By August 2002, I began to see that I had been unable for most of my life to use my faith in God
to maintain my health and a normal weight. Why not? This is a question that many people
would like to ask, especially people with weight problems. Indeed, churches are filled with very
sincere people of faith who are also overweight.
I see now that the most important factor in my use of food was not abuse or sexual
discrimination. Lots of people who misuse food do not understand about sexual
discrimination in our culture; or that this ever-present facet of our culture has successfully
denied them their right to develop themselves fully as human beings. Similarly, lots of people
who misuse food were never abused beyond the normal abuse that all people experience. It is
true that both abuse and sexual discrimination are powerfully important stimulants to
over-eating, but it is simply not the root cause of obesity, in my experience and opinion.
Furthermore, we cannot believe that certain personality types are more disposed to obesity.
Research into this matter has indicated that fat people are no more similar to each other in
personality traits than they are to the rest of the people in our society. In other words,
personality and character have not been found to be the cause of obesity.
Certainly we will eventually find that genetics has everything to do with the capacity of a person
to get fat, just as a person might have a predisposition to develop diabetes. By that I mean that
there are some people who would have great difficulty getting fat because they have "skinny"
genes, although most of those people were removed from the gene pool during the famines of
the Middle Ages. It is important to know that the human being has the ability to store fat
because this capacity has saved homo sapiens from extinction. Women especially must have
the biological ability to store fat so that, in the event of a famine, she will still be able to feed her
young, or to carry her pregnancies to full term.
So, if most of us have the genetic capacity to get fat, and most of us do not, then what
separates the fat person from the rest of the population?
Many people would like to say that a fat person does not have enough faith in God, or that they
cannot get their priorities straight. And yet my writing shows that faith has never "failed me" in
any aspect of my life except for the problem of over-eating. So why does a fat person have
trouble relying on her faith in God to help her stop eating too much?
Some of the later chapters in this book deal with the reality that the intense drive to do the right
thing in the midst of the wrong-doing of others, especially the groups in which we live and work,
can increase eating in order to cope. It appears that it is during those times that the fat person
experiences a lack of trust in God, thus an inability to perceive God's love and omnipotence in
the midst of trial and tribulation. Part of this might relate to the reality that as children our first
"God" is our parent. So if that parent tends to be unforgiving and harsh and demanding, then
the young child might learn to fear God. It will be later in life that such a person can learn that
God is an ever present help in times of trouble....
As an overeater, I relied on God for help, wisdom and instruction for coping with my problems
and frustrations. I relied on the words of Jesus Christ to help me know how to live in this
difficult world. Perhaps the most significant evidences of faith were the many times, especially
in my work as a social worker, that the Holy Spirit helped me have intuitions about situations
that needed to be examined closely for the sake of someone's safety. Sometimes, now, as a
therapist, questions come to mind that turn out to be very productive and helpful to my client.
Because of my confidence in God's presence and help, I have learned to be obedient to the
promptings of the Holy Spirit, and this has been a very significant factor in my professional
survival.
How do I know that God was helping me? Timing is everything.
If I wonder about something even though there is no immediate reason to think about it, when I
act on that question and find that it was a indeed a very important and useful question, then I
believe that God just helped me to do more with faith than I could have done by myself alone.
So if God has helped me so many times with my work with others, then why has He not helped
me with my eating problem? Why could I not trust that His omniscient and omnipresent
presence in my life could help me maintain a normal weight and good physical health?
Part of the reason is that I felt such pain over the events of my life;
I have wished many times that I could have known that things would work out for the best.
Then I could have maintained inner peace throughout my struggles without relying on eating for
comfort.
And why was this so? Why couldn't I see that things would work themselves out, that all was
not disaster, that every stress would lead ultimately to growth and a better life? Why were there
specific areas of my life that were unaffected by the healing power of God?
The chapter about dysthymia, that is, learned childhood depression, can help the reader to
understand that some children are deprived or punished if they fail to be as depressed and
passive as their parents require. In other words, in that childhood environment,
the maintenance of such depression is a learned skill that is used for survival. The
consequences of it may be a permanent influence on the actual workings of the adult brain.
The reader can recall the earlier writing about the importance of music in my life to at least
partly recover from this terrible liability.
In other words, our first "God" taught us to feel bad about ourselves. They taught us to fear.
They taught us to stop progress towards normal developmental goals. They taught us to have
a depressed brain. Eventually we would learn that carbohydrates have a powerful ability to
alleviate much of the pain of dysthymia, and therefore to restore at least partially the normal
workings of our saddened brain. We learned to calm the distressed brain with food, and
hence to feel some modicum of happiness.
I have experienced a precious gift; when surgery eliminated the choice to govern the workings
of my brain with food, then I became able, slowly but surely, to find other ways to relate to God
and to the good life intended for me. I could finally learn that God does not intend me to overeat
because of the wrong-doing of others, that the burden to "please" others is lifted from me, that I
need not be afraid of mean people in a world where God is ultimately in charge, and that
"goodness" bought at the price of overeating and fatness was not part of God's plan for me.
After learning to become liberated from the torments imposed on me during my childhood, I
can now hear God speaking and see him moving in my life, not only now, but in the past, and
most certainly, in the future.
I see now that I did not fully trust God with my life. I trusted food and eating more. How did that
happen to a person who could have said at the age of seventeen that faith was the most
important thing in her life?
