Escaping the Counterfeit Health Message

“Is this it, God?… Am I going to die?…”

I listened with intense interest as my friend Lori shared what she’d experienced in the last few months. We’d all been praying so earnestly that she would get the answers she needed for the health issues she’d been dealing with for years, and which had brought her nearly to the point of death. Little did I know when I met her two years ago that I’d already begun my own spiral down the same path, leading to the very same issues, and that God would give her the answer we both needed…

On July 21, 2020, I was slouched down on my bedroom floor, feeling completely defeated and praying for a miracle. I’d just eaten a very simple lunch, foods I’d consumed countless times with no ill-effects, which now felt like they’d poisoned me. It sat in my stomach like a rock, refusing to be digested. My energy was sapped, and my brain was in such a thick fog that I couldn’t even form sentences for the study I was trying to write up. According to all the food purists of our generation, I was doing everything right. My step-dad often commented on the way I ate, declaring that he was sure I’d live to see 120. But no one else was seeing the effects yet of what I knew to be true, that somewhere along my genuine journey for optimal health, I’d veered off track—going beyond God’s simple, practical health principles. Now I feared that I was losing the ability to process food entirely. I was at my wits end, with no idea what to do to repair my damaged digestive system.

How I Got Here 

My first year of college (2013) was when I’d first started heeding the conviction to treat my body as God’s temple in what I was consuming. After all, our food provides the building blocks for this temple. I began to acknowledge the steep rise of chronic physical and mental illnesses in our society, and seeing them develop in some people close to me, I was motivated to do all I could to keep myself healthy for my loved ones and for the work God had for me to do.

I’d had a pretty typical North American diet growing up, but as a teenager I started eating a excessive amount of sugary, processed foods. It never affected my weight, and that seemed to be the only health marker anyone cared about. The only fruit I ate regularly was to top my ice cream sundaes, and almost every day of high school included a trip to the vending machine for a Twix bar and a bag of white cheddar popcorn. Oh, and my favourite food group was probably cheese. Though these habits didn’t affect the scale in my case, I certainly did pay for them. I’d come down with colds/flues multiple times each year, even in the middle of summer, which would last up to two weeks. My sinuses were always inflamed, so that I could barely ever breath through my nose, and I dealt with skin issues as well. So when I began making changes in college, they were certainly positive changes, and the reason they were positive was because the conviction was coming to me from God’s Word. I realized that I was missing out on the abundance God had provided in nature for our health and enjoyment. I began to slowly transition away from heavily processed foods to more fresh, whole foods, learning to cook for myself in the process. I began studying the diets of other cultures which had much less incidence of chronic disease, and realized that the North American diet places a much greater emphasis on processed foods and animal products than other nations, where these items are more of a delicacy. Seeing as dairy was present in almost every meal I consumed (and I basically drank milk instead of water), I decided to slowly transition away from using it. Within months my sinuses completely cleared, and my skin was also doing much better. A few months later I was convicted to cut back on meat consumption, and experienced positive effects from that as well—most remarkably in my mood and energy level. I’m sure that the much wider variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, and grains that I was introducing to my diet at the same time played a huge role in supporting healthy, happy brain hormones as well. I didn’t completely give up animal products, but they became more of a treat—very occasionally eating a dish that included eggs or butter, or having a small piece of salmon. But as I moved towards a largely plant-based diet, some loved ones expressed concern that I might lose more weight. I’d lost about 20 lbs after a surgery in 2012, and hadn’t yet been able to come back up to the healthy weight I’d been at before. Surprisingly though, on a plant-based diet I was actually able to gain healthy weight for the first time in many months. I believe my gut had become much less inflamed, and able to absorb the wide variety of nutrients my body needed and was now happily receiving.

For the next few years, my health was thriving. I never got sick and had plenty of energy. The way I ate was simply fueled by love—love for God, for others, for the creatures we’d be given dominion over, and for the health of my body. But in my fourth year of college, a very stressful situation came into my life, which I simply wasn’t mentally prepared to cope with. I started experiencing all the symptoms of adrenal and thyroid dysfunction—hair loss, fatigue, brain fog, constantly cold extremities, depletion of hormones, and high anxiety that led to panic attacks on multiple occasions. Blood tests confirmed low thyroid hormones, and my doctor recommended some supplements and lifestyle changes, one of which was to cut wheat out of my diet, as studies had shown that a gluten intolerance could affect thyroid function in some people. Though I’d basically lived on cereal, bagels and pasta for most of my life with no issues, I figured that maybe something had changed in my body, and that it was worth a shot to help my thyroid heal as quickly as possible. At the same time, God brought a program to my local church for recovering from depression and anxiety, which revealed several other areas in my life that needed to be addressed, including more regular physical exercise, seriously increasing my water intake, and, most importantly, filling my mind with God’s truths and learning what it really meant to cast all my cares upon Him. Looking back, I believe it was these areas where change was truly needed, and benefited me greatly, but unfortunately I decided to remove gluten from my diet as well. I made the mistake of assuming my doctor’s recommendation was right for me without going to God for confirmation.

