Lose ten pounds in two weeks on our drink-a-shake-instead-of-eat diet. Lose 50 pounds on our magic treadmill. Take our abracadabra pill and watch the bulge vanish. Freeze off or suck out the fat at your local clinic. Chuck the vitamins and minerals in vegetables—just eat meat for a few months and watch the pounds melt away—but then spend a fortune on doctor bills because it made you sick. How may more diet and equipment commercials must we endure to feel guilty enough to tackle the avoir du poir that has accumulated in places too difficult to hide? Weigh loss has become a major industry.
I have a theory. We simply have too much—of everything. Our supermarkets and specialty stores are swollen with multiple brands of every kind of food known to humanity. How many different brands and shapes of pasta do we really need? As a culture, we seem to have an insatiable appetite for something new, something glamorous, something imported from places we would never see. Gluttony clamors for more on bigger pizzas, buffet restaurants where people pile on a mélange of grub all for one price, fast food eateries offering a frenzy of greasy meals and sugar-loaded drinks. And then we are disappointed at fine restaurants where you pay a month’s wages for a meal not big enough to fill a tooth cavity. Sounds nuts to me. Somehow the noise of modernity has overwhelmed our capacity for sobriety and moderation in all things and we need to reclaim it before it buries us.
Missionaries are not fat. It’s just a fact; get over it. I don’t mean the vacation warriors who travel a gazillion miles to lend a helping hand or go to church services and conferences in exotic places, enduring up to 36 sleepless traveling hours to get there, and then schlep their exhausted selves back home after a week or so. You may lose a pound or two, but nothing that won’t be regained, and even then some, when you treat yourself to your favorite hyper-calorie restaurant to reward yourself for your pains. I confess I have been on these short-term missionary trips a few times and I’m not minimizing the value of them to the field or the visitor. Everyone should to do it at least once. But I found a hidden benefit you never read in the brochure.
The itinerant and long term missionary is a different breed. Having met a considerable number of those “laid down lovers of God” who forego many luxuries of home, both large and small, to answer the “go ye, therefore” call repeatedly or for long periods of time, I have noticed that they are lean and generally fit enough to walk everywhere without gasping and looking for a bench to rest. Dragging those extra fifty pounds is punishing when you walk miles to get bottled water. In remote villages, the open air marketplace is the only source of vittles, and selections are limited to whatever is available or in season from local farms. Typically, the menu is highly repetitive and simple. They eat to live, not live to eat. Quite a shock to bloated bellies that fold over the waistband, but here’s the good news.
Drumroll – – – Aha! I’ve discovered an amazing weight loss program that you will not see on TV. Every time I go to remote places on an extended time on a mission trip, I drop at least ten pounds (operative word extended). You get to meet awesome people doing miracles every day; you get to do the “go ye” stuff; and for a bonus, you drop off the unwanted heftiness because your diet and travel is nothing like home. You eat way less, eliminate the snacks, move around in often difficult terrain, and sweat more just by being there. It’s a holistic program–no need to weigh and measure food, no calorie counting, no dragging yourself to the gym since walking is the only way you get to anywhere, and all the while doing what makes your soul and spirit happy. Less really is more. In a few weeks, I’m off to spending seven weeks in Asia. I look forward to coming home different – less poundage and more life.
Copyright 2016 by Eva Benevento. All rights reserved.