I believe that salvation and sanctification come in stages, much like human development. We
are "saved" when we first truly believe in Jesus Christ. When we truly believe Jesus Christ, we
also truly love him, because we can see how much he loved us, cared for us, taught us, and
put himself out for us. The fact that we truly believe causes changes in our lives and our
behavior. Our life gradually becomes more and more Christlike and in line with His Will. We
become saints, in the old-fashioned Biblical sense of the word: those who are not only saved,
but whose growth and development as a Christian has continued toward increased
sanctification and purposefulness.
But the overeater, filled with anxiety, guilt and fear, can have all of these things and still use
food to calm their anxious brain. Why do they have an anxious brain? Because it was
programmed to be anxious and depressed by many types of emotional abuse during
childhood. Parents have used a variety of methods, including shame, humiliation, criticism
and every sort of demeaning interpretation of personality and personal motivation to
accomplish their goals of achieving compliance from their children.
They have "brainwashed" their children to obsess over whether or not there is something truly
wrong with them; if only the child could discover the correct clue as to their imperfection, then
maybe they could earn the love of their parent. This child learns that the most important thing
in life is the parent's viewpoint of him and his actions, because ignoring the things that give the
parents satisfaction leads to incredible amounts of emotional pain. And this strong,
conditioned emotional response to the desires and actions of others will continue into
adulthood. This painful self-evaluation will continue to be triggered by almost every life activity.
In other words, this child will become self-absorbed, not from conceit, but from fear and the
wish to overcome some perceived inadequacy. Over time, this quest becomes what life is
about. It is never-ending; the inner doubts regarding basic goodness or lovability are triggered
constantly by everyday matters of life.
This person's mind will be constantly and forever used to think about his/her fears, his
inadequacies, and the continual search for what could restore the lost hope for lovability and
goodness. The person strives for some kind of perfection of thought, word and action that will
guarantee proof of adequacy.
Unfortunately, the frustrations of dealing with unhealthy people and their selfish demands
continues throughout both childhood and adult life. This ever-present stimulus triggers the
memory of painful feelings, unhealthy attitudes and therefore the continued use of a faulty
program in the brain.
What the overeater is afraid of is sin. Who understands this and helps with this? The
overeater is choosing to resist the temptation to sin. They are defending against fear that they
will respond to stress, pressure, conflict or trouble with the same negative thoughts and
actions that they see demonstrated by others in their lives. They stand faithful to their own
vision of goodness despite the destructive actions of others; they cope without retaliating,
resist without fighting back, and respond with kindness instead of mimicking evil. They fight
the battles of conscience every moment, especially during the many times that they are being
criticized, demeaned or otherwise brow-beaten. They succeed at overcoming the temptation to
fight back. They courageously prevent themselves from conforming to unhealthy purposes,
pressures and demands of unwise people. They understand how Job felt as he faced his
critics during his undeserved trials and torments.
But they consequently feel anxiety that they will fall into known traps of wrong-doing because of
their continuously aroused feelings. This is especially true when the majority of people in a
work organization, family or even church are living in ways contrary to the known Will of God.
Such unhealthy people often choose to get their way, that is to manipulate others, by creating
negative circumstances that trigger negative feelings in others. The people around them
struggle to give them what they demand in order to avoid having to cope with a continuous
barrage of negative, exhausting emotion. That is, indeed, all they seem to know about
problem-solving.
These are very unhealthy environments for the person who uses food to keep herself calm.
Often the emotionally inadequate people in such groups dump endless amounts of emotional
pain on the apparently calm obese person, temporarily freeing themselves of their own
negativity, while giving the obese person one more reason to overeat.
In other words, the obese end up living and working in groups that do not follow the healthy
prescriptions for living as clearly outlined in Biblical Scripture (this is partly caused by the fact
that a person's obesity will prevent them from becoming part of the most effective and
desirable groups). And imagine the genuine plight of the child who is incested or otherwise
physically abused, or the woman who is raped. How does she cope with the wrong-doing of
another without resorting to sin herself?
In these cases, the overeater is having to "go it alone", being the non-conformist, when one
would rather nestle into the comfort of a loving family group. The sense of aloneness and even
alienation is often excruciatingly painful. The most feared condition on the planet among
human beings is rejection. The worst punishments given by man are not physical pain, but of
expulsion from the group.
All human beings fear this because our very lives depend on being part of the group. But some
people are more conscious of the trauma of rejection than others, especially over-eaters.
They have had a lifetime of feeling that they are "different" and somehow unacceptable to their
families. They know what it feels like to be alone and scape-goated. Sometimes there is no
way out of this dilemma. In my case, the simple fact of ugly, dysfunctional legs made me an
object of ridicule to my family. There was no way I could change that.
How do other people handle the difficulty? Some people change their status as a loner by
simply copying the leader of their most significant group. If the leader and their cohorts believe
in deliberately scapegoating the weakest members of the "clan", then one can simply join in,
thereby proving one's loyalty and ensuring one's acceptance in the group.
Or one can become a leader in these activities himself. All cults, gangs, and abusive work
groups use this technique to brain-wash its members.
