What's Holy Eating?

Holy Eating in Brief

• God cares about HOW you eat—not just what you eat.       
• Holy Eating goes beyond “mindful” eating to “soulful” eating—eating with spiritual awareness.
• Holy Eating shifts eating from a self-focused to a God-focused activity.
• Biblical, Kabbalistic and Chassidic sources instruct us to eat with holiness.
• God wants us to be holy, healthy––and trim.
• Holy Eating teaches methods from Kabbalistic meditation & modern psychology to improve eating habits and transform your weight.
• Holy Eating works with any diet and doesn’t prohibit any food group.
• With Holy Eating you won’t “lose” weight, but transform your weight into spiritual energy.

                                                       How to Transform Your Weight

        According to Holy Eating, the answer lies in returning eating behavior to its proper context:  For humans, eating is a spiritual act.  Eating with spirituality involves a recognition that one is partaking of the divine gift of food that comes from God for the purpose of maintaining a healthy body to fulfill one’s life task.  For animals, eating is regulated by instinct alone, and animals in their natural habitat will rarely eat to excess. They do not have free choice in this domain any more than in other aspects of existence.

But when humans lose connection with the spiritual nature of eating, they fall out of harmony with God's will and the natural order of things.  When life was simpler, this connection came more naturally.  With the advent of technology, affluence, and fast food this bond became more remote and tenuous.  Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, renowned authority on addictive disorders, has often said that addictions can best be understood as a futile attempt to fulfill a spiritual void with some physical substance.  Soul hunger can be confused with physical appetite.  We are witnessing an epidemic of what Dr. Twerski calls “SDS,” Spiritual Deficiency Syndrome.  Spiritual voids can be filled only with spirit, so no amount of food is sufficient to satisfy and consumption becomes excessive. 

                                               

Once you adopt Holy Eating, you will shift your focus from physical metabolism to what I call “spiritual metabolism,”---a process that frees you from the preoccupation with food and diets and replaces it with a deeply satisfying connection with God.  You will realize that your excess hunger for food stems from your hidden hunger for spirituality and God.  Spiritual metabolism is both a metaphor and a reality.  Physical metabolism involves chemical reactions that provide the energy and nutrients to sustain the life of the body.   In the realm of what psychologist William James called the “reality of the unseen,” spiritual metabolism creates the nutrients needed to animate and elevate the soul, which in turn interacts with and satisfies the body. As with the mind-body connection, there is a spirit-body connection.

Everyone is familiar with the maxim “you are what you eat,” and that’s true, to a great extent.  Many religions prescribe and prohibit certain foods, and nutritionists have demonstrated that foods differ in their health value.  But once you are eating the right foods, your humanity is defined less by what you eat than by how you eat.  Different peoples thrive on various diets ranging from vegetarian to carnivorous.  For Westerners, bread is a staple, whereas the Chinese depend on rice.  Although a certain balance of nutrients is required, the digestive process is a great equalizer that can take a variety of culinary inputs and transform them into adequate nutrition.   But every great culture has developed elaborate customs that govern both what is eaten and how a meal is prepared and consumed.


                                                                                                 

Holy Eating focuses on the spiritual meaning and the manner in which you eat.  It is not another diet that emphasizes a biological theory about how certain foods will break your food addiction and keep weight off.  Holy Eating begins with God as the prime motivator, not with diets or calories—or even your inner self and willpower. Holy Eating takes you beyond self-management to God-management.  The focus of Holy Eating involves understanding what God wants from you in life, and, most importantly, the way in which God wants you to eat. The path to eternal weight loss is to discover how God wanted Moses and Miriam to eat, and to internalize this attitude and manner of eating.

Religious and spiritually oriented people unfamiliar with Kabbalah will find these traditional teachings new to them, but will quickly be able to appreciate the profound truth they contain.  People following a 12-step program do not draw directly on any specific religion but will find this approach consistent with their spiritual principles.  Holy Eating is especially helpful at Step 11: “[We] Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”  But for most people, this book will reveal an open secret that is typically concealed:  God cares deeply about how you eat.