FOUR

The Science of the Spirit

Deb, twenty-nine, called quickly after choosing to start on recovery. She was a week into committing to do whatever it took to stop overeating and she couldn’t wait another day. She had been fighting with food issues more years of her life than she could remember, and she yearned to be free from it all. The battle began when she was ten and her father, with a hand on her head, introduced her to new neighbors as, “This is Deb, our chubby one.”

“Our chubby one!” Deb said in our first meeting. “Dad may as well have knighted me Deb the Chubby One because that is exactly the code I lived by every day after.”

As she reached to food for comfort, that code brought on even more pounds, not peace. Finally, ready to stop the binges, stop the focus again and again on her body (how to slim it with doomed diets, how to hide it with outlandish fashion), Deb called ahead of our scheduled appointment. Anything she could start doing, even thinking on, to change her life?

“I’m already looking into food plans,” she said, “and you’ll help me take on all the issues that drive me to overeat and binge, right?”

“Right,” I answered, “and we’ll work on ways to strengthen your spirit too.”

“My … spirit?” It was like Deb had never heard the word. There was a long silence before she said, “Come again?”

“We’ll look at ways God can help you.” More silence. Odd, I thought. Deb was a Christian. We knew mutual friends at her church. Matters of faith weren’t unknown to her. Still, I explained, “There are things you can do to strengthen your spirit that will give you the freedom you seek.” More silence. “You know,” I filled in, “how prayer, meditation on God’s Word, and faith in His promises will help you overcome and find peace with what you eat.”

The silence was even more palpable this time. Longer. Long enough that I thought the call had dropped or maybe I should cue the crickets. Then I heard a breath, a slight shuffling. “Deb? Are you there? Are you okay?”

“I thought you said, ‘we’ll look at spiritual things,’” she answered slowly, deliberately, as if trying on the words and not finding them a fit. There was another long pause.

“That’s right.”

Silence.

“Is something wrong?”

“Well,” Deb said, as if the reins had been pulled on her gallop toward recovery, “I just didn’t think this was going to be so complicated. I understand recovery isn’t just about a diet. I get that the brain is involved, there are triggers, and there are emotions to deal with, but, really, what do prayer and meditation have to do with my eating problem? What does faith have to do with food issues anyway?”

What does faith have to do with food, with issues, with addiction, with freedom?

In a word: everything.

FAITH HELPS YOU HEAL

The evidence is substantial for what people have believed for centuries: faith helps you heal.1 There’s power in prayer. Meditation on God’s Word brings peace. Gathering with fellow believers delivers belonging and supplies support.

There’s a whole biology of belief on the way faith affects your physical, emotional, and mental self.² The bottom line is simple: God is great. He’s good. He’s good for you in every way. Relationship with Him not only saves your soul; how you practice your faith in God helps your body, your mind, and your emotions too.

For instance, look at just a few of the benefits recently found in the groundbreaking research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Spirituality and the Mind:3

•  Spiritual practice reduces stress.

•  Contemplation of a loving God can curtail anxiety and depression.

•  Time spent talking to, thinking upon, and worshipping God increases feelings of security, compassion, and love.

•  Prayer enlivens and activates your senses by involving your sensory organs for taste, sight, smell, sound—so you engage more fully in what is going on around you, as well as inside you, your thoughts, and feelings.

•  Prayer deepens your capacity for gratitude, which, like humor, can boost your immune system and resiliency.

•  Meditation has lasting effects on the functioning of the brain, including changing values and perception of reality.

•  People who attend church services live longer than those who don’t.

•  Belief in a loving God helps you handle a diagnosis of illness and fare better afterward than no belief or a belief that God is punitive.

The benefits go on and seem almost too good to be true, but the proof is too convincing to think otherwise. Exercising your faith really is just what the Good Doctor ordered for peace, fitness, total health, and a vibrant, full life. And the best part of it? You can be part of the living proof. You can grab on to faith’s benefits and see your whole life change for good because faith is the key to freedom from food addiction, mad cycles of eating, and all the aftereffects like weight gain, debilitating guilt and shame, and low self-worth. Practices of faith can bring you

•  healing for an overweight body and overburdened mind;

•  power to overcome any challenge;

•  peace as you face your past; and

•  a community of support to help when you’re sick, tired, or discouraged and to celebrate good moments and great days with you.

Faith will enable the mental clarity you need to make good decisions in all situations and get you through tough times. Faith also gives you what you won’t get from your body or your mind—a super strength and sustenance of the soul that is the true ingredient to overcoming.

Faith is the key to freedom from food addiction.

While the evidence of this is fascinating, step back a minute and think about what you already know beyond the science of the soul. We’ve all read accounts of people on the brink of physical and mental collapse, who then persevere and get through an ordeal or challenge by sheer faith and an indomitable spirit. You probably know more examples than you realize of those who overcame great obstacles by exercising faith, in spite of physical, emotional, and mental limitations.