These leaders use their influence to cause members to do things they would never have done
under other circumstances. Most of the wrong-doing in our culture (that is, actions that
degrade our spirit and block our quest for union with God) happen because we belong to
groups, or because we have felt expelled from groups. When we show others in a group that
we are "cool" (all the various versions of "Modern"), we often fall into traps of verbal immorality,
sexual immorality, financial excesses, dishonest business practices, political scheming,
brutality, coercion, discrimination, degradation, racial or sexual power struggles, manipulation,
lying, revenge, general meanness, unhealthy individualism and "liberation", corrupt
entertainment, and sometimes group induced addictions (such as the salesman required to
overuse alcohol during frequent business meetings).
But to the Christian, accepting this solution to isolation leads to sin. In fact, there are many
scriptures in the Bible that relate the necessity for the person of faith to "go-it-alone" with only
God as a companion whenever they are surrounded by the wrong-doing of others. We admire
Daniel and the Apostle Paul for their ability to stay on the course determined by their
relationship with God. Indeed, part of the reason that fat people are often admired is that they
resist falling into these traps, even when it means chronic feelings of loneliness or isolation.
Thus fat people, that is those people who overeat under stress and gain weight, often resist
responding to aggression from others, at least partly because they do not want to become
hurtful people. They absorb pain without fighting back, without returning "fire for fire". And in
that sense, they are attempting to follow the example of Christ, to remain moral people and to
resist sin.
But because they are beleaguered more often, and by more people, the resistance is costly. It
creates reservoirs of anger, resentment, alienation, anxiety and depression that cannot be
dealt with directly. Others interpret their lack of aggression as weakness or fear, and therefore
pursue them harder. Which means that the fat person has to absorb more and more pain, and
work ever harder at finding constructive responses to aggression from others. They are trying
their very best to avoid sin. And, except for overeating, they are very, very good at it.
During the times that this was true for me, every minute of every day, in workplaces bereft of
morality and professional ethics, I was thankful that the carbohydrates in food could help me
stay calm. They helped me stay on the path I believed was right. But there is no question in my
mind that I used food instead of trust in God.
Why? Partly because when social pain comes quickly, a remedy is needed quickly. A person
can't wait until there is time to meditate and soothe one's spirit through prayer. Food is faster.
And often other remedies, such as a fervent physical workout is not available to the truly fat
person. It is not that I did not try to help myself. There were times that I took sick days from
work, and used the entire day to read the Bible and thereby to restore my ability to cope with the
difficult people that I found in the workplace.
But for people like me, a new kind of trust in God must be born. One must be gripped so hard
by the reality of the presence of God that one actually sees the world differently and the pain is
therefore endurable. This happened partly because of the state of famine and physical
weakness following gastric bypass surgery. When you are nearly sixty years old, when you are
recovering from major surgery, when you are still 240 pounds overweight and thus cannot walk
or work, when you are suffering from the famine induced by a 400 calorie food regimen, then
you know what true helplessness is all about. You are weak and very vulnerable. You have
pain when you eat. You get sick if you make a mistake. During that time, with no one to help
me and no food to comfort me, I began to really live on the presence of God. I never lost faith
that it had been God's will for me to do this difficult thing. I did not know if I would live through it.
But during the next year, I began to understand at the deepest level that God is more powerful
than man, even man organized into groups. One must then develop the high tolerance of
personal and social pain that is required for success in the Christian's world.
Nobody likes pain and suffering. Most of us avoid it or alleviate it if we can. But sometimes
suffering is necessary to both success and personal growth. When we decrease our suffering
through the use of food, or any other brain altering chemical, then we fail to grow and to achieve
our true purposes.
People used to say that eating does not work, that it only causes the bad effects of obesity. We
know now that this is simply not true. Carbohydrates enhance the brain's use of seratonin,
while other foods help the body to produce endorphins, natural pain-killers that soothe our
minds and aching muscles.
There are several ways in which we enhance the brain's use of the neurotransmitter, seratonin.
We use carbohydrates, medication, music or walking. We also use meditation, humor,
calming therapies, or prayer. In other words, it is good to enhance the workings of our our
brains. A positive relationship to God, to a loving church group, to a prayer group, or even to a
diet or exercise support group, is a known antidote to stress and illness.
So why don't we use these things to cope with stress? First of all, fat people are unaware that
these constructive things really work until, like me, they experience life without overeating! In
most healing, one never learns about wholesome avenues for action until he/she stops the
negative behavior. This is true for alcohol abuse, anger addiction, codependency, abuse of
others, manipulation, and every other truly bad habit that one can observe in ourselves and
others.
In other cases, as in my case, problems with avoidance and social anxiety prevents the
healthiest forms of self-care that occur in connection with healthy group activity. When one has
been conditioned by a problematic childhood to fear groups, then that affliction must be healed
in order to find better ways to give peace and comfort to our brains and bodies.
Certainly, adequate care of the brain and body will require that we choose carefully the people
that with whom we live and work. The Bible says, "Be not unequally yoked." Sometimes it is
not possible, but it is best to minimize the stress of one's life by associating with people who
believe the same things about health and happiness that we do. We can model healthy living
to people who are difficult, destructive and demeaning, because we know that they also have
been injured. But we cannot change them, and it is important to neither become like them, nor
to use all of our energy coping with them! In sum, I will never like being around argumentative,
mean, sarcastic or dishonest people!