Eight months later I’d jumped into the life of full-time ministry, and had my thyroid hormones retested, coming back at great levels. Now that I felt much more stable and at peace in my relationship with God, and would be living in other people’s homes, I wanted to try reintroducing wheat to my diet for the sake of not having that burdensome dietary restriction. But to my dismay, my body did not react well. I became extremely bloated, my digestion seemed to halt to a stop, and my skin broke out—reactions to wheat that I’d never had in my life. I began researching “gluten-sensitivity,” and decided that this must be what I had. I would try to reintroduce wheat a few other times in the coming months, but the reaction would always be the same.

If I knew what I know now, I would understand how extremely intelligent our bodies are in only producing the enzymes necessary for foods being currently eaten. Also, our digestive tract can only support the life of bacteria who eat the food that we are eating! Therefore, if a food is eliminated for a time, it must be slowly reintroduced while the body enables itself to digest it properly again. The same is true of foods that have never been eaten in the past, and are introduced for the first time. Some discomfort in this process should be expected, and not feared, and does not mean that the food is bad, or that your body has any particular issue with that food. This is not to discount the existence of legitimate food allergies, but I had been tested, and had none. The internet is teeming with talk of food-sensitivities, and I had effectively jumped on that bandwagon, believing that I “just couldn’t handle wheat anymore.” This became the first item on my list of “fear foods,” which I identified as a threat to my health, and avoided like the plague.

Over those years as I moved around and lived with different families (who were all plant-based, by God’s amazing grace), I was introduced to many plant foods I hadn’t eaten much of before, and several of them also seemed to be associated with negative reactions (surprise, surprise!). Some were clearly not digesting well, while others just seemed to make my skin break out. One specific interesting case was coconut, which seemed to give me a blinding headache. As I read more about food sensitivities online, I was convinced that that skin reactions and headaches were also related to inflammation in my gut, and that I needed to cut any item that produced a negative reaction out of my diet for the time being. And this is where I need to make the important point, that none of these sporadic eliminations of specific foods were led by conviction from God. I was listening to my flesh, and my flesh was becoming fearful of these foods, supposing that they were harming my body. Therefore these dietary restrictions were motivated by fear, and not by power, love, or a sound mind (II Timothy 1:7). It’s amazing what fear can do when given even the slightest bit of power in your mind. Suddenly I started perceiving that I was reacting to foods I’d eaten for years, and had never reacted to before. And so my list grew longer and longer…

I’m sure any plant-based person reading this list can feel my frustration, and feel the burden I was placing on my hosts to try to cook for me without these ingredients. I assured them that I didn’t mind preparing my own food, but I knew in my heart that it was a blessing to prepare meals for all to enjoy as a family, and to make my own meals would be to rob them of this blessing. So they largely refused my offers, and in the kindness of their hearts did everything they could to accommodate my restrictions, but I felt like a terrible burden. The passage from Luke 10 rang in my mind over and over, reminding me that I was not living by Christ’s instructions for the life of a missionary…

Luke 10:2-8 “Then He said to them, “The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest. … Carry neither money bag, knapsack, nor sandals … But whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ And if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest on it; if not, it will return to you. And remain in the same house, eating and drinking such things as they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not go from house to house. Whatever city you enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you.”

I tried to ignore it, and my hosts insisted that I not feel bad about it, but I carried deep guilt and often blamed myself for not having enough faith to just praise God for whatever food was put before me and eat it with thankfulness.

