Excerpt from Let Food Be Thy Gift
Health and Wholeness
We not only need to have an honest conversation to stop the health epidemics that we are experiencing in our country, but we will have to work together to return to common sense and a basic understanding of who we are and how we are naturally designed to strengthen the health of our whole person. Instead of individually reducing ourselves to fit into an industry formula that requires us to focus all our time, energy and money on getting results (results that are completely deficient of what we need to be good human beings), we will need a community of men and women working together to create the space to accurately identify and diagnose the root issues our health problems.
Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammation, gut disease, autoimmune conditions, obesity and most cancers are usually the direct result of what we choose to do and not do on a daily basis for many, many consecutive days, months and years. Likewise, depression, loneliness, disconnection, boredom, and hopelessness can also be a result of a missing daily practice of nourishing our spirits, hearts, minds and bodies through loving relationships.
Will we continue to turn a blind eye to our nutrient deficient diets and our self-sabotaging habits, and ask for a pill to fix us? Will we continue to focus our attention toward some fragmented piece of information that won’t make a bit of difference in why we refuse to do the most basic things to strengthen our health? We are literally consuming ourselves to death every day. Yet, we build bigger hospitals, take more pills and continue to follow a broken weight loss formula that feeds our addiction to food and prevents us from knowing, accepting and loving our whole person
It is time we create the space to return to the basics and rebuild a community willing to put people before profits and to stop pushing them toward products, programs, and formulas.
We deserve the opportunity, responsibility, encouragement and tools to treat, reverse and prevent