“Protein or fiber.” This is my standard refrain, and my elementary-aged sons have it all but memorized.
Since I homeschool them, we spend a majority of our daytime hours within eyeshot of the kitchen. Their occasional glances toward the pantry more often than not incite the same Pavlovian response: “Mom, can I have a snack?”
“Sure,” I reply. “Protein or fiber. Yogurt, fruit, crackers and hummus — something like that.”
I’m not an “almond mom” — I do allow them to enjoy a couple treats each day. But in general, I encourage them to reach for snacks that will nourish and satisfy their growing bodies.
My approach to snack time reflects my complicated history with food. When I was a teenager I struggled with a shame-driven habit of emotional overeating, which eventually began to show in the stretch of my jeans. I was mortified, and I remember the exact moment when I decided I was going to do something about it. I started paying closer attention to what and how much I ate. To feast freely was not an option. But so terrified of falling back into my old, impulsive habits, I gripped onto my sense of control with claws, and within several months a full-fledged eating disorder had appropriated the space in my heart that I had intended to be occupied only by an earnest pursuit of health.
If the effects of my overeating had been evident in the fit of my clothes, the effects of my eating disorder were doubly so. Before long, the people close to me began to express their concern, and when I could no longer deny the cause of my increasingly gaunt figure, I surrendered the truth and submitted to care from an intensive treatment program.
A decade and a half has passed since I left my disordered eating behind, and I have never since fallen back into a pattern of such extreme restriction. I have, however, at times spurned the softening body I’ve seen in the mirror and have then felt the urge to yank back at the reins. The cycles are not so pronounced to count as “disordered,” but the process follows the same framework: shame and anxiety, which produces a desire to restrict and control, which works for a while but comes crashing back down on me as soon as my husband returns from Sam’s Club with a bulk box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Shame. Control. The binge. The pattern is familiar. I see it in the church as well — not in regard to food, but to sin. We hear the message in sermons, and we read it in books: Stop sinning! Control yourself! Only once you have emptied yourself of the filth will you have room in your heart to entertain the things of God. Only when you have learned to say no to the desires of your flesh will your heart awaken to the desires of the Spirit.
The enjoyment of an indulgent meal, of course, is morally benign; sin is not. The wages of a milkshake might be a bloated stomach, but the wages of sin is death. We are right to take sin seriously, we are right to oppose it, and we are right to encourage self-control. But how often does a purely restriction-driven approach to fighting sin see us falling back into our old indulgences? Then again, sometimes our efforts at control do produce “results,” but we are then caught up in a cold and anxious legalism that quenches the life-giving Spirit. There has to be a better way.
Within the past couple years, I’ve finally figured out how to break, in my own personal eating habits, free from the shame-driven cycles of restriction and over-indulgence. As it turns out, the key appears to be really quite simple: Consume a lot of good food. Eat a lot of protein. Eat a lot of fiber. Drink a lot of water.
Instead of placing the burden of moderation solely on the strength of my willpower to say no to treats, I say yes to food that nourishes me and satisfies me. When I’m hungry, I eat. My body thanks me for the nutritious fare, and I no longer feel deprived. Treats are still a part of my life — as they should be — but I no longer find myself as hungry for them as I once did. My tastebuds now actually crave the foods that I know will energize and fill me.
God designed humans to be creatures of yes. The embodied nature of our humanity means that we must always be doing something and thinking something; stopping one thing always means starting something else. When we are enslaved by the desires of our flesh, our actions and thoughts will reflect these selfish desires. Even when we strive to put a bad habit behind us another is likely to take its place. But when we surrender our lives to Christ, the Spirit breaks us free from our bondage to our selfish desires. Christ stands ready at all times to empower our whole selves, unities of body and soul, to say yes to what is good — to “live and move and have our being” in Christ, as Acts 17:28 says.
Our shame and anxiety tell us that we must rid our hearts of darkness before Christ will be willing to work in us. But that is not how darkness works. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” says John 1:5. The only way to get rid of darkness is to let in the light — to turn our minds to Christ and then to “pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness” (1 Tim 6:11). Christ has already won our righteousness, and he now invites us to embrace it through obedience in faith (Rom 1:5) — that is, through the active, embodied exercise of his righteousness in us.
God is not waiting for us to clean ourselves up before we can enter his feast. He has set a place for us, and he welcomes us to the table just as we are. Just as I articulate for my sons a list of nutritious snacks from which they can choose, so too does our Father articulate the fare of righteousness and of freedom from sin: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic 6:8).
Learning to say no to sin is half the battle. But it is only half the battle. Even if we’re still struggling with the no, God beckons us to say yes to the “perfect law that gives freedom” (Jas 1:25) — that is, the law of the life-giving Spirit (Rom 8:2). The more we learn to trust the Spirit and the more we enjoy the nourishment of his presence, the more sin will lose its grip on our hearts.
Are you struggling with pride? Exercise your humility. Envy? Exercise your generosity. Wrath? Exercise your gentleness. Lust? Exercise your honor. None of these virtues can be worked out in isolation, so immerse yourself within the body of Christ, and find your healing in relation to the family of God. Feast on the grace of Christ by participating in communion with your brothers and sisters, and fill your time with worship, fellowship, and service.
Again, the point here is not that through our exercise of virtue we will earn our righteousness before God. That much has already been accomplished in Christ. The point is that by inviting the Spirit into tangible demonstrations of his transformative power in our lives, we flood our whole selves, body and soul, with the light of Christ’s righteousness, which drives out the darkness more effectively than our own desperate efforts ever will.
Our hearts will always hunger. We know that sin will not satisfy this hunger, and it is good for us to refuse it. But Christ does not leave us empty: He is the bread of life, and whoever comes to him will never go hungry (John 6:35). Because of this, we can say yes to the feast of righteousness that he has laid before us.
