A Ramble About Dieting

A few years ago, my family and I went on a gluten free, soy free, dairy free, corn free diet. After years of mystery seizures, stomach pains, and other illnesses, we discovered through various means that my wife in particular, but also my kids as well (and to a more limited extent myself), had food intolerances ad allergies that weren't being caught, and were causing all the health problems we had been having.

The first time we tried it, the food restrictions seemed so severe I thought I would starve to death. We would go to the grocery store and everything on the shelves seemed like it was off limits. The problem was that, while we knew what we couldn't eat, we didn't really know everything we could eat. and so we were eating mostly salads, rice, and a few other things that we knew wouldn't cause any reactions. But my job at the time required a lot of heavy lifting, and such a high calorie diet that what we were eating just wasn't providing. So, I started bringing some of the “forbidden” foods back into our diet thinking that this was all just too difficult, and didn't really need to be done anyway. After all, the “doctor” who first warned us about it was just a new-age quack right?

About a month or two after we started working those foods back in, we started getting sick. I came down with a bad lung infection that refused to go away for weeks. It got so bad that I was forced to resign from my job because I couldn't do the heavy physical labor any more. A few weeks after that, Heidi lost her ability to stand up or do anything for more than a few minutes a day. For weeks, all she could do was lay in bed and look at the ceiling. I took her to doctors and they had no idea what was causing it. After a couple of weeks of being unable to stand much less go to work, Heidi had to resign from her job as well because she couldn't return.

About six months later we were able to make the connection between what we were eating and Heidi's condition and the illnesses. Once we eliminated everything from our kitchen that contained something we couldn't have, everyone's health started improving. Fast forward a few years, and my wife is almost back to where she was, and the kids' and my chronic illnesses have all but disappeared. We know for certain when one of us has eaten something which contains either gluten, or corn, or dairy because that person immediately begins to react to it in some way. It really can't be hidden.

Looking back, when we first started the diet, it seemed completely impossible to do in this society. I mean, how do you eliminated corn or gluten when they put them in nearly everything you buy at the store. Further, what about all those foods like pizzas, and twinkies, and candy bars? What do you mean I can't have them? But now, after doing it for several years, when we go to the store it's second nature to almost not see all the foods we can't eat for fear of getting sick. The temptation is there still on occasion, but I also know what the cost will be of indulging and I know now it's a cost which we're no longer willing to pay.

When we tell others about our diet, people look at us as though we're from another planet, or act as though there's nothing at all we can eat. But the truth is that it's actually a lot easier than people think once you've been conditioned to do it. It becomes almost automatic.

Jesus said “Remain in Me, and I in you.” Someone once said this is the easiest command that Jesus gave to understand, and nearly impossible to carry out. I was thinking about this recently in the context of the diet we've been forced onto, and the truth is that they're really not that different in practice. Like the diet, in order to remain “spiritually healthy” we must remain in Christ. This involves at the very least directing our love and attention towards Him at all times. As St. Paul said, “pray without ceasing.” There are ways and practices of prayer and devotion that assist in this to make it easier or at least possible, but it requires a whole change of lifestyle and way of looking at things. At first it will seem impossible because you don't really know how to make it work. But as you stick with it, you begin to find new ways of doing things; new ways to spend your time, new ways of responding to temptations and thoughts that appear in your mind. And as you begin to become conditioned to the new way of living, the old way of living, while still a temptation, become less and less of one until you realize one day that remaining in Christ is far from impossible and something that you can't do without.

Jesus was explicit in what the effects of not remaining in Him were, “If anyone doesn't remain in Me, he dries up and is cast out as a branch. And they gather them up and they are burned.” In other words, like going off our diet, you will get very sick spiritually, and you will eventually die from it. This is the reason why so many churches, and so many Christians in so many churches seem powerless and ineffective. This is the reason why demonstrations of God's power within the churches seem so rare. They aren't remaining in Him. They aren't staying with the diet and lifestyle He told them to.

The problem with the churches today isn't that the Gospel doesn't work, or that it needs to be tweaked. It's that Christians need to believe and obey it. Diets don't work unless you follow them.