If we stop eating and heal of our problems with people, then we can notice that consistent
meditation, prayer and other forms of contact with God really do increase our happiness and
effectiveness in living. Perhaps there is a connection between the "soul" of man and God that
is really necessary to our peace and sense of meaning.
If so, using food to alleviate suffering is a way of short-changing our relationship with God, and
the joy we could be experiencing through the frequent contacts that build our faith over time.
Thus, when we stop eating for emotional reasons, we learn to re-connect to our Source of
Being. When Jesus says, "I am the Vine, you are the branches", he is explaining that our soul
is part of God. We, as human beings, feel incomplete until our finite soul is connected with
eternal God. Because of that experience of reconnection, we become aware of God's
presence in everything we do.
Maybe we aren't consciously in touch with that connection some of the time. But when we
review our actions later, we see that God was present for us during the events of our day.
During those rare times that we are consciously in touch with God's light and love, we are filled
with both awe and peace. We know that nothing matters except that connection. That
connection is permanent. The causes of our anxieties are temporary. They don't matter in the
long run. It does matter that the awareness of the connection changes one's behavior towards
other people all the time and forever. After all, the petty wrong-doings of modern man mean
little in the long run. The energy and happiness generated when we love our fellow man matter
now and for all eternity.
Why hadn't I learned this before? In fact, the vulnerability of extreme fatness had already taught
me to rely on God for almost every aspect of my life, whether it was the need to find someone to
clean my house, the need for enough income, or the need for wisdom. Also the fat limited my
time and ability to function in many areas of life, so that I had already learned how to give up
everything in life that really doesn't matter. My extreme obesity, then, may have set the stage for
an experience with God that would increase my joy, my gratitude and the faith that I could
attempt social relationships one more time. Having once learned to go without whatever is
unproductive and empty of lasting value, I would never go back to old ways of thinking and living.
Eventually I would also see that eating was a shortcut to sainthood.
I worked to live according to the teachings of Jesus Christ without truly understanding the
nature of faith in God's love for me. Now I know that even though it is true that "faith without
works is dead," we must not forget Paul's admonition that "the just shall live by faith."
After spiritual healing, I still have work to do and problems to solve. I still have to choose well,
both practically and morally. I still want to work hard. I will still be afraid sometimes in social
settings. But I am less and less distracted from my life with God because of anxieties and
obsessions learned in my childhood. Once these worries took their proper place in my mind
and heart, measured appropriately against the things that I know to be of true importance to
God, then my mind and body can truly become vehicles through which God's Spirit works its
wonders.
Those wonders are understood by faith and not by vision or even belief. We simply trust that
there is a true Importance in the mind of God, an importance that we are not able as human
beings to understand. We trust also that there is a true unimportance, or meaninglessness,
to God. We have useless beliefs and values; we experience useless things. We think that we
understand the events that occur around us. We think that we place proper value on them. We
worry and feel anxious because we think they are important. But God devalues them and
ultimately makes them into nothing.
These things are temporary precisely because God devalues them. God withholds his power
and creativity from these man-made values, which include resentment, competitiveness, envy,
self-pity, abuse, deceit, betrayal, and all manner of excessiveness, greed and self-devaluation.
When we feel that God is not with us, not helping and loving us, it is because we are
momentarily disconnected from God. We are suddenly beset by all the things held
unimportant by God.
We reach for destructive tools, methods and beliefs to cope. We forget the the solution to our
pain is so simple. Reconnect with God. Because from that connection comes meaning and
strength, wisdom and love, joy and humble thanksgiving.
When we are connected with the Spirit, we still do the things we did before, but after learning to
trust in God, we see our lives differently. Tasks that were colorless and mundane before are
now filled with creativity and joy. People who were difficult or uninteresting are now lifted up to
God in love and truth and joy. If we want to maintain this joy, then part of our life as a Christian
must be to disconnect from those things that ruin or interfere with our connection to God's
powerful Spirit of Truth and love.
That is why it was a profoundly important experience for me the day that I heard a sermon that
included Jesus instruction, "If your hand offends you, then cut it off. It is better to lose the hand
than to lose the whole body."
I knew it was God's will for me to cut myself off from the habits of eating and fatness that were
interfering with my connection with God and the fulfillment of His Will for my life.
I worked diligently on this for two years, attempting to heal the eating disorder through my own
knowledge, work, and will. I accomplished a lot. But I could not lose weight; my inability to
exercise meant that I was unable to burn enough extra calories to use up that huge storage of
fat.
So when the opportunity for corrective surgery arose, I saw it as a medical intervention that
could block the ability to overeat forever. It was an important choice. It was not an effort to get
slim. It was a commitment to give up forever the main strength against sin of my lifetime. It
was to choose willingly to become powerless against the forces of evil in this world. It was like
Samson willingly giving up his hair, his main source of strength. It was the act of willingly
tearing down a self-made fortress in order to trust God completely with my life or my death, my
success or my ruination, my service to the Kingdom of God or my eventual degradation.
All of this I learned after almost two years of not using food for emotional comfort. Stopping the
wrong behavior enabled my soul to reconnect with God at the level of trust. How did this
happen? God led me to it. Reading Ezekiel helped me see my errors. But by living without
this terribly bad habit, I slowly began to rely on God....
to maintain my health and a normal weight. Why not? This is a question that many people
would like to ask, especially people with weight problems. Indeed, churches are filled with very
sincere people of faith who are also overweight.
