Concerns about body image often involve efforts to mold the shape and weight of the human form to meet the ever-changing standards of beauty and health. Modifying our diet is often at the center of the struggle to reform the body. Consequently, food either becomes an enemy or an unreliable friend.

Eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote,

Some have meat, and cannot eat,
And some cannot eat that want it;
But we have meat, and we can eat –
And let the Lord be thanked.

Burns’s words hit the mark. For some, eating well doesn’t seem to be a problem. For others, allergies, illness, or fears of the effects of food prevent them from eating the good food available to them. In other cases, low income, unbalanced distribution, poor harvests, or contamination limits the access of many to sufficient quality food.

We all have to eat. So, how should we think of food? Does it control health and determine our quality of life? What has God got to do with food?

It seems to me that when feasts and fasts are mentioned in the Bible, they are seldom food-centered or body-centered activities. Feasting involved celebrating God’s gift of grace, not the pursuit of satisfaction. Soldiers fasted before a battle in order to orient their attention on God. Food decisions—to eat, not to eat, what to eat—often followed a spiritually centered focus on what God is, and what God’s all-powerful love was doing in peoples’ lives. This sort of orienting on God inspired the patriarch Joseph to save a nation from a seven-year famine (see Gen. 41). Elijah rescued a family from starvation (see I Kings 17); Elisha made contaminated food palatable and healthy (see II Kings 4); and Jesus fed a hungry multitude (see Matt. 14), proving that God could meet the human need as the situation required.

Christ Jesus taught us to expect results from turning thought Godward. He said, “Seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink . . . . your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Luke 12:29–31).

So, food—is it a good thing or a bad thing? Spiritually considered, one would have to say it is neither good nor bad. Food, as matter, isn’t a blessing or a curse to God’s spiritual creation. The Discoverer of Christian Science came to some interesting conclusions regarding food. Mary Baker Eddy explained these concepts thoroughly on page 388 of her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and there follows the necessity for another admission in the opposite direction,—that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity. This is a specimen of the ambiguous nature of all material health-theories.” 

Mrs. Eddy’s experience overcoming food challenges, and helping others overcome them, armed her with the understanding that material food could not affect the absolute Life of man. She discussed a few of these cases in the chapters “Physiology,” “Footsteps of Truth,” and “Christian Science Practice” in Science and Health. 

Eddy found that Mind, a synonym for God, is also Love, Life, and Spirit, and that man is Mind’s perfect spiritual reflection. This loving, divine Mind, not matter, has ultimate control over man. The so-called vital processes—eating, digesting, and metabolism—can be redeemed from material influences, and the body will respond naturally and harmoniously, as we yield thought to Mind and reflect God’s love in daily life. In fact, we can put down many unhealthy physical symptoms by being kind and loving to ourselves, to others, to our bodies, and by accepting God’s love and care for us. Neither food nor the human body is our enemy, and we can stop treating them as such. 

Eating and digestion are natural, normal human activities. Obsessing about food—and what one will or won’t, can or can’t eat, or how our bodies will process nourishment—is not. Science and Health says, “That body is most harmonious in which the discharge of the natural functions is least noticeable” (p. 478).

Many years ago, a teenager came to me for help after his parents became aware of an eating disorder. For some time, he had been taking in very little food and exercising excessively. Although he didn’t recognize the problem himself, deep concern was expressed by his sports coach and by the school nurse, who informed the parents that anorexia was rampant at his high school and that several students were under medical supervision. The parents were informed that if their son missed one more day of school—absences because of chronic severe headaches—he would have to repeat the year. He was prevented from participating in sports.

The problem had been hidden from the parents for quite a few months. They thought perhaps his weight had something to do with a prolonged adolescent growth spurt. He had also taken to cooking for the family, but they didn’t realize that he wasn’t eating what he was preparing for others. Once the problem was fully exposed, they took swift action to find help for him, investigating medical options for treatment. Then they gave him the choice of medical care or Christian Science treatment through prayer, which his family had effectively practiced since he was an infant. He chose Christian Science, contacted me, and I took the case.