I actually did have one experience where I was invited to a couple’s home for lunch, and the wife had prepared a soup with hundreds of teeny tiny balls of wheat pasta in it. Not wanting to offend her by refusing the meal she’d clearly put much love into, I just prayed for God to protect my body and ate it gratefully. In fact, I barely focused on it at all as I was eating because I was so caught up in sharing stories of all the miracles God had been working. Low and behold, I suffered no ill-effects from that meal. I excitedly shared this story with several people, but instead of continuing to walk forward in faith, I quickly fell back into my fearful ways. Oh how easily we take our eyes off of God and forget what He’s done for us… I continued developing greater and greater anxiety towards meals, always wondering if there would be anything I could eat, or if one of the dreaded ingredients would be hiding inside a dish and cause me harm.

The astonishing thing was, as I cut out more and more of these foods that seemed to not digest well, my digestion only became more sensitive. Soon I met families who were only eating two meals a day, and had been thriving on that schedule for years. I decided to give it a try, but it seemed that my digestion had slowed down considerably, so I got full very quickly and found it difficult to eat enough in two meals. This produced a whole new type of anxiety, worried that I wouldn’t get enough calories to maintain a healthy weight. So I would end up stuffing myself, and face intense brain fog, sluggishness, and bloating afterwards, seriously effecting my productivity. I still had intense cravings for food in the evenings, but decided that I needed to bring these cravings into submission, as a test of self-control. If they all could do it, I should be able to do it! Oh my silly pride…

I flip-flopped back and forth between two and three meals as I lived with families on different schedules, and confused my body even more. But it became difficult to eat a third meal at all, because my slow digestion caused me to still feel uncomfortably full by the time I went to bed, even if I only ate a very small portion around 5 or 6 pm. So I convinced myself and others that “I just do better on two meals.” I wouldn’t admit that I usually fell asleep dreaming of food, and anxiously envisioning the breakfast I would be eating the next morning. My body had given up trying to get my attention with physical hunger signals at night, since these take more energy for the body to produce, but my mental hunger was still screaming at me.

Somewhere along the line I started researching and implementing various types of herbal treatments, cleanses, detoxes, colonics… Thinking that my bloating and slow digestion must have been caused by a terrible microbiome imbalance in my gut. Sometimes I would feel short relief after the treatments, but it never lasted.

In this research I soon discovered the villain that everyone is blaming for digestive issues these days—Candida. A fungus that exists in all of our bodies, but that can begin to cause issues when it grows out of control. The question is—What causes it to overgrow? And the world’s pervading answer is—SUGAR. And not just processed sugar either, but any sugar, including any foods that turn into sugar. Therefore anyone who desires to be rid of their Candida overgrowth is encouraged to remove all sugar sources from their diet—cane sugar, honey, maple syrup, dried fruits, fresh fruits, starchy vegetables, beans, and most grains. In case you didn’t notice, that includes the entire diet given in the Garden of Eden (a.k.a., the most perfect foods for mankind). Yet, I was desperate for relief, and it seemed that ingesting these sweet foods would especially trigger the bloating. I also had the classic white coating on my tongue that suggests bacterial overgrowth in the digestive tract, so I figured it was worth a shot. My wonderfully supportive fiance offered to do this “Candida diet” with me, which I knew was a huge sacrifice since fruits are his absolute favourite food. At the end of two weeks, I wasn’t bloating anymore, but it felt like my digestion had almost halted to a complete stop, making it very difficult to continuing enjoying meals. Above that, something just felt so inherently wrong about not eating fruit. I knew God was telling me that this diet was not according to His plan, but I just didn’t know what else to do.

Shortly afterwards I met a lady who’d done the strict Candida diet 30 years ago with pretty good success, but 10 years later all of her symptoms came back worse than before. That was when she found “The Mucus-less Healing Diet,” which promotes transitioning away from all mucus-forming foods, which apparently slow down elimination. According to this theory, the only foods that do not form mucus in the system are fruits and vegetables. Therefore, a diet consisting of only fruits and vegetables keeps things moving swiftly through your system, not allowing for any food to get stuck rotting or fermenting in your gut, which was apparently the “real cause” of Candida overgrowth. At this point I was craving fruit so badly that this idea sounded about a million times better than continuing on the Candida diet, so I decided to slowly add fruit back in over the next few weeks and then try it out. I had high hopes that it would get my digestion moving as well. I mean, how could it not? It was a diet consisting entirely of fiber!