Remember Corrie ten Boom, the middle-aged, unmarried clockmaker who joined the Dutch Resistance during World War II? Corrie hid in her home, many of those hunted by the Nazis, and helped save the lives of hundreds of Jews and people of the Resistance before being interned with them. At age forty-eight, she endured eleven months at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, and lost most of her family, before being released by clerical error (one week, by the way, before all women her age were killed). Then, despite the lasting physical and emotional effects of her starvation and torture, she devoted the rest of her ninety-one years to helping other survivors. She set up rehabilitation centers, sheltered the jobless Dutch who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation, and traveled the world as a public speaker and author.

At a speaking engagement in Munich, she came face-to-face with one of her tormenters from the camps … and forgave him. She forgave the man who helped persecute her and kill her eighty-four-year-old father and sister Betsie, who saw to it she and those with her suffered in the camps. People were stunned. Corrie was too. How could she do such a thing? Where does one summon that kind of spirit to defy physical limitation (Corrie often joked she was a little dumpling, no athlete)? How does one overcome the anger, bitterness, and agony of grief to do so?

It wasn’t her body that enabled her to travel all those miles, all those years, with her message of hope. It wasn’t her mind and heart, forever grieved by loss, that allowed her to pardon her persecutor. It was her faith. It was God. “I stood there … and could not forgive,” she wrote. “I had to do it.” She prayed silently and “healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being”—not her own love, but “the power of the Holy Spirit.”4 Doing the impossible freed her from imprisoning emotions, and it was her spirit, her faith in God, that made possible the impossible.

That same spirit, so intimately connected to God, enabled Corrie to keep singing His praises the last five years of her life when a series of strokes left her bedridden and mute. Though she couldn’t speak or write, she continued to signal her trust in and love for God with eye motions, in response to Bible readings, prayers, and gestures from her caretaker and friends.⁵ Corrie’s body was stilled, imprisoned by effects of those strokes, but her spirit, by faith, was free and vibrant as ever.

That kind of faith is what helps overcome torment and whatever has isolated and imprisoned anyone in the mad cycle with food addiction and issues. Where the body says, This is too exhausting, too taxing, the spirit can will another step. Where the mind says, I can’t go on, I can’t deal with this, the spirit enables going on anyway, pushing through regardless.

Faith, we see in Hebrews, is the thing that got a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1) through all kinds of dark valleys and shadows of death. Faith is what, when the body fails and mind falters, gets you over a hump, up a hill, and ahead of what is better left behind.

TRIGGER TALK

How to Trigger a Taste for God

So you see now how faith practices help you be more fit in mind, body, and spirit. Here are the best ways I’ve seen (and experienced in my own life) to trigger those practices so they become habits—and the habits become your lifestyle.

•  Start the day with God. As soon as you wake, ask God to go with you hour by hour, to direct your thinking away from self-pity or anything self-serving and toward what’s right and good. Ask Him to guide your choices.

•  Meditate upon Him. Sit somewhere quiet to let go of racing thoughts and focus. Still yourself to release other desires. Close your eyes to shut out distraction and help you look within. Think upon a word, or certain words, for instance, a phrase from the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:9–13: “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your name”) or the names of God (Counselor. Redeemer. Provider.). Repeat these words or phrases, in your mind or aloud, for several minutes. Say them slowly and deliberately, breathing deeply and staying focused, letting go of self-analysis and instead focusing on the words of God.

•  Deepen your relationship with God. Make dates to spend time with Him daily. Start by getting to know who He is, His character. Read devotionals and books of daily meditation on Him that will help you fall and stay in love with Him and worship Him. Some of the books that helped me most are the daily readers in 12-step programs; and classics like My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers, Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, Streams in the Desert by L. B. E. Cowman (and the updated edition edited by James Reimann), and The Battlefield of the Mind Devotional and The Confident Woman Devotional by Joyce Meyer. The book that helped me most, giving me spiritual food for daily living, is Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ by a seventeenth-century woman, Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon, commonly known as Madame Guyon—this slim but meaty book helped me fill up on God rather than food. Her book A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, available in many forms, even free online, also helps you practice in very practical ways how to have a conversation with God anywhere, anytime, and be in His presence—and it leads to another way of plugging in to the power of the spiritual solution. The Life Recovery Bible with commentary from David Stoop, PhD, and Stephen Arterburn, MEd, is helpful too, including additional model perspectives in devotionals, serenity prayers, and encouraging reflections from and profiles of people in recovery.

•  Pray. Just as one bite of a chip can lead to eating the whole bag, one prayer triggers many. Keep a conversation going with God through the day. Be deliberate. Pray at appointed times: before meals, upon leaving work, as you go to bed. Use the structure of the Lord’s Prayer as a guide: Address God and acknowledge His goodness, His holiness. Ask for His will for this day. Tell Him what you need. Thank Him for help you believe He will deliver. Ask for forgiveness of things done and left undone. Ask Him to help you forgive others, and for guidance and wisdom to get through the next twenty-four hours. Thank Him for His goodness.

