Article November 2, 1998 Issue

FREE FROM FEAR OF FOOD

Louise M. Snead

During my freshmen year in college, I began to adopt an extremely rigid lifestyle that included a strict diet and a daily, rigorous physical workout. Within a five-month period, my weight dropped to an alarming point for a 5 feet 8 inch nineteen-year-old. The abnormality of my weight was indicated by the loss of my menstrual cycle as well. Yet even though I wore a size four or six, when I looked in the mirror I would think, "I'm too fat."

I was battling with fear—fear of the power of food over my life. But, at least, I was battling. During the three years this condition remained, I prayed for a higher; more spiritual sense of balance and dominion. I plunged deeper into my spiritual heritage as a child of God. And slowly I began to glimpse more clearly what Mary Baker Eddy points out about how to bring out one's natural beauty and well-being. She writes in Science and Health, "The recipe for beauty is to have less illusion and more Soul, to retreat from the belief of pain or pleasure in the body into the unchanging calm and glorious freedom of spiritual harmony" (pp. 247–248).

After graduation, I spent a month seriously studying the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's writings. During this time I realized that as a complete, spiritual idea of God, I could not possibly be without His daily provision. God's spiritual nourishment would feed me. As a result, there was no reason to fear food. Rather, I could be grateful that food had no power either to injure or to cure. I didn't have to bow down to a material scale either. In fact, I disposed of my scale. This statement was becoming more real to me: "The human mind acts more powerfully to offset the discords of matter and the ills of flesh, in proportion as it puts less weight into the material or fleshly scale and more weight into the spiritual scale" (ibid., p. 155).

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