Eating only fruits and vegetables for several days was a very interesting experience. You know, eating a large enough quantity of these foods, you actually do feel quite full and satisfied. I would eat a massive plate of all kinds of different fruits in the morning, my body rejoicing that there was finally some form of sugar coming in, and at lunch I would eat both raw and cooked vegetables to my heart’s content. However, though I felt like I was eating a lot, I didn’t realize that I was consuming an extremely low amount of calories each day. I’ve never been one to care about or count calories, so it simply wasn’t on my mind. I figured as long as I was eating enough to feel full I’d be fine. However, it still wasn’t helping my digestion, which confused me to no end.

Finally a friend recommended a salt flush, which is drinking 1 L of warm water first thing in the morning with 2 teaspoons of Himalayan pink salt dissolved in it. I did some research and found many well-known health sites recommending it as well. The theory is that your body will not want to absorb all that salt at once, so it will send the mixture straight through and flush out everything else in the process. The reason I’m thankful for this suggestion was not because it worked for me, but because it didn’t. Nothing happened. My medically-minded brain sounded the alarm loud and clear, that my body had just happily absorbed 2 teaspoons of salt all at once. That quickly woke me up to the fact that I had a deficiency. So I added back in some grains, nuts, beans, etc., but surprise, surprise, I found that this little “Mucus-less diet” experiment had only slowed my digestion down even more.

I then returned to Canada to be with my family, which presented a new series of dietary stresses. Not only did I have my long list of food sensitivities, wheat being the most difficult of all for sharing foods with my family, I’d begun wondering if pesticides were to blame for my problems, and started wanting to only eat organic as well. The family I’d lived with in the states bought mostly organic, but my family hadn’t adopted that habit, and now I found myself developing anxiety towards any non-organic foods, and don’t even mention GMO’s…

Now, again… Having a healthy mindset towards these things is everything. Supporting organic farming as much as possible is awesome, and I still do that and encourage it! But becoming fearful of non-organic foods is bondage, because frankly, it’s unrealistic in our society to avoid all pesticides all the time. At this point I was blatantly disregarding precious health counsel that I knew in my heart to be true.

“Do not think that your food will injure you; do not think about it at all. Eat according to your best judgment; and when you have asked the Lord to bless the food for the strengthening of your body, believe that He hears your prayer, and be at rest.” (Ministry of Healing, p. 321, 1905)

“The less the attention is called to the stomach, the better. If you are in constant fear that your food will hurt you, it most assuredly will.” (Christian Temperance & Bible Hygiene, p. 101, 1890)

I had also finally “gotten used to” eating two meals at our friends’ home, but my family ate three. The evening meal was the only one everyone came together for, and I didn’t want to miss out on that blessing. So I shifted my meal times to 11 am and 6 pm so that I could eat with them, but my digestion was so slow that eating in the evening was almost unbearable. The food would still be sitting in my stomach by the time I went to bed, and I’d wake up feeling nauseous and still full the next morning. I tried switching to 8 am, 3 pm, and a small snack-sized meal with my family in the evening, but the “three meals” felt like overload as well. Then I stumbled across what I thought would be my final breakthrough—Food Combining. This handy dandy food combining chart revealed “the source of all my problems,” declaring that fruit needed to be eaten completely on its own. The theory is that since fruit digests so quickly, when eaten with other foods it will get slowed down in the GI tract, fermenting, promoting Candida growth, and throwing a wrench in the whole digestive process. But, if eaten alone, it can move through the system unhindered and be properly processed. Feeling like I had once again “found my answer” I began eating a copious amount of organic fruit for breakfast, with nothing else (talk about expensive, by the way…). Then lunch was my “big” meal, followed by a very light dinner in the evening.

At this point, though I felt that I was eating a significant amount of food (and it surely looked to my family like I was), calorie-wise I was really only eating one proper well-balanced meal a day, with a morning and evening “snack.” On top of that, I had upped my typical daily half-hour of intentional exercise to at least an hour, hoping that it would help get my digestive organs moving as well. I even started doing some exercises with heavier weights, intentionally tearing muscle to be rebuilt, which (I would find out later) was the last thing my body was equipped to handle at that time. I soon noticed my face looking slimmer than usual, and eventually forced myself on the scale, to find out I’d lost at least 10 lbs since being home, and was the lightest I’d been since my weight had come back up after my surgery. It was only then that I started acknowledging the obvious signs of hormone depletion in my body. My hands and feet were cold constantly, my hair was falling out again, and I never felt like I could get quite enough sleep (though I felt fairly energetic throughout the day, misinterpreting the adrenaline of my body’s fight-or-flight mode for actual energy).

