Commentary: Filling up on spirituality can help your waistline

When my wife was a teenager, she became very concerned with her weight. But her mother told her not to worry. Why? Because she knew her daughter was too astute to let her weight get out of control.

What that meant to my wife was that her mom was reminding her that she had a deeper understanding of her identity as being more than just physical. She had learned in her Sunday school that she was a child of God, and so she understood that issues of weight had a spiritual dimension. She could demonstrate what the Bible calls “dominion” over her circumstances.

Why is my wife’s story important today? Because, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity continues to be on the rise and is now found to be a significant factor in many urgent public health issues. Obesity rates in the U.S. are among the highest in the world.

While people continue to look for answers to obesity by identifying economic conditions and analyzing food quality and quantity, progress remains elusive. This means that people are looking in other directions for an answer to what controls the need for excessive food consumption. And some are beginning to conclude that filling a mental and spiritual void is key.

But how do we turn from the need to fill a void with food to filling that void with spiritual sustenance?

We can get some counsel from the Bible, like my wife did.

Jesus advised, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink... Is not the life more than meat?”

This doesn’t mean we can just eat whatever we like. Instead it points our thoughts away from too much focus on what we consume — whether that means overeating or being overly conscious of what we eat — to our spiritual identity.

And I find a quote from someone who loved and understood the Bible, author Mary Baker Eddy, to be especially helpful in showing how to do this.

She wrote of God: “Divine love corrects and governs man.” And, “Love inspires, illumines, designates and leads the way.”

Holding to the idea that an all-encompassing and ever-present divine love is always directing our path can combat feelings of purposelessness or powerlessness. These thoughts of divine love satisfy our longings and become the basis for filling that spiritual void, in a way that never runs out, never goes stale and satisfies the hungry heart.

Christian Scientist DON INGWERSON lives in Laguna Beach. He is a media and legislative liaison with the church.