•  Feed on the Bible. Read Scripture like you eat a meal, not in snippets or as a snack, but as a full course, a story, a letter from God to you. It means making time in your day, as you would for a meal, to read a section of the Bible, not just a verse. Choose one chapter or several. Ask: Who is this about, for, from? What happens or is said? What does this mean for me? How can I use this in my life today, this week? A wonderful tool on getting the most from your Bible reading is Kay Arthur’s short book How to Read the Bible (Harvest House), which offers five helpful practices in fewer than 180 pages.

The fascinating thing is faith can actually help your body survive what it says it can’t. Faith can help your mind process and handle what it says you shouldn’t.

HOW BELIEF AFFECTS BIOLOGY

So exactly how does it work? Can one’s faith and the practice of it really create physical, mental, and emotional change? Can belief enable you to overcome eating issues, get healthier in every way, do anyway what your body and mind may signal they cannot?

Yes! By God’s design there is a science to the soul, and belief does affect biology.

For fifteen years, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, M.D., and therapist Mark Waldman looked into this and helped pioneer a whole new field called “neurotheology.”6 They studied brain scans, interviewed thousands of people in surveys, and analyzed how people depicted God in drawings, plus what happened in those people’s brains as they engaged in how God showed up to them on a page in their art and in their everyday lives.

Their discoveries, detailed in their book How God Changes Your Brain, are electric, literally visible. Newberg and Waldman show how pathways in the brain “light up” when people pray, worship, or even talk and think about God. The more you use a part of the brain encountering religion, they explain, the more blood flow it gets and the brighter red in color those parts appear on brain scans. When you engage, exercise, and feed your spirit, visible effects show in your head and through your body.

Believing Builds up Brain Pathways

For starters, when you even think of God, certain pathways in your brain actually grow, enlarge, strengthen, open, and activate your thought processes and bodily behavior. That’s what the researchers mean, in addition to what shows on the brain scans, by those pathways “lighting up.” These pathways respond to religious practice just like body movement makes the heart pump faster. There’s a direct connection between the body and thought processes and the brain, an unmistakable influence. Your body and mind are definitely affected by the matters of your spirit, and the very act of believing, in and of itself, changes brain structure.

One of those effects or changes brought about by belief shows up as a kind of power—power that heals and helps you in every way.

In a way, it’s sort of like a placebo effect. You know about placebos. People fighting disease or illness can be given a placebo, a pill or treatment with zero therapeutic property and still get better, heal, or experience less pain simply because they believed in the medicine. Yet the medicine itself offered no power. The belief in it did.

The act of believing in a loving God seems to activate the same kind of power. People who carry out spiritual practices based on their beliefs handle disease and illness better than those who don’t.7 That’s not to say believers in a good God don’t get sick, die, or suffer. It is saying that the science shows how the very act of believing God is good, and that His promises will help you in this life and beyond it, ushers in more ability to fare better physically and mentally. Sometimes believers did well by experiencing peace of mind and spirit amid the physical punishment of illness and disease, sometimes by possessing serenity in spite of suffering, and, yes, sometimes with improved health and healing.⁸

Isn’t that encouraging?

If people who believe in a fake treatment get positive results by the act of believing alone, imagine how much more you can expect to receive when you focus your belief on the Almighty God who, regardless of whether you believe in Him or not, holds the power to give you every breath you take.

Prayer Powers Your Brain Up and Down

Practicing such belief gives you more of this benefit and power as actual brain structure is changed. When you pray, for instance, the frontal lobes of your brain take the lead to deliver literal brain power. Those frontal lobes govern your ability to focus and concentrate, so praying activates the same brain passages that help you find clarity and be more mindful, deliberate, engaged, and thoughtful. Praying powers up the brain to think clearly and sort through things.

Prayer also calms your brain in the very best way. Deep, intense prayer engages the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that gives you orientation to space and time. When you pray fervently and feverishly the parietal lobes essentially power down, creating a euphoric, ethereal state. This enables you to feel loosed from a situation, able to rise above the circumstances. Your body’s relaxed, your mind is opened and unencumbered, and you’re freed from what might otherwise paralyze you emotionally.

Meditation Fosters Memory, Decision Making, Calm, and Compassion

The brain is activated even more by meditation. If the very word meditation makes you think of people in yoga pants sitting in a circle and chanting “om,” that’s only one picture.

For meditation, one person in the study may have used Eastern religion techniques like what you envisioned, and terms like “silence the mind” and “breathe deeply.” But others used what we typically do as Christians in our devotional times—what Jesus, the prophets, disciples, and ancients used to think on to connect with God. With this type of meditation you:

•  separate yourself from distraction by going to a quiet place. Jesus often withdrew to the lonely places and wilderness for time with God.