I see now that the most important factor in my use of food was not abuse or sexual
discrimination. Lots of people who misuse food do not understand about sexual
discrimination in our culture; or that this ever-present facet of our culture has successfully
denied them their right to develop themselves fully as human beings. Similarly, lots of people
who misuse food were never abused beyond the normal abuse that all people experience. It is
true that both abuse and sexual discrimination are powerfully important stimulants to
over-eating, but it is simply not the root cause of obesity, in my experience and opinion.
Furthermore, we cannot believe that certain personality types are more disposed to obesity.
Research into this matter has indicated that fat people are no more similar to each other in
personality traits than they are to the rest of the people in our society. In other words,
personality and character have not been found to be the cause of obesity.
Certainly we will eventually find that genetics has everything to do with the capacity of a person
to get fat, just as a person might have a predisposition to develop diabetes. By that I mean that
there are some people who would have great difficulty getting fat because they have "skinny"
genes, although most of those people were removed from the gene pool during the famines of
the Middle Ages. It is important to know that the human being has the ability to store fat
because this capacity has saved homo sapiens from extinction. Women especially must have
the biological ability to store fat so that, in the event of a famine, she will still be able to feed her
young, or to carry her pregnancies to full term.
So, if most of us have the genetic capacity to get fat, and most of us do not, then what
separates the fat person from the rest of the population?
Many people would like to say that a fat person does not have enough faith in God, or that they
cannot get their priorities straight. And yet my writing shows that faith has never "failed me" in
any aspect of my life except for the problem of over-eating. So why does a fat person have
trouble relying on her faith in God to help her stop eating too much?
Some of the later chapters in this book deal with the reality that the intense drive to do the right
thing in the midst of the wrong-doing of others, especially the groups in which we live and work,
can increase eating in order to cope. It appears that it is during those times that the fat person
experiences a lack of trust in God, thus an inability to perceive God's love and omnipotence in
the midst of trial and tribulation. Part of this might relate to the reality that as children our first
"God" is our parent. So if that parent tends to be unforgiving and harsh and demanding, then
the young child might learn to fear God. It will be later in life that such a person can learn that
God is an ever present help in times of trouble....
As an overeater, I relied on God for help, wisdom and instruction for coping with my problems
and frustrations. I relied on the words of Jesus Christ to help me know how to live in this
difficult world. Perhaps the most significant evidences of faith were the many times, especially
in my work as a social worker, that the Holy Spirit helped me have intuitions about situations
that needed to be examined closely for the sake of someone's safety. Sometimes, now, as a
therapist, questions come to mind that turn out to be very productive and helpful to my client.
Because of my confidence in God's presence and help, I have learned to be obedient to the
promptings of the Holy Spirit, and this has been a very significant factor in my professional
survival.
How do I know that God was helping me? Timing is everything.
If I wonder about something even though there is no immediate reason to think about it, when I
act on that question and find that it was a indeed a very important and useful question, then I
believe that God just helped me to do more with faith than I could have done by myself alone.
So if God has helped me so many times with my work with others, then why has He not helped
me with my eating problem? Why could I not trust that His omniscient and omnipresent
presence in my life could help me maintain a normal weight and good physical health?
Part of the reason is that I felt such pain over the events of my life;
I have wished many times that I could have known that things would work out for the best.
Then I could have maintained inner peace throughout my struggles without relying on eating for
comfort.
And why was this so? Why couldn't I see that things would work themselves out, that all was
not disaster, that every stress would lead ultimately to growth and a better life? Why were there
specific areas of my life that were unaffected by the healing power of God?
The chapter about dysthymia, that is, learned childhood depression, can help the reader to
understand that some children are deprived or punished if they fail to be as depressed and
passive as their parents require. In other words, in that childhood environment,
the maintenance of such depression is a learned skill that is used for survival. The
consequences of it may be a permanent influence on the actual workings of the adult brain.
The reader can recall the earlier writing about the importance of music in my life to at least
partly recover from this terrible liability.
In other words, our first "God" taught us to feel bad about ourselves. They taught us to fear.
They taught us to stop progress towards normal developmental goals. They taught us to have
a depressed brain. Eventually we would learn that carbohydrates have a powerful ability to
alleviate much of the pain of dysthymia, and therefore to restore at least partially the normal
workings of our saddened brain. We learned to calm the distressed brain with food, and
hence to feel some modicum of happiness.
I have experienced a precious gift; when surgery eliminated the choice to govern the workings
of my brain with food, then I became able, slowly but surely, to find other ways to relate to God
and to the good life intended for me. I could finally learn that God does not intend me to overeat
because of the wrong-doing of others, that the burden to "please" others is lifted from me, that I
need not be afraid of mean people in a world where God is ultimately in charge, and that
"goodness" bought at the price of overeating and fatness was not part of God's plan for me.
After learning to become liberated from the torments imposed on me during my childhood, I
can now hear God speaking and see him moving in my life, not only now, but in the past, and
most certainly, in the future.
I see now that I did not fully trust God with my life. I trusted food and eating more. How did that
happen to a person who could have said at the age of seventeen that faith was the most
important thing in her life?
