Waste Not Want Not

This page is all about being overweight. My mother calls it middle-age spread, but there’s more to it than that.

In my case, the tendency to be overweight has a number of roots, partly ancestral and partly ways of thinking that I was brought up with. So, in tackling this, I was mostly dealing with generational sin and ungodly beliefs. On point of note: as of writing this, I am not super-slim, though I have lost some weight. I am still a lot heavier than I really want to be, but the trend is gradually downward. The reality is that losing weight is not as high on God’s agenda for me as other things. It’s not that God doesn’t care, it’s just that there are other things he is tackling in me at the moment, though I fully expect that I will reach a level that is much more healthy than I am now.

On the generational side, my father’s mother was quite plump, and my father at one time had tended to follow suit. She was very fond of cooking and making jams, and so on. I remember when we used to go and visit, that there was always plenty of very nice food. She and her husband were in the catering business and had a hotel before they retired. Before that, he had been a butcher. Though I can’t be certain, I believe there was a food addiction behind this. At any rate, I prayed through the standard prayers, forgiving my forbears for passing on the tendency to overeat, and renouncing the sin of food addiction. That was easily dealt with.

When I was at school, I was as thin as a rake. It is possible that I was actually undernourished at boarding school when I was 12, which was during a critical growth period. Though I was tall for my age, I never became as tall as people expected from my size as a child. What used to happen is that I would starve during the term time, and then come home for the holidays and eat and eat and eat to make up for it. This pattern of behaviour carried on until I left school. In fact it carried on afterwards, and because there was no term-time, I just carried on putting on more weight. I am now a full 1½ times the weight I was when I left school, and I’m no taller.

I was on what some people would call the see-food diet: see food and eat it. I have never been into sweets and junk food, but when food is on offer, I had the tendency to just eat and eat and eat without restraint. This would be a particular problem at parties (though I never went to that many, or it would be an even bigger problem). With a large amount spread out, I would have no concept of what was a sensible amount to consume, and just become completely stuffed.

The feast-and-famine cycle was one root behind the issue, but there was another. At prep. school it was compulsory to eat everything that was put before you. It was drilled into me form a young age that it was a deadly sin not to leave a clean plate. Behind this was a kind of war-time mentality that food was in short supply, and the phrase “waste not, want not” was often quoted. This lead to a compulsion to ensure that everything was always finished up. I can remember at home, it would be said about left-overs that such-and-such “needs finishing up”, and I would often oblige as the human dustbin. My parents were brought up during the war, at it was strongly impressed on them that food must never go to waste. They were always very pleased when I finished a meal with a clean plate, which I always did.

There were several ungodly beliefs behind my way of thinking, and the standard ungodly belief prayers were prayed on each on them.

Ungodly belief: all food must be eaten up, or something terrible will happen. Godly belief: the God who loves us supplies an abundance to meet our needs, and he sees it as better that I leave food that is too much than I consume it to the detriment of my health.

Ungodly belief: the food that is set out before me needs finishing up. Godly belief: most food that is not finished can be put in the fridge and left for another day.

Ungodly belief: I have to eat all I can get. Godly belief: I can choose to eat just the amount that I need to satisfy me, and leave the rest for somebody else or another day.

Because of the compulsive nature of having to eat everything in front of me, and because food addiction seems to have come down the family line, we concluded that there was demonic oppression involved in this area too. So we drove out the demon of compulsive eating.

So how am I now with respect to all of this? There are two aspects: the habit and the compulsion. The compulsion is certainly gone. I really don’t have to eat all that is before me. But the habit is deeply ingrained, and it is a challenge to break completely. I have to admit that it is easy to fall back into the habit of another, and another, and another, particularly if something is very more-ish. However, I do have the ability to choose not to and I like to think that more often than not I do choose to eat a sensible amount in the face of abundance. I’m still working at it though.