ICHABOD, THE GLORY HAS DEPARTED - explores the Age of Apostasy, predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, to attack Objective Faithless Justification, Church Growth Clowns, and their ringmasters. The antidote to these poisons is trusting the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Isaiah 55:8ff. Romans 10. Most readers are WELS, LCMS, ELS, or ELCA. This blog also covers the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Left-wing, National Council of Churches denominations.
My father said, "When you start to drink coffee, do not add sugar or cream. Then you will never have to ask for it or look for it."
When a long-time friend stopped by, we talked about craving food, being overweight, and how to address the problem. He went home with two Fuhrman books.
I continue to lose weight, now down to 195 pounds. Yesterday, I ate a large bowl of spinach, two or three apples, some prunes, two big slices of fresh pineapple, a piece of chicken, a Southern biscuit and later - a sauce-pan of garbanzo beans, mushrooms, tomato paste, broccoli, almonds, and blueberries.
Fuhrman is right - sticking to his common sense foods makes us hungry for it, not craving the self-destructive standard presentations of salt, grease, sweeteners, and food-fats. Prepared food is bound to be
heavily salted,
loaded with vegetable fats,
sweetened with corn syrup or artificial sugars,
low in nutrition.
Another irony, which I thought about, long before Fuhrman, is the promotion and deception of modern medicine.
The first and primary advice of a physician is, "Try this pill" and if that does not make a difference "Try this pill with the other one." Every man-made medicine has side-effects. Until WWII was over, almost all medicine was herbal. The manufacture of a mold, penicillin changed that.
I am not condemning modern medicine but the simplistic urge to try something, thanks to the endless promotion of the pharmaceutical companies. My doctor did not say, "Change your eating habits, fatso" but listed a number of pill products that are even worse than insulin. Yes, insulin has to be used in many cases. However, a diabetic expert inhaled sharply when one medicine was named, the same one used when a member died suddenly - many years ago. That broke her husband's heart.
My doctor did one good thing for me. He smirked when I said I would lose 20 pounds, doubtless because such a miracle had not happened yet. I wanted to make it 30 pounds.
Craving - Not Crazy
The big question asked was, "How can I stop the craving?"
Every marketed diet will perhaps take off weight until the starvation demons insist on the old ways again. Craving is powerful.
Several things have worked for me since Christmas. Craving blockers are:
A huge pile of greens with a tiny bit of dressing.
Garbanzo beans combined with asparagus, peas, mushrooms, onions, green peppers, almonds, tomato paste, broccoli, and various mixed vegetables.
Two big apples, or two slices of pineapple, or berries and almonds, or walnuts, or two oranges.
I had to give up ice cream, almost all desserts, excess slices of bread, cheese (a fat), hard candy, and other delights of the taste-buds but ballast on the human body.