This brought me to July 21, 2020. Sitting on the floor in my room that day, feeling terrible after such a simple meal, I finally threw in the towel. “God, I give up. I’m done. I don’t know what else to do. Please just help me.” And that was all He needed—for me to release control. He reminded me that I had a phone call scheduled with Lori, which I’d almost forgotten about. I’d heard Lori was doing so much better, and having related on so many of our health issues, I felt a greater urgency than ever to hear her testimony.

She’d been dealing with digestive issues for 11 years, going down the very same path I found myself on, eliminating more and more foods, putting her body through all kinds of cleanses, detoxes and restrictive diets (paleo, keto, GAPS, candida, raw… you name it), and only finding her digestive system to be growing weaker and weaker. She is petite, 5′ 2″, but I was shocked to learn that she’d gotten down to 79 lbs this spring, barely even able to digest fruit. At that point she went with her young daughters to stay at her mom’s house. Her mom sat down with her to put together a meal plan, and she simply burst into tears saying, “Mom…. I can’t eat anything. Everything poisons me.” She spent the rest of the day in prayer, with no idea how to move forward, thinking “Is this it, God?… Am I going to die?…” And suddenly a word came to her mind. One she’d come across once in the past, but had no idea what it meant.

Orthorexia.

She started immediately researching and learning about orthorexia—an eating disorder that has nothing to do with desiring weight loss, but is essentially defined as an unhealthy obsession with “healthy” eating. Someone may start out with a perfectly healthy enthusiasm for eating nourishing, wholesome foods, but somewhere along the line their dietary choices and behaviours begin to be driven by a fear of the foods deemed to be harmful. This anxiety alone (as we read in the quotes above!) is enough to disable the function of the digestive system, causing more and more foods to be eliminated from the diet because they are deemed “undigestable.” As the diet begins to have less and less variety, many good bacteria in the microbiome die off, and specific digestive enzymes stop being produced. The body slows down the digestive process to try to compensate, spending a longer time trying to absorb all it can from what’s being eaten. Thus the feelings of fullness, bloating, and constipation start causing fewer calories to be consumed. As the body goes into caloric deficit it begins neglecting functions like daily cellular repair and hormone production in order to keep vital organs operating. Basically, the body goes into survival mode, holding on to every incoming calorie for dear life. Intense food cravings are often experienced, but ignored, and if anything considered unhealthy is consumed, it produces intense anxiety that usually leads to compensating behaviours in an attempt to reverse ill-effects, which may include fasting, juicing, cleanses, additional exercise, detox supplements, enemas, etc., as well as feeling the need to repent and seek forgiveness from God.

As Lori shared all this with me, God was speaking through her, revealing the true cause of everything that had been taking place in my body over the past few years. Part of me wanted to cry with relief, but I just couldn’t stop smiling. I still had no idea how to overcome this, but at least I knew what I was dealing with. It felt like blinders came off and I saw clearly all of the anxiety and fear that existed in my relationship with food, and how it had not only been affecting my health, but my relationships with others as well. And above that, it was affecting my relationship with God, because I was not trusting Him to bless my body with the very things He had created to be nourishing food for me. My choices were no longer being driven by love, but by fear.

I John 4:18 “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.”

Romans 14:23 “He who doubts is condemned if he eats, because he does not eat from faith; for whatever is not from faith is sin.”

Romans 8:1 “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.”

Through fear and doubt I had been feeding self-condemnation, which could only promote death in my body. I was walking according to the flesh, not the Spirit. When the revelation hit me that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my stomach, and nothing wrong with all of these foods I thought I was intolerant to, a massive weight fell off my shoulders. Lori continued to tell me how God had freed her in the same way, and told her to drop every extreme restriction the world had convinced her was good, and just get calories into her body ASAP, because she was starving. She came out of the bedroom and excitedly declared, “Mom, I know what’s wrong with me, and I’m going to get well.” She learned she needed a minimum of 2500 calories daily to properly fuel her body for damage repair, weight gain, and resetting her metabolism. Because her digestive system was so weak, she was impressed to first focus on adding as much liquid calories as possible, so she stocked up on fruit juice, coconut water, plant milks, protein shakes and vegan yogurt (which she’d never bought before because of the sugar content). Besides that, she committed to eating whatever meals were prepared for her, and eating to her heart’s content. She was going to be well.