I believe that salvation and sanctification come in stages, much like human development. We
are "saved" when we first truly believe in Jesus Christ. When we truly believe Jesus Christ, we
also truly love him, because we can see how much he loved us, cared for us, taught us, and
put himself out for us. The fact that we truly believe causes changes in our lives and our
behavior. Our life gradually becomes more and more Christlike and in line with His Will. We
become saints, in the old-fashioned Biblical sense of the word: those who are not only saved,
but whose growth and development as a Christian has continued toward increased
sanctification and purposefulness.
But the overeater, filled with anxiety, guilt and fear, can have all of these things and still use
food to calm their anxious brain. Why do they have an anxious brain? Because it was
programmed to be anxious and depressed by many types of emotional abuse during
childhood. Parents have used a variety of methods, including shame, humiliation, criticism
and every sort of demeaning interpretation of personality and personal motivation to
accomplish their goals of achieving compliance from their children.
They have "brainwashed" their children to obsess over whether or not there is something truly
wrong with them; if only the child could discover the correct clue as to their imperfection, then
maybe they could earn the love of their parent. This child learns that the most important thing
in life is the parent's viewpoint of him and his actions, because ignoring the things that give the
parents satisfaction leads to incredible amounts of emotional pain. And this strong,
conditioned emotional response to the desires and actions of others will continue into
adulthood. This painful self-evaluation will continue to be triggered by almost every life activity.
In other words, this child will become self-absorbed, not from conceit, but from fear and the
wish to overcome some perceived inadequacy. Over time, this quest becomes what life is
about. It is never-ending; the inner doubts regarding basic goodness or lovability are triggered
constantly by everyday matters of life.
This person's mind will be constantly and forever used to think about his/her fears, his
inadequacies, and the continual search for what could restore the lost hope for lovability and
goodness. The person strives for some kind of perfection of thought, word and action that will
guarantee proof of adequacy.
Unfortunately, the frustrations of dealing with unhealthy people and their selfish demands
continues throughout both childhood and adult life. This ever-present stimulus triggers the
memory of painful feelings, unhealthy attitudes and therefore the continued use of a faulty
program in the brain.
What the overeater is afraid of is sin. Who understands this and helps with this? The
overeater is choosing to resist the temptation to sin. They are defending against fear that they
will respond to stress, pressure, conflict or trouble with the same negative thoughts and
actions that they see demonstrated by others in their lives. They stand faithful to their own
vision of goodness despite the destructive actions of others; they cope without retaliating,
resist without fighting back, and respond with kindness instead of mimicking evil. They fight
the battles of conscience every moment, especially during the many times that they are being
criticized, demeaned or otherwise brow-beaten. They succeed at overcoming the temptation to
fight back. They courageously prevent themselves from conforming to unhealthy purposes,
pressures and demands of unwise people. They understand how Job felt as he faced his
critics during his undeserved trials and torments.
But they consequently feel anxiety that they will fall into known traps of wrong-doing because of
their continuously aroused feelings. This is especially true when the majority of people in a
work organization, family or even church are living in ways contrary to the known Will of God.
Such unhealthy people often choose to get their way, that is to manipulate others, by creating
negative circumstances that trigger negative feelings in others. The people around them
struggle to give them what they demand in order to avoid having to cope with a continuous
barrage of negative, exhausting emotion. That is, indeed, all they seem to know about
problem-solving.
These are very unhealthy environments for the person who uses food to keep herself calm.
Often the emotionally inadequate people in such groups dump endless amounts of emotional
pain on the apparently calm obese person, temporarily freeing themselves of their own
negativity, while giving the obese person one more reason to overeat.
In other words, the obese end up living and working in groups that do not follow the healthy
prescriptions for living as clearly outlined in Biblical Scripture (this is partly caused by the fact
that a person's obesity will prevent them from becoming part of the most effective and
desirable groups). And imagine the genuine plight of the child who is incested or otherwise
physically abused, or the woman who is raped. How does she cope with the wrong-doing of
another without resorting to sin herself?
In these cases, the overeater is having to "go it alone", being the non-conformist, when one
would rather nestle into the comfort of a loving family group. The sense of aloneness and even
alienation is often excruciatingly painful. The most feared condition on the planet among
human beings is rejection. The worst punishments given by man are not physical pain, but of
expulsion from the group.
All human beings fear this because our very lives depend on being part of the group. But some
people are more conscious of the trauma of rejection than others, especially over-eaters.
They have had a lifetime of feeling that they are "different" and somehow unacceptable to their
families. They know what it feels like to be alone and scape-goated. Sometimes there is no
way out of this dilemma. In my case, the simple fact of ugly, dysfunctional legs made me an
object of ridicule to my family. There was no way I could change that.
How do other people handle the difficulty? Some people change their status as a loner by
simply copying the leader of their most significant group. If the leader and their cohorts believe
in deliberately scapegoating the weakest members of the "clan", then one can simply join in,
thereby proving one's loyalty and ensuring one's acceptance in the group.
Or one can become a leader in these activities himself. All cults, gangs, and abusive work
groups use this technique to brain-wash its members.
