On October 30, 2014 my husband
and I went to the Land Transportation Office to get our new driver’s licenses
as they had expired. A medical examination was completed and I was horrified to
discover that I weighed 65 kilos (143 lbs). I felt really bad.
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| Left: November 11, 2014 (photo taken after jogging) Right: January 13, 2015 (photo taken after making better food choices for a couple of weeks) |
I felt bad because I had
lost all form of control over what I
ate and why I ate in the first place.
I had never let myself go hungry and
I often used food to comfort me when I was stressed or bored. John Piper accurately says that “eating is not the anesthesia of sadness,” yet even when I
was happy and contented, I would still eat much more than my body needed to survive. In his chapter
on fasting in Celebration of Discipline,
Richard Foster explains:
Psychologically, that sort of thing is spoken of a lot today, especially in regard to people who have much pain in their lives. We would say they “medicate” their pain with food. They anesthetize themselves to the hurt inside by eating. But this is not some rare, technical syndrome. All of us do it. Everybody. No exceptions. We all ease our discomfort using food and cover our unhappiness by setting our eyes on dinnertime. Which is why fasting exposes all of us—our pain, our pride, our anger.
