1 1/2 buttered toast (sugar free bread, real butter)

Saturday, April 24, 2010
1 1/2 buttered toast (sugar free bread, real butter)
This is what I was thinking about as I finished my toast:
Does the normal development of a human being mirror our relationship with God?
Or is it a mirror image and therefore opposite: do we mature spiritually by becoming more and more dependent on God as opposed to depending on our own will power?
Why are we given the spiritual gift of self-control if we are only really happy when we surrender completely to God? (What does this have to do with toast? Bear with me, please.)
When a baby is newborn it is completely dependant on its mother and if it is developing normally the child grows more dependant on him or herself. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the opposite seems to be true. I know that no matter what I think I want, what I really, really want is to know God’s will and to be able to do whatever He wants.
For example (I think as I shake the toast crumbs off my shirt):
I think I want to lose weight in order to be healthy. I start to pray for that. But as soon as the prayer is formed, a cry, like a foghorn in treacherous waters goes out "Seek first the kingdom of God!"
Born an American girl I have always equated good health and a good life--in fact, all goodness with being skinny. In my household the word “skinny” was synonymous with clean, worthy while "fat" was equivalent to evil: dirty, lazy, stupid and bad. (Easy to see the why I have struggled with an eating disorder, right?)
I’ve always believed that the eating disorder was a lack of self control. But I am beginning to see that it is more a matter of anger and an act of defiance than it is about self control. Or maybe it is equally about anger/defiance/self-control, or lack thereof. I don't know.
The first rumblings of the disorder came in defiance some forgotten thing that infuriated me on the way to school in second grade. I remember riding to school, sitting on the edge of the seat and clamping my gut so tight, like a little hidden fist, tightening as I swore “I will never, ever be like my mother!”
I don’t know what she did to make me so mad or to swear to never be like her. But now, when I think about dieting or controlling my weight, that same little, internal fist tightens. And ‘it’ is much stronger than my best intentions.
For years I was anorexic and/or bulimic. I felt in control when I was strong enough to stick to my food plan (which was at its most extreme: one small apple and ¼ cup of wheat germ. Period. (For THE WHOLE DAY.) But in the late 1990’s I got sick and tired of starving myself. In a fully conscious act of defiance I declared war on dieting. That single act of defiance, however, did not initiate healthy eating habits. I was still obsessed with foods and treated food like an idol. Food was the answer to all my issues (I thought) and if I could just eat the right kind, then the right amount would be easy to maintain because the ‘right food’ would satisfy all my needs (like God ;) the right food would produce homeostasis.
Right Food was a two-faced idol. One side showed the beautiful array of all natural food, the other side showed a person happily engaged in active recreation. An image of a very clean blond woman in dazzling white tennis gear flashes before my eyes; it was probably a TV commercial or cereal ad that burned its way into my impressionable mind.
Do you recognize this Idol? Who in our society does not believe (like a good indoctrinated person should) that “Diet and Exercise” are the keys to good or bad health?
The mantra is repeated in every doctor’s office: Diet and Exercise, Diet and Exercise, all hail the Right Diet and Exercise! Every grocery store checkout line is bombarded with advertisements for diets and exercise plans. And the First Lady has declared it her campaign to put an end to childhood obesity, which has intensified the mantra so dear to our hearts: Diet and Exercise.

If eating the ‘right’ foods is key to our happiness, why it is that in-between commercials for the right diet and exercise programs are advertisements for chocolate, which, by the way, has even more power than the Right Diet and Exercise to satisfy our every desire (and I do mean every desire.) Diet and exercise, we are told will make us healthy and happy; but we all secretly crave, and deserve forbidden foods too, like that chocolate I was talking about.
So what, exactly, is the scoop?
As I sipped my morning coffee I started listing the food I’d consumed today. I did this so that I could enter it into a computerized calorie counter. “This time,” I said, “this time I will stick to a food plan and lose weight. I will be like the saints, who ate very little. If I don’t get my eating under control it is my own fault that I have health problems. I just need to find and stick to the right diet and exercise program. Right?”
But the internal foghorn sounded:
No. Janice. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
So I said, "No. I will choose to avoid this pitfall. Dieting may not be a pitfall for some, but it is for me. No. This time I will choose to ‘eat’ my spiritual food first: the word of God in the Divine Office. I will choose to give my will over to God and I choose to trust that if I do this, and if I listen to Him and not to the TV or magazine adds, I will have everything that brings me peace, whether peace means I’ll be ‘skinny’, or not. God will take away the anger that fuels this eating disorder and He will replace it with knowledge and understanding. If self-control is a natural gift of the spirit, then the Spirit will teach me how to develop it. I will begin by exercising my will power by changing the mantra: Diet and Exercise! To 'Not my will, but Thine be done…'
I will resist the urge to add, "but please God, can I please be skinny?”