On the day of that phone call, Lori was 6 weeks into recovery. She had gained 14 lbs and all of her digestive discomfort was gone. She was enjoying food for the first time in years and eating freely with her family. The energy and brightness I could hear in her voice was a 180 degree change from the last time I’d seen her. She said she felt that she’d been resurrected from the dead. Several days later she hit her first milestone, weighing in at 100 lbs, and her husband and her celebrated with vegan cake and ice cream. Now, at 10 weeks, she has continued to steadily gain healthy weight and feels like she finally has her life back.

There aren’t words to fully express my gratitude for how God used Lori’s experience and testimony to save me from continuing down the same path. I hadn’t reached the point that she had, but I was surely on my way there. But now I am free, and I’m so grateful. I’m grateful that I can share more foods with my family again. I’m grateful that I’ll be able to continue travelling and doing the work God has called me to, trusting in the nourishment of the food He provides for me wherever I go. I’m grateful that I won’t drag my future husband down into this disordered thinking about food. I’m grateful that I can rest upon God’s simple health principles and promises, and be truly strong and healthy for my loved ones. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my experience and help others find this same freedom.

If any of this has resonated with you, I encourage you to reach out. You’re not alone! The enemy has taken God’s simple and precious message of how to care for our bodies, and has created a counterfeit. He has distorted it, complicated it, and created extreme forms of restriction that bring our bodies and minds into bondage. Thousands have bought into this counterfeit and are suffering because of it. It reminds me of exactly how the Jewish leaders in Christ’s day had taken the beautiful gift of God’s Sabbath rest (made for man), added hundreds of their own rules and restrictions to make them feel more holy, and turned what was meant as a gift into a heavy yoke upon the people. The blessing was stolen and replaced with bondage, and the same has been done with health counsel today. And the most clever part of the enemy’s design, is that many who’ve gone down this destructive path and realized the bondage they were brought into, have now swung completely to the opposite side in their quest for freedom, throwing the blessing of God’s counsel out right along with the enemy’s. “Throwing the baby out with the bath water,” so to speak. This is why we’ve been impressed to create a Facebook group called Free Indeed- Restriction Recovery Support Group, as a place for sharing testimonies, resources, encouragement, and supporting each other through the recovery process, while sharing God’s true, simple health principles that have been buried under all the rubble. If this is something that sounds like it would bless you, please join us! (Link below!)

It’s been interesting to share with people that I’m in “recovery” right now, since most didn’t discern that there was anything I needed to be recovered from. I’ve always been slim, and even 136 lbs (my recent lowest) at 5′ 11″ technically isn’t quite “underweight” (though it’s right on the edge), but that’s why weight isn’t the thing to focus on. My snail-like metabolism and plummeting hormones were my body calling out for help. So if yours is doing the same, it’s the most loving thing in the world—to God, to others, and to yourself—to stop what you’re doing and acknowledge these signs. And even as one embraces recovery, weight gain is not the ultimate goal, nor the thing to focus on. The goal is a healed mindset. God doesn’t want us to suffer and stress about food. He wants us to walk in the freedom of trusting our Father, and be strong and healthy for His glory.

So while it might not make sense to those around me that I need to eat 3000 calories a day and prioritize restfulness right now, it’s what my body needs to repair, rebuild, and reset my metabolism. And it’s working! Within two days of basically pumping my body full of fruit juice, protein shakes, and carbs (LOTS of carbs), it was like a switch was flipped on and my digestion started working again, and day 3 was when I noticed the white coating on my tongue was completely gone. I’m now 4 weeks in. My hair loss is slowing, my body is producing hormones again, my hands and feet are warm for the first time in years, and my weight is back up in the healthy range. Oh, and I’m eating every food on my past sensitivities list, with no negative reactions. So I want to encourage anyone who may be resonating with the mental or physical features of orthorexia, but don’t think that they look “sick enough” to embrace “eating disorder recovery.” It is never too early to get back on track. God wants you to feel good, to have energy, and to not be a slave to food.

III John 1:2 “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.”

It’s important for us to take care of our bodies and appreciate the principles God has given for healthy living, but we must keep fear out of the equation. Fear puts us in bondage, and God gave His only-begotten Son to free us from all bondage. We are to live by every word that proceeds from His mouth, not the words of every trending online health forum. If you’re wondering why there’s so much conflicting information out there, remember that Satan is the author of confusion, and lift your eyes to God instead—the Author of peace (I Cor. 14:33).

John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

John 8:36 “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.“

Love & blessings!

Sabrina