If you’re struggling with food don’t bury yourself under failure. Don’t think something must be wrong with you. Don’t give up and think you can’t succeed. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” is never more appropriate than it is in this struggle. It’s a struggle mankind has dealt with since the dawn of creation.
I was raised in church. By that I mean if the doors were unlocked, we were going through them. The story of Creation and the fall is as familiar to me as my own bed. In spite of that it only recently struck me that God established all of Creation with only one, single, solitary prohibition. Don’t eat from THAT tree.
Look, I have given you EVERY seed-bearing plant on the surface of the ENTIRE earth, and EVERY tree whose fruit contains seed. This food will be for you. [emphasis added] GEN 1:29
God basically said, eat from ANY plant on the entire planet except from one particular one. One single solitary plant on the entire planet. Now, with all the cries of deforestation and environmental destruction that man wreaks upon the planet one can assume that there were more trees at the dawn of mankind than there are today. Today, according to ask.com there are an estimated 400,000,000,000 trees on the planet. I don’t know about you but if I had at least 400 billion options to choose from and God said leave that one particular option out….. Well.
We all know what happened.
Mankind corrupted all of Creation. Eve was tempted, gave in to temptation, and the first physical manifestation of sin ever is the act of eating. I’d love to beat up on Eve for what she did. As a matter of fact, there were times in the past when I literally wished I could reach back through the ages and slap her right across the lips and shout, “WHAT. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU?!?!”
Eve, I owe you an apology. For years I ate things that I knew I shouldn’t be eating. If someone brought donuts to the office, I could count on the fact that there’d be some blueberry donuts in there. Pie, chips, fast food, and buffets. Buffets were my favorites. Each one was a personal challenge to me. If I didn’t leave feeling miserable I felt like a failure. I intentionally, routinely, and with great enthusiasm engaged in that pesky little sin of gluttony. You know, the one paired with drunkenness in many places in the Bible and worthy of drastic punishment.
When I started changing my dietary habits I caught myself countless times reaching for a piece of hard candy here, a couple of pieces of chocolate there, “Oooh rolls? Yeah I’ll take one.” Putting garbage into my system was a habit I was totally unaware I had developed. It was one not easy to get over, but it happened. I know if I can do it, anyone can do it.
This article was first published on January 10, 2015 and was recovered using AI and web.archive.org.
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