In the meantime, the parents had a meeting with the principal, the guidance director, the health teacher, and the school nurse, in order to share that their son was having Christian Science treatment, and to ask that they support his choice. They explained that he would be seeing me once a week and would be talking with me daily before school in the morning. The school staff agreed, and was very respectful. The nurse in turn asked for the parents’ support, as she wanted to watch him at lunchtime and to weigh him every week to make sure he didn’t continue to lose weight. The parents accepted this, and at home, they also monitored his behavior with food and lovingly encouraged normal healthy eating. 

At his first visit, we didn’t discuss food, diet, body, or anything related to the diagnosis. To me the issue wasn’t one of controlling food or the body. I knew that divine Mind regulated and maintained the thoughts and the life of man. It also seemed that a lot of spiritual talk would meet with the same resistance as would the presentation of a large plate of food. He wasn’t yet prepared to take it in. So I took the case to God in prayer and listened carefully for how to proceed.

I was inspired to ask him to attend to a small unhappy parrotlet that our family was looking after. This little bird seemed often angry, agitated, and it squawked almost continuously, but it was quite responsive to being hand-fed (actually, lips-to-beak fed). And so during the first and subsequent visits, he fed the bird and I prayed silently. I remember considering one of Eddy’s poem’s titled “Love” in my prayers. The last stanza had particular significance: 

Thou to whose power our hope we give,
Free us from human strife.
Fed by Thy love divine we live,
For Love alone is Life;
And life most sweet, as heart to heart
Speaks kindly when we meet and part. (Poems, p. 7)

From the beginning, I wanted to understand more about divine Love, God, to whom I was yielding all the power to influence this case. I was certain that infinite, all-powerful Love—not words and personal will—would bring about a healthy change and release this young man from his food and body image struggles. Eddy’s poem states that God’s creation isn’t fed by food, but by imaging “love divine”—that is, by reflecting the divine Love that is Life, God. 

I reasoned that both the boy and the bird reflected divine Love and it was this reflection of Love—loving each other and letting themselves be loved—that was feeding them both with the element most essential to well-being. I gave daily Christian Science treatment—prayer that insisted on the fact that divine Love alone was the source and maintainer of this young man’s being and that no power could oppose or limit the impact of healing Love. This Christ-message of the power of Love, witnessed persistently in prayer treatment, was the key to the healing.

First, after only a few visits, the parrotlet’s behavioral problem of incessant angry squawking stopped. It became calm and contented. Not long after, the boy’s mother reported that one evening while her son was raging fiercely against eating his dinner, she left the room and began to pray silently. Her son suddenly became quiet and began to eat. That was the beginning of the end of the destructive behavior. He started eating normally, regaining weight, the chronic headaches stopped, and he soon received medical clearance to resume participation in sports. This marked the end of the eating disorder. 

In fact, the entire situation was resolved within a few weeks. Seeing the dramatic change, the school nurse told the mother that she had never seen this problem overcome so quickly—that anorexia can drag on for years. She was curious about the treatment he received, and the mother gave her a Science and Health. She welcomed having the copy.

We read in Eddy’s Rudimental Divine Science: “Christian Science erases from the minds of invalids their mistaken belief that they live in or because of matter, or that a so-called material organism controls the health or existence of mankind, and induces rest in God, divine Love, as caring for all the conditions requisite for the well‐being of man. As power divine is the healer, why should mortals concern themselves with the chemistry of food? Jesus said: ‘Take no thought what ye shall eat’ ” (p. 12).

No one is obliged to have a dysfunctional relationship with food or the human body. As Love divine is the healer, it also cares for the conditions requisite for man’s well-being in relation to food. My prayer for the world is to so understand the nature of this divine Love’s infinite care that we may ultimately rephrase Burns’s verse to read:

All have meat that they can eat,
And all can eat that want it.
Yes, all have meat that they can eat –
And let the Lord be thanked!