•  still your body and thoughts. David, the shepherd-king who wrote a whole book of psalms and meditations, said in Psalm 37:7 how good it is to find God in stillness.

•  think intently on God, dwell on Him, connect with Him (Eastern religions might suggest more vaguely to think on “things higher”). The prophets, Jesus, disciples, and many others throughout the Old and New Testament constantly and consistently talked to God through prayer, whether it was silent or spoken or written or sung in praises and in music. They strove to keep Him ever present in their hearts.

•  ponder deeply, relish the experience of connecting with the Maker of the universe. Brother Lawrence, a fifteenth-century monk in Paris, talked about experiencing God in simple, almost rote tasks of service performed as prayers and done in love—in everyday tasks such as washing pots and pans in the kitchen or repairing sandals and shining shoes.9

Thirty minutes of meditation practices a day, for as little as eight weeks, created actual changes in brain structure. One study showed the frontal lobes of people’s brains bulked up.¹⁰ Another showed the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of neural tissue, not only thickened, but folded more, a process called gyrification.¹¹ Both changes increased brain power. The more the frontal lobes of the brain bulked up and the more gyrification that occurred, the better the brain became at processing information, making decisions, and forming memories.

Other things happened in meditation too. A unique central neural circuit in the brain was switched on, enabling social awareness, empathy, and compassion, while also subduing destructive feelings and emotions.

HOW THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF HELPS YOU

This couldn’t be better news for people fighting food issues. Once you decide to finally confront a food addiction and face the triggers, you must make all kinds of new decisions. You’ll need to think clearly and be able to process a lot of new information for a new life. There will come a time when all the guilt and shame you’ve felt by hiding those binges, all the torment of carrying that weight, all the confusion and pain of dealing with the emotional issues that drove you to overeat to begin with, will seem too much to bear. You’ll long for peace. You’ll need to learn all new things about self-care, compassion, and being kind to yourself.

All this can overwhelm you … unless you know you have God on your side, until you realize tuning in to Him will help you in every way. By His design, He gave you things you can do to power up the brain, engage your best emotions, soothe your soul, and rely on Him where you can’t rely on anything or anyone else.

Deb discovered this with her first phone call, taking those first steps on the road to recovery. She thought she needed to go right to work on the things regarding her body and maybe her mind, her emotions. But instead we talked about things of the spirit.

“The body can fail and your brain can falter,” Deb said, as if trying on an idea that finally fit. “But your spirit can overcome. That is so encouraging, because I called you knowing my physical and emotional limitations were huge. I guess I was hoping you could give me some sort of diet pill or prescription or something to make everything better. Frankly, I’ve tried so hard for so long to change on my own, and I keep going back to the fast food and the desserts. I keep on with binges. My body has failed and my brain has faltered. I can’t trust my emotions. I can’t do this alone.”

We don’t need to have our lives in order to go to God. We need God to help us get our lives in order.

None of us can.

We are not meant to face this life, and all its challenges, alone. We are meant to face every moment with God by our side. We are meant to call on Him for help and use all the tools He gives us, designed for us. We are meant to know His promise, His love, and the unique master plan He has for each of us. A plan that cares about food and relationships and health, but is bigger than all those things put together. “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you,” He says (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV), “plans to give you hope and a future.”

Deb sighed. “I know that about God,” she said. “I know He’s good, and He loves me. It’s why I’m so ashamed. I’ve messed up so much.”

We all have. We all do. But we don’t need to have our lives in order to go to God. We need God to help us get our lives in order.

This is the challenge, especially for those of us battling addictions, and those of us who have latched on to this idea through untrue religion or wrong thinking, that we have to comprehend. We’ve somehow believed we have to clean up our acts before God will love us. Nothing could be more opposite of the truth. If we could get clean, get fixed, find healing, stop the madness, be complete, and attain perfection without God, we would have already. But no one has, and no one will.

God loves us anyway, in spite of, and because of, just who we are. It’s why He made sure, even though we may make bad choices, we can overcome them by His design. He’s made us able to be strengthened by our belief in His power, and to experience the power of that belief. He has given us a way to become stronger and more whole by practicing our belief in His unconditional love and grace. He knows we’ll succumb to a cupcake now and then, and maybe not just one but a dozen or twenty at a time. He knows we’ll struggle with self-worth and guilt and shame. He doesn’t expect us to get our act together before coming to Him for help. He just wants us to pray, meditate upon His Word, make time each day to simply be with Him and enjoy Him, and tell Him our troubles. In doing these things, in practicing our belief, there are benefits, both biological and spiritual.

With all the things you’ll learn about in this book regarding how to live that plan, keep coming back to this spiritual solution!