These leaders use their influence to cause members to do things they would never have done
under other circumstances. Most of the wrong-doing in our culture (that is, actions that
degrade our spirit and block our quest for union with God) happen because we belong to
groups, or because we have felt expelled from groups. When we show others in a group that
we are "cool" (all the various versions of "Modern"), we often fall into traps of verbal immorality,
sexual immorality, financial excesses, dishonest business practices, political scheming,
brutality, coercion, discrimination, degradation, racial or sexual power struggles, manipulation,
lying, revenge, general meanness, unhealthy individualism and "liberation", corrupt
entertainment, and sometimes group induced addictions (such as the salesman required to
overuse alcohol during frequent business meetings).
But to the Christian, accepting this solution to isolation leads to sin. In fact, there are many
scriptures in the Bible that relate the necessity for the person of faith to "go-it-alone" with only
God as a companion whenever they are surrounded by the wrong-doing of others. We admire
Daniel and the Apostle Paul for their ability to stay on the course determined by their
relationship with God. Indeed, part of the reason that fat people are often admired is that they
resist falling into these traps, even when it means chronic feelings of loneliness or isolation.
Thus fat people, that is those people who overeat under stress and gain weight, often resist
responding to aggression from others, at least partly because they do not want to become
hurtful people. They absorb pain without fighting back, without returning "fire for fire". And in
that sense, they are attempting to follow the example of Christ, to remain moral people and to
resist sin.
But because they are beleaguered more often, and by more people, the resistance is costly. It
creates reservoirs of anger, resentment, alienation, anxiety and depression that cannot be
dealt with directly. Others interpret their lack of aggression as weakness or fear, and therefore
pursue them harder. Which means that the fat person has to absorb more and more pain, and
work ever harder at finding constructive responses to aggression from others. They are trying
their very best to avoid sin. And, except for overeating, they are very, very good at it.
During the times that this was true for me, every minute of every day, in workplaces bereft of
morality and professional ethics, I was thankful that the carbohydrates in food could help me
stay calm. They helped me stay on the path I believed was right. But there is no question in my
mind that I used food instead of trust in God.
Why? Partly because when social pain comes quickly, a remedy is needed quickly. A person
can't wait until there is time to meditate and soothe one's spirit through prayer. Food is faster.
And often other remedies, such as a fervent physical workout is not available to the truly fat
person. It is not that I did not try to help myself. There were times that I took sick days from
work, and used the entire day to read the Bible and thereby to restore my ability to cope with the
difficult people that I found in the workplace.
But for people like me, a new kind of trust in God must be born. One must be gripped so hard
by the reality of the presence of God that one actually sees the world differently and the pain is
therefore endurable. This happened partly because of the state of famine and physical
weakness following gastric bypass surgery. When you are nearly sixty years old, when you are
recovering from major surgery, when you are still 240 pounds overweight and thus cannot walk
or work, when you are suffering from the famine induced by a 400 calorie food regimen, then
you know what true helplessness is all about. You are weak and very vulnerable. You have
pain when you eat. You get sick if you make a mistake. During that time, with no one to help
me and no food to comfort me, I began to really live on the presence of God. I never lost faith
that it had been God's will for me to do this difficult thing. I did not know if I would live through it.
But during the next year, I began to understand at the deepest level that God is more powerful
than man, even man organized into groups. One must then develop the high tolerance of
personal and social pain that is required for success in the Christian's world.
Nobody likes pain and suffering. Most of us avoid it or alleviate it if we can. But sometimes
suffering is necessary to both success and personal growth. When we decrease our suffering
through the use of food, or any other brain altering chemical, then we fail to grow and to achieve
our true purposes.
People used to say that eating does not work, that it only causes the bad effects of obesity. We
know now that this is simply not true. Carbohydrates enhance the brain's use of seratonin,
while other foods help the body to produce endorphins, natural pain-killers that soothe our
minds and aching muscles.
There are several ways in which we enhance the brain's use of the neurotransmitter, seratonin.
We use carbohydrates, medication, music or walking. We also use meditation, humor,
calming therapies, or prayer. In other words, it is good to enhance the workings of our our
brains. A positive relationship to God, to a loving church group, to a prayer group, or even to a
diet or exercise support group, is a known antidote to stress and illness.
So why don't we use these things to cope with stress? First of all, fat people are unaware that
these constructive things really work until, like me, they experience life without overeating! In
most healing, one never learns about wholesome avenues for action until he/she stops the
negative behavior. This is true for alcohol abuse, anger addiction, codependency, abuse of
others, manipulation, and every other truly bad habit that one can observe in ourselves and
others.
In other cases, as in my case, problems with avoidance and social anxiety prevents the
healthiest forms of self-care that occur in connection with healthy group activity. When one has
been conditioned by a problematic childhood to fear groups, then that affliction must be healed
in order to find better ways to give peace and comfort to our brains and bodies.
Certainly, adequate care of the brain and body will require that we choose carefully the people
that with whom we live and work. The Bible says, "Be not unequally yoked." Sometimes it is
not possible, but it is best to minimize the stress of one's life by associating with people who
believe the same things about health and happiness that we do. We can model healthy living
to people who are difficult, destructive and demeaning, because we know that they also have
been injured. But we cannot change them, and it is important to neither become like them, nor
to use all of our energy coping with them! In sum, I will never like being around argumentative,
mean, sarcastic or dishonest people!
If we stop eating and heal of our problems with people, then we can notice that consistent
meditation, prayer and other forms of contact with God really do increase our happiness and
effectiveness in living. Perhaps there is a connection between the "soul" of man and God that
is really necessary to our peace and sense of meaning.
