To Eat and Be Filled

I approached my recent vacation with a little bit of anxiety about food. The last few decades of my life have been marked by oscillating cycles of weight gain and loss, of being fit for a while, and then having the mass slowly return on a rising tide of IPAs and ice cream.

Going to the beach isn’t exactly the best place to go midway through an effort to constrain one’s once again increasing girth. One might think that being vegetarian would help, but let me assure you that it does not.

Sure, I’m eating a veggie burger, but it’s hard to feel that vegetarian virtue when I’m getting it with a fried egg, fried mushrooms, cheese, and a side of fries the size of the average rabbit.

I’m back to pushing myself to exercise more, which is good for me, and paying more attention to what I eat, mapping out my daily calorie counts against the medically determined expectation for what a man of my height and age needs. In kilocalories, or what we just call calories, that’s around 2,450 a day to maintain life.

The average Spaniard takes in around 2,600 calories a day. The average Japanese, 2,100. The average American? 3,700.  We eat thirty percent more than we need.  And it shows.

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. population is technically overweight. The diet and weight loss industry in this country is a $135 billion dollar enterprise, one that was recently upended by the arrival of GLP-1, which is on track to hit 65 billion in sales this year, with nearly 12% of the population of the United States currently using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 agonists to constrain and suppress appetite. It’s clearly something that I’m not alone in struggling with. We consume too much, and exercise too little, and when you’re surrounded by an endless groaning table of synthetic deliciousness, it’s hard not to yield to that siren song.

Here in this country, we clearly have trouble with food, trouble coping with our fear of of absence and the presence of consumerist "abundance."   Rather than taking just what we need, we seem unable to constrain ourselves. Are we fearful we’ll not eat tomorrow? Are we soothing some broader anxiety about our place in the world, or our futures?

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The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.

The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.

But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.

They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.

How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.

The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.

The Amazing Miracle Jesus Diet

It's been a year since I took a hard look at myself, and decided that my ever-expanding girth was starting to become an issue.

Oh, sure, I was far from obese.  But at five nine and somewhere between 178 and 180 pounds, I was feeling my mass.  I'd been rail-thin growing up, so I really didn't ever worry much about it.  But as I aged my way into my forties, my metabolism was slowing.  I felt more and more lumbery and cumbersome, not to mention cumbery and lumbersome.   I was at the point where it was getting to wear on me.  I didn't feel healthy, and my capacity for self-delusion wasn't anywhere near enough to mask my increasingly barge-like profile.

Plus, there was that picture of me in a wet swim shirt at a church event.  Oh, the humanity.

I had always hated the idea of dieting, particularly succumbing to one of the endless fad diets that seem to cycle through our collective consciousness from year to year.  Plus, I'm cheap.  Me, pay money for a diet plan?  Feh.

So I came up with my very own super amazing miracle Jesus diet that will work for almost anyone!  And it totally, totally worked!

I'd write a book about it, but I'm not sure the word count would pass muster with any sane publisher.

On page one, it would say:

Eat less.

Somewhere in the middle of a sea of blank pages, it would then say:

Exercise more.

That'd be it.  Those four words.  Nothing more.  That's all that'd be in that book.

In fact, hold on.  Let me write it, and publish it.

Just a sec...upload file...get ISBN...approve...review...yeah...uh huh...done!

There we go!  Ah, self-publishing in the Amazon era.  Gotta love it.

Eat less, exercise more.  For a few people, this won't work.  I'll admit that.  Some folks have major metabolic issues, or congenital disorders, or deeply-seated food addictions.  My heart goes out to them.

But for so many human beings, it's always been that straightforward.  You don't need to pay anyone anything, dangit.  I mean, jeez, if anything should save you a few bucks, it's losing weight.  You're buying less food, eh?  And yet we manage to botch even that.  Pills and shakes and books and memberships and blah blah blah, spending enough money trying to figure out how not to eat that we could make a huge dent in global hunger. 

Seriously.  The United Nations has estimated that to insure that no human being would starve, it'd cost $30 billion a year.   At the same time, here in America, we throw somewhere between $20 billion dollars and $60 billion dollars every year at the "weight loss industry."  Yeah, I know, that's a pretty crazy range, but this "industry" is not like building cars or growing corn.  Is a diet soda part of the "weight loss industry?"  What about gym membership?

It's a wildly squishy number, but the low end, most conservative estimate would go two thirds of the way to ending hunger for humankind.

So as millions starve, we try to figure out how not to eat ourselves to death. 

Human beings are insane.  We really are.

Just eat less, and exercise more.  Do those things.  So simple.

Whichever way, using my sure-fire method, I managed to drop from around 180 to the mid-150s, right smack in the middle of the healthy range for my height.  Took me six months of eating less and exercising more.  What, you think it happens quickly?  Why would you think that?

Was I occasionally hungry?  Sure.  I was eating less.  Of course I got hungry.  My body had adapted to consuming more calories than I needed.   Hunger is what it feels like when your body is spending more energy than you're consuming.  Which, if you're trying to lose weight, is kinda the goal.  So I'm hungry.  So what?  I wait until my next meal, and just feel hungry for a while.  I'm hungry now, as I write this, because it's going to be dinner time in about two hours.  Whoop dee doo.  I am not starving.  I'm just peckish.  

Did I consume anything I felt like consuming?  Of course not.  You can't do that.  I cut out the empty calories first, cutting waaay back on delicious hoppy beverages and pointless industrial-bag-o-carb anxiety-snacking.  Then I dropped the caloric input from basically healthy food to a level that would consistently result in weight gain.

As the weight slowly began to come off, I picked up the "exercising more" part.  I didn't go crazy, or spend a dime.  I walked more.  I started using that old hand-me down weight set more regularly.  That was about it.  Nothing magic, nothing complicated.

Just eating less, and exercising more.  So simple.

Which is where, in a wildly tangential way, is where the Jesus thing comes in.  Jesus never said a blessed thing about weight loss.  Not a thing.  The whole idea would have seemed absurd to him.   But he did teach in a very specific way, about a very specific path.

Of all of the great faith traditions in the world, nothing should be easier than following Jesus.  Love God.  Love Your Neighbor.  That's it.  In those words rests the whole of the One Sacred Law, the completeness of what you need to do to be a walker of the Way.  It is wildly simple, as pure and potent as a tumescent singularity.  It is so easy, so light.

But we prefer to lose ourselves in the complicated.  We prefer a mess that we can hide in.

Nothing comes harder for us than the simple.