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 couple weeks ago I was talking to my spiritual director about my slack prayer habits, and I happened to mention in passing how tired I am all the time. Interestingly, she wanted to focus more on addressing the tiredness situation than the specifics of the prayer issues, pointing out that if you’re exhausted it’s going to make everything an uphill battle, including prayer.
- Then, as I wrote about here, I went to Adoration with a laundry list of concerns and ended up feeling called to one thing and one thing only: to put some serious thought into what I eat on a daily basis to help control the “carb crashes” that regularly put me in a sluggish, angry mood.
- Then one morning I found myself acting like a maniac in my car, about to harass a weary woman in the minivan in front of me, all because I was overbooked and in a huge rush. I wrote about it at the time here.
These three lessons have been rolling around in my mind, and finally coalesced into an ah-hah moment when I realized: there are ways you can structure your lifestyle to make it more conducive to holiness.
I know this is probably obvious to a lot of people, but it was a real lightbulb-going-on moment for me. As a new convert, I’d always thought of living a life of holiness and avoiding sin as confined to the spiritual level alone, that there was nothing I could do in my physical life (other than receive the sacraments) to impact it one way or another. But, now that I think about it…
If prayer time rolls around and I’m tempted to read blogs instead of pray, am I more likely to turn to God instead of Bloglines if…
a) I went to bed around midnight, leaving me feeling exhausted, sluggish and weak.b) I went to bed at a reasonable hour and got plenty of good sleep, leaving me with an ample store of mental and physical energy for the day.
If I am at the grocery store and someone is rude to me, am I more likely to respond in Christian charity if I have eaten a lunch that consists of…
a) Greasy pizza, Coke and a cookie.b) A mixed greens salad with lean chicken and hardboiled eggs.
If my children misbehave and do something that costs me time and throws my schedule off track, am I most likely to resist the urge to lose my temper and start yelling if…
a) I have more on my plate than I could possibly handle and am trying to accomplish 20 hours of work in a 12 hour day.b) If I have kept my commitments to a reasonable level and have buffer in my schedule to allow for the unexpected.
And so on. Obviously, choice (b) is going to help me do the right thing in every case.
Similar examples could be given about the spiritual impacts of not getting enough exercise, carrying too much extra weight, not getting enough sunlight and fresh air, etc. (all things that apply to me to some extent or another). It’s not to say that any of these things make it impossible to be Christ-like, but the battle against our fallen natures is certainly more of an uphill battle when our lifestyles set us up to feel stressed, overwhelmed and fatigued all the time.
Over and over again lately I’ve felt called to focus on this to the exclusion of almost everything else. I think that God is basically trying to tell me, “Look. It’s going to be hard enough for you to be a saintly person. You really, really don’t need lifestyle factors to make this any more difficult than it’s already going to be for you.”
So I’ve been attempting to embark on a lifestyle makeover, starting with my diet. Since I have some obvious insulin sensitivity issues and turn into a very angry, very tired person after I eat processed foods (seriously — we’re talking Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde type stuff), I’ve realized that eating a “whole foods” diet would have a big impact not just on my physical health, but on my spiritual health as well. I’ve been calling it The Saint Diet in my head, an eating plan that consists of foods that will maximize physical health, energy levels and mental peace (and, when I’m not pregnant, I’d love to also incorporate some traditional fasting practices to help temper my attitudes toward food…but that’s the subject of another post).
So that’s what’s going on with me this week: I’m working on coming up with a list of foods, particularly lunch foods, that are nutritious and free of processed carbs, yet are also fairly easy to prepare and keep on hand. It won’t be easy to make these changes, especially with my issues with simple carb addiction, but it’s something I feel strongly called to do.
I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions!
RELATED: Check out the daily schedule of the Missionaries of Charity that I posted in this post (scroll down), and notice how it speaks of a life of balance and buffer. I find it so inspiring!