If so, using food to alleviate suffering is a way of short-changing our relationship with God, and
the joy we could be experiencing through the frequent contacts that build our faith over time.
Thus, when we stop eating for emotional reasons, we learn to re-connect to our Source of
Being. When Jesus says, "I am the Vine, you are the branches", he is explaining that our soul
is part of God. We, as human beings, feel incomplete until our finite soul is connected with
eternal God. Because of that experience of reconnection, we become aware of God's
presence in everything we do.
Maybe we aren't consciously in touch with that connection some of the time. But when we
review our actions later, we see that God was present for us during the events of our day.
During those rare times that we are consciously in touch with God's light and love, we are filled
with both awe and peace. We know that nothing matters except that connection. That
connection is permanent. The causes of our anxieties are temporary. They don't matter in the
long run. It does matter that the awareness of the connection changes one's behavior towards
other people all the time and forever. After all, the petty wrong-doings of modern man mean
little in the long run. The energy and happiness generated when we love our fellow man matter
now and for all eternity.
Why hadn't I learned this before? In fact, the vulnerability of extreme fatness had already taught
me to rely on God for almost every aspect of my life, whether it was the need to find someone to
clean my house, the need for enough income, or the need for wisdom. Also the fat limited my
time and ability to function in many areas of life, so that I had already learned how to give up
everything in life that really doesn't matter. My extreme obesity, then, may have set the stage for
an experience with God that would increase my joy, my gratitude and the faith that I could
attempt social relationships one more time. Having once learned to go without whatever is
unproductive and empty of lasting value, I would never go back to old ways of thinking and living.
Eventually I would also see that eating was a shortcut to sainthood.
I worked to live according to the teachings of Jesus Christ without truly understanding the
nature of faith in God's love for me. Now I know that even though it is true that "faith without
works is dead," we must not forget Paul's admonition that "the just shall live by faith."
After spiritual healing, I still have work to do and problems to solve. I still have to choose well,
both practically and morally. I still want to work hard. I will still be afraid sometimes in social
settings. But I am less and less distracted from my life with God because of anxieties and
obsessions learned in my childhood. Once these worries took their proper place in my mind
and heart, measured appropriately against the things that I know to be of true importance to
God, then my mind and body can truly become vehicles through which God's Spirit works its
wonders.
Those wonders are understood by faith and not by vision or even belief. We simply trust that
there is a true Importance in the mind of God, an importance that we are not able as human
beings to understand. We trust also that there is a true unimportance, or meaninglessness,
to God. We have useless beliefs and values; we experience useless things. We think that we
understand the events that occur around us. We think that we place proper value on them. We
worry and feel anxious because we think they are important. But God devalues them and
ultimately makes them into nothing.
These things are temporary precisely because God devalues them. God withholds his power
and creativity from these man-made values, which include resentment, competitiveness, envy,
self-pity, abuse, deceit, betrayal, and all manner of excessiveness, greed and self-devaluation.
When we feel that God is not with us, not helping and loving us, it is because we are
momentarily disconnected from God. We are suddenly beset by all the things held
unimportant by God.
We reach for destructive tools, methods and beliefs to cope. We forget the the solution to our
pain is so simple. Reconnect with God. Because from that connection comes meaning and
strength, wisdom and love, joy and humble thanksgiving.
When we are connected with the Spirit, we still do the things we did before, but after learning to
trust in God, we see our lives differently. Tasks that were colorless and mundane before are
now filled with creativity and joy. People who were difficult or uninteresting are now lifted up to
God in love and truth and joy. If we want to maintain this joy, then part of our life as a Christian
must be to disconnect from those things that ruin or interfere with our connection to God's
powerful Spirit of Truth and love.
That is why it was a profoundly important experience for me the day that I heard a sermon that
included Jesus instruction, "If your hand offends you, then cut it off. It is better to lose the hand
than to lose the whole body."
I knew it was God's will for me to cut myself off from the habits of eating and fatness that were
interfering with my connection with God and the fulfillment of His Will for my life.
I worked diligently on this for two years, attempting to heal the eating disorder through my own
knowledge, work, and will. I accomplished a lot. But I could not lose weight; my inability to
exercise meant that I was unable to burn enough extra calories to use up that huge storage of
fat.
So when the opportunity for corrective surgery arose, I saw it as a medical intervention that
could block the ability to overeat forever. It was an important choice. It was not an effort to get
slim. It was a commitment to give up forever the main strength against sin of my lifetime. It
was to choose willingly to become powerless against the forces of evil in this world. It was like
Samson willingly giving up his hair, his main source of strength. It was the act of willingly
tearing down a self-made fortress in order to trust God completely with my life or my death, my
success or my ruination, my service to the Kingdom of God or my eventual degradation.
All of this I learned after almost two years of not using food for emotional comfort. Stopping the
wrong behavior enabled my soul to reconnect with God at the level of trust. How did this
happen? God led me to it. Reading Ezekiel helped me see my errors. But by living without
this terribly bad habit, I slowly began to rely on God....
| I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing John 15:5 NIV Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they wil walk and not be faint. Isaiah 40:28-31 NIV |
© Copyright by Nancy Carter, LCSW, ACSW
Faith is Fine But Food is Faster
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