Good Food

"They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."

"When they went across the lake, the disciples forgot to take bread. 'Be careful,' Jesus said to them, 'Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' They discussed this among themselves and said, 'It is because we didn't bring any bread.' Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, 'You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread? Do you still not understand? Don't you remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered? How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees."

This week I read the label of everything I put in my shopping cart. I also counted all my calories and like any serious exerciser, I tallied my protein. My goal? To eat healthy, and gain mass. I believed I wasn't getting enough protein, that if simply increased my protein count, then I would increase my muscle mass. When I got home, I opened my personal training book and started reading. I read about caloric intake, energy expenditure, and grams/kilogram of protein. I came to a startling realization; I couldn't gain mass because I wasn't consuming enough calories, good old plain calories obtained from eating regular food. My protein intake? Slightly more than double my daily amount! I had been duped into believing that mass was a product of a specific nutrient, not the total amount of food I consumed. My conception about mass was based on popularly held notions. Ones that no matter how much protein I consumed or how much I worked out, would never add an ounce of mass to my body. I think we have this same struggle in our spiritual lives, we overcomplicate what we are supposed to do and end up getting no where, when all we have to do is eat good food.

What is good food? I can promise you that just about any food claiming to be fit, healthy or lean is actually bad for you. Their labels require a chemistry dictionary to understand. All that processing is to remove fat from the product. We believe fat is bad. It's that stuff around our midsections we can't get rid of, therefore if we stop eating fat, we'll start losing fat. This is true if you go home and eat lard everyday. Cutting the excess fat out of our diet will help us lose weight, but cutting all fat out of our diet is unhealthy; its a good way to make yourself irritable, cranky and generally not a nice person to be around. In fact, even if you cut your caloric intake drastically, your fat may not move. It might actually increase! The body will go into starvation mode and keep any fat it can get its hungry hands on. The body needs fat to protect itself, its an essential part of our organs and skin. When the body starves, it doesn't go for fat first. It goes for muscle. The very thing most of us are trying to increase. Even though the scale drops, we're not losing fat, we're losing the good stuff. Why? Because the body is trying to preserve itself. It needs more fat to survive than muscle. When people die of starvation, they still have fat on their bodies; they have simply run out of protein. Good food has fat, hasn't been through a laboratory and tastes like food.

What do you mean 'tastes like food?' Real food doesn't need flavor enhancers. Real food is flavorful. If you want to know where your flavor comes from, read the back of the label. If you can't pronounce what you're eating, there's a good chance the flavor you love is a synthetic. It's not real flavor! You've been tricked! You may believe you're eating the real thing, because everything else you've tasted with that flavor is synthetic! It's a marketing ploy. And it works. That and sugar makes everything taste better. Which is why its important to note what kind of sugars you are taking in, and whether or not its a natural sugar or a refined sugar cane product. Your typical 'fit & healthy' product has a high sugar content, masking the laboratory tastes, and added synthetic flavors. If it comes in a bar or bottle -claiming to be healthy- chances are it didn't fall of a tree, get dug out of the ground or come from another natural source. It's lying to you. Don't eat it!

Why do we eat such foods? Because they are convenient. It's way easier to grab a pre-made shake, than to make one yourself. It's easier to throw something in the microwave than cook it in the oven. But the self-made shake and the oven bake will always be healthier than those pre-made ready to go products. There is no substitute for the real thing. It may not be sweet, it may not have enhanced flavor, but it will fuel your body better than any imitation will ever be able to. It will take a little more time, but the end results will be worth the effort.

This foolish alteration of life giving sources is the yeast Jesus warns his disciples about. The pre-made, flavor enhanced, over sweetened version of the truth. These seemingly healthy products are all over the market place, but they do not satisfy. Unless they've been chemically altered to trick your brain into being satisfied, in which case you'll need to listen to your body, because the body is much harder to convince than the mind. The body is the barometer of health, not our mental conception of our health or the image we'd like to look like. Real health comes from real food and following the truth.

The truth about spirituality? It's very simple. The disciples of Jesus broke it down into four things: real teaching, real people, real food and real prayer. What do I mean by real? I mean authentic and unaltered, honest and open, taking into mind the struggles of life and persevering together through the unity of God's love. This can be made simpler: study, eat, live in community, pray. Not a hard task. But too often, like our food, we want to add enhanced flavors. We want to add sugar and get rid of all the fat. So we find ways of increasing our spirituality by doing out of the ordinary things. Like sitting on mountains for long periods of time. Starving ourselves for weeks at a time. Seeing how fast we can read our Bibles and how many times we can read through it. Seeing how much scripture we can memorize. Or how exciting/solemn our services can be. It's not that any of these practices are wrong in and of themselves: we should take time to get away from our lives and meditate on the simple things, we should fast when we are seeking God, we should read the Bible, we should learn it by heart, we should be moved in our services, but these are not the core of our spiritual nutrition. They are protein. Essential, but often taken in greater quantities than we need. Sometimes 3-5 times greater than we need. That's a nutritional fact. We need to go back to our basics and look at the calories we are consuming and consider their sources. Like me, you may find that you're simply not eating enough.

That's the challenge of eating and our spiritual lives. What are we eating? Are we eating it in the right amounts? Are we overemphasizing one part of our diet while neglecting the other essentials? It's so easy to get lost with the sheer number of options, but nothing compares to eating real healthy food. Healthy food is what it says it is. It doesn't claim to be the next big thing, and when we eat it, we grow the way we should. And we may even shed those unhealthy fat stores, as our body realizes it doesn't have to hold on to them anymore. And that should make us all rejoice!