I find beauty in a great many things. The ever-changing canvas of the sky, for example, mystifies me. One moment, a deep and abiding blue, the next, a tidal wave of clouds on the horizon, and the next moment the blue is gone—eclipsed by billowing shades of gray. One would think the sun had been swallowed up. But no, it peers out through crevices and creates shafts of light, as if to say, “the blue was not enough and so I called in the clouds in order to paint a prettier portrait.” And all of this experienced on a drive home from some errand I was not fond of.
The tasks involved in living a healthy lifestyle can feel like those errands. Salad for lunch. Again. Elliptical machine of Doom. Again. Walking around the block. Again. Celery instead of donuts. Again. It’s enough to make one chuck in the towel and land in the White Castle drive-thru. Because the sweet reward one grasps between greasy fingers satisfies an itch. The chocolate shake meets a need. The fries and perfectly-dolloped-ketchup bring to fruition a ritual that elicits a certain sense of soul-satisfying comfort. What you crave, indeed!
But I would propose that such rituals are hollow. The food-addicted person experiences the temporary pleasure in the immediacy of that moment, but each indulgence becomes a weight that brings the body low. And not only the body…. For each stomach-expanding experience pierces the soul. The food-addicted person lives to eat but often dies with each bite.
And so we hold fast with one fist to the foods that are killing us while grasping for an inoculation to the waist-expanding epidemic for which we feel there is no cure. We drown and we die. And hope is extinguished with each savory bite. Unless…
…we let go of what is killing us and cling fast to what is good.
I had been “good” for many months when I encountered the cake at work. Beautifully frosted and mostly uneaten, it felt wasteful to leave it there. Alone. Dejected. Forlorn. At least that is how I perceived it. My thoughts had turned traitorous.
“You can eat just one piece. You have worked so hard. Indulge. Go ahead. You deserve it.”
And so I settled in with a piece. But when that piece was gone, and no one was looking, I went back for another. And then another. And then my thoughts, on fire with sugar-laden euphoria, grabbed a box and began stuffing it full of left-over cake to take home. Four hours later, and sick as a sugar-overdosed human being can be, I found myself searching the aisles of Walgreen’s (in despair) for a bottle of ipecac to purge the poison from my body. (Thank God I did not find it). I just felt so helpless.
So how does one let go of that self-destructive behavior yet find a semblance of peace?
We must disseminate the lies from truth, and then forcibly live the truth.
This is not easy. The psychological issues surrounding addiction are buried deep within that squiggly gray mass that resides atop our obstinate bodies. Probing that sponge is like wading into the ocean of our issues. We stick a toe in and immediately withdraw. The water is ice cold! But I would posit that unless we persist, we perish. Unless we confront the why behind our addiction and start slicing off the heads of that beast as it rears and snaps, we will forever be under its power. We may find success for a moment—we may even reach our “goal”—but we will invariably collapse beneath the weight of the chains that bind us. And so…
If we are to rid ourselves of the addiction that is killing us, we must replace it with something else. The heart was not created to be a void. For many, this is the rub to reducing girth. I remember when vegetables and fruit were abhorrent. Lean meats provoked a gag reflex. But I knew the only way to live a healthy lifestyle was to stop consuming foods and pursuing habits that harmed my body—no matter what.
Developing healthy habits was very challenging, but I approached it with the attitude that the change would be permanent. Then I went on an adventure to re-learn how to eat. This is not unlike learning to ride a bike(I’m slow so it took me a REALLY long time to learn). Now, I don’t drink soda, and guess what? I don’t miss it. I do not consume fried foods and I do not miss them. French fries no longer have dominion over me, but there was a time not too long ago that a meal was not a meal unless it contained fries and soda. I spent decades in that dungeon. And I’ll be candid, I would rather cut off my own tongue than go back to that God-forsaken place.
Portia De Rossi describes her struggle with anorexia in the book, “Unbearable Lightness”. Her desire to fit a specific standard of beauty drove her to madness and nearly killed her. Karen Carpenter was not so lucky, and we lost a beautiful voice. Why do we fall in love with the lies? Why do we twist ourselves into pretzels to conform to the ever-shifting perceptions of beauty in our culture?
The lies have power because we are hungry for beauty, and so how we assimilate beauty into our lives is important.
Dean Koontz wrote book called, “A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie”. In it, he describes life before, during, and after his friend. Everything that Trixie was, was beautiful. Her presence forever changed the Koontz’s lives.
“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary.” – Dean Koontz – A Big Little Life
Trixie brought such meaning and joy to the Koontz’s that the loss of her was unbearable. You see, once one has experienced real beauty, a false substitute will not do.
Addiction is ugly. Addiction is a cycle of lies. So in order to find our way out of the ugliness we must wage war with lies by way of beautiful truth.
Truth is beautiful because it sets us free.
Ask the pardoned convict who was wrongfully incarcerated. Or the addict who comes to understand his triggers. I like the way John Owen describes it in “The Nature of Indwelling Sin”, “For a man to find his sickness, and danger thereon from its effects, is another thing than to hear a discourse about a disease from its causes.” It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and learn about cancer, it’s a completely different experience to be diagnosed with it.
Beauty is the help we all secretly long for.
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you might notice that many of the pictures I share are of nature. I am deeply inspired by the beauty in the world around me. We use our eyes to behold and absorb beauty. The intricacies of a cocoon, woven by a caterpillar that emerges as a butterfly is enough to fill the senses with wonder. But these types of beauty are not usually found by the casual eye. We must pay attention to our surroundings. We must seek them out. ANd when we do find them, they are marvelous. We simply have to train our eyes to find them.
The lie says, “Diets are miserable. I will have to eat food I don’t love.”
The truth says, “I don’t know how to make or even purchase tasty, healthful food.”
The lie says, “Salad is boring, vegetables are gross, and lean meats disgust me.”
The truth says, “I can try new salads, vegetables and meats until I find what I like.”
The lie says, “The perfectly-shaped body will make me happy.”
The truth says, “There is no such thing as a perfect body”.
Beauty is never boring.
The truth is beautiful because it is tangible. The truth is our only hope of ever breaking free from addictive behaviors. Once we are brave enough to expose the lies we believe—the lies we tell ourselves and others—and embrace the beautiful truth, the sooner we can begin to experience lasting change.
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