Body and Food: Friends or Foes

For much of my life I didn’t exactly hate my body, but I didn’t really want it.  It felt like my enemy.  It did not represent who I felt that I actually was, and I couldn’t control it.  It seemed to betray me and give me failure over and over.  I loved who I was mentally and spiritually, but my physical self seemed to be separate and foreign to that part of me I liked.  So I neglected and abused my physical self for years.  Even when I tried to lose weight, it was not usually in a healthy way that respected the needs of my body.  I was completely out of control physically.  The natural man was in control of my body.  It was all wrapped up in being carnally-minded, devilish and sensual — whether I was wallowing in what made me fat or fighting it. 

Food, on the other hand, I treated as though it were my best friend — couldn’t live without it, wouldn’t want to.  I used it to search for happiness, pleasure, companionship, consolation, celebration, and comfort.  I thought about it all the time.  It was my obsession.  I wasn’t a binge eater.  I didn’t eat enormous amounts of food at one time.  I just ate the wrong foods and ate whenever I wanted to.  It had nothing to do with being hungry or needing nourishment.  It was all emotional. 

I decided a few years ago I needed to attack this problem from the spiritual side of things.  That meant I needed to completely change my relationship with my body, and that required really getting a testimony of why I’m better off with a body than without.  I knew that the soul is the body and the spirit together.  I accepted that the body is the temple of my spirit.  I knew that obtaining a body was one of the main reasons I was born into this mortal world and that Satan’s punishment for rebelling against God is that he will never have one.  At that time, I only had an intellectual acceptance of those facts.  I trusted the source of the information and didn’t doubt its veracity.  I just did not understand it.  I couldn’t feel it.  I needed to have that confirmation from the Holy Ghost that would take it into my heart so that it would change my way of thinking and acting.  I had to get past that feeling that my body was just a case for my spirit and truly come to see that it is as much a part of me as my spirit is. 

I came to this decision to get a testimony of the importance of the body in May of 2009.  A lot has changed since then.  One of the first things I was prompted to meditate on was the fact that we take the sacrament in memory of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the physical aspects of who he is, not his spirit, though we do it so that we can have his spirit to be with us.  So we are constantly reminded that even God has a body.  That led me to ponder why He has a body.  Why is he more powerful because of his body?  Why does having a body make me more powerful?  What is the connection between a particular body and the spirit it houses?  How does having a body relate to the purpose of this mortal life?  Why do we get a body and are then separated from it for a time before we are resurrected in an eternal bond of body and spirit?  How has having a body benefitted me already? 

I learned the answers to all those questions and more, and I will be sharing what I learned in my future blogs.  As I wrote, I started on this quest in 2009.  Since then I have lost a significant amount of weight and gained it back.  Why wasn’t I able to succeed and make the change permanent?  Well, the answer, I believe, is that my body and its condition drives me to study so that I can learn, and I hadn’t learned enough, so the challenge remained.  I don’t know if I’ve learned enough yet, but I know that I am once again in the right place to attempt change because I once again have the desire.  And I’m sharing this now because I want to share some of what I have learned, and I felt prompted to share now, not after I have changed.  My hope is that the sharing will help me to change as well as inspire others to do the same. 

By the way, out of curiosity, I checked my weight again this morning, and the three pounds that prompted me to start this are gone.  Thought so.  And because this is psychological for me, now that I’ve weighed three times in less than two weeks, I won’t be doing much more of that for a while.