If you asked most people, they would say they know a lot about healthy eating and living. However, teachers and medical personnel have not taught us what healthy eating really means, because most of them don’t know either.
If you’ve been told you need to eat healthier, your first thought may have been “kill me now!”
You may think, “I only have one life. Why can’t I enjoy it with donuts, milkshakes, chocolate chip cookies, and pasta? I would rather take medicine than change my diet.” However, eating healthy does not have to be the end of all food pleasure. It can be the beginning of a wonderful relationship with food, your body, your spirit, and your emotions.
Medicine versus Nutrition
I loved rich foods, diet Coke, and had a major sweet tooth. But I was overweight, and my body screamed in pain and discomfort. Either the flu, cold, or bronchitis invaded my body at least once a year, too.
We live in a world where if you have an illness you take medicine—we don’t do preventative care, i.e., eating healthy and taking vitamins and minerals to help our immune system. Medication is not always the first thing we should go to, either.
Dr. Rebecca Freese said, “Studies have shown that exercise and nutrition can often outperform drugs in achieving health goals. Most importantly, they do it without any of the side effects with which prescription drugs are often riddled.”
God gave us beautiful food to eat. He planned the bright colors of apples, peppers, carrots, melons, eggplant, strawberries, and others to attract us to it and he created the nutrition inside it. Fruits and vegetables help our immune system and keep our body alkalinity from 7.35–7.45. Sugar, soda, white flours, pasta, and other high carb foods are acidic, causing our bodies to take the alkaline-rich calcium from our bones to maintain our bodies’ alkalinity. This eventually causes osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
God made fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, and meat-filled with the vitamins and minerals our bodies need to fight bacteria and viruses.
** Our bodies need vitamins A, B (especially B12), C, D, and E along with magnesium and zinc. These vitamins and minerals help prevent infections, allergies, viruses, and leg cramps.
**Too much calcium builds up on bones instead of building bone. Please get your calcium from food instead of a supplement. Foods that are high in alkalinity are key.
** For best results, don’t take a multi-vitamin, but take each of these vitamins separately.
Is Sugar that Bad?
Since I started a healthy diet by removing sugar and high carb grains and eating foods rich in vitamins and minerals, it helped me lose weight but stay healthier. Now, I rarely get sick.
What most people don’t realize is sugar feeds every known bacterium, virus, and pathogen in our world. Sugar feeds cancer, too. Doctors use a PET scan to find cancer in your body. They do this by introducing radiated glucose into your bloodstream. It goes right to any cancer in your body—because cancer wants sugar.
Sugar also changes our taste buds. When we eat a high-carb diet, our taste buds get used to sugar and our brain prefers the taste of sweet foods over the taste of anything else. It distorts the flavor of other good foods.
After a couple months without sugar, everything thing else began tasting better! I could not believe it. Foods I had not liked before suddenly tasted good and the sugary foods made me physically ill. I would be in so much pain from eating a donut that I could not move off the couch. This was not a one-time experience, either.
My body no longer desired the unhealthy foods I had once fed it.
How Does Food Affect Us Emotionally?
High-carb foods act like stimuli to our bodies. They give us a temporary high metabolically. What does this mean? When we eat a lot of high-carb, sugary food, our blood sugar spikes giving us energy and a good feeling—a high. The high from sugar is stronger than the high from cocaine. Sugar affects our brain chemistry—serotonin. I have seen MRIs of the brain of a person using cocaine and of a person eating sugar. They were no different. Sugar can act like a drug, as it can be addictive—because of its effects on our brains.
Sugar also spikes blood sugar, causing insulin to be released to bring blood sugar levels down by storing it. Insulin does not metabolize sugar—it stores it.
But, when insulin sends that sugar from our bloodstream to our liver, we can experience a crash. Which starts the cycle of eating to make us feel better. Doctors have also related high sugar and carb diets to anxiety and depression. If you would like to decrease your sugar consumption, check out How to Eat a Low Sugar Diet.
How Does Food Affect Us Spiritually?
When we think of idolatry, we think of the golden calf the Israelites made while waiting for Moses to return from his meeting with God on Mt. Sinai. Pastors and teachers teach us idolatry is the worship of gold, silver, or wooden carvings. However, it’s more than that—and we all do it in some way.
When we eat to self-medicate or make ourselves feel better, it can be a type of worship. Idolatry is worshipping something other than the God of the Universe.
What is comfort food? It sounds innocent and, in most cases, it is. But when we use food to do what only Jesus can do—which is to give peace and comfort—then we turn food into an idol.
Our culture fills us with images and ideas of what makes life fun and exciting. Most of these images are of people loving life with lots of food, wine, and beautiful people. This is simply not true. God created us to eat a healthy diet and to like it, too. If not, He wouldn’t have given us taste buds. He wants us to enjoy the food He gave us, but He also meant it to heal us.
I know, some would say that is not true. But it is. God intended food to give our bodies the ability to resist viruses, bacteria, heal, and fortify. A healthy diet can reverse inflammation—which is the swelling of organs, joints, and blood vessels—and keep you from getting diseases and sick.
We are a temple for the Holy Spirit. Treat your body well. Give it the healthy diet it needs to live a long, healthy life. You do not need to live with pain and discomfort. Ask the Lord to direct you and the foods you eat. Ask Him to keep you accountable. I pray this year will see you living a healthier life with healthy eating.
About the Author
Stephanie Pavlantos is passionate about getting people into God’s Word. She has taught Bible studies for fifteen years and spoken at ladies’ retreats. She is ordained with Messenger Fellowship. You can visit her blog at www.stephaniepavlantos.com and other social media sites at twitter @DPavlantos and www.facebook.com/stephaniepavlantos. Check out Stephanie’s Bible study, Jewels of Hebrews.
Healthy eating isn’t as straightforward as it seems. For example, your discussion on sugar is very telling and it shows that while it may be bad in large volumes, it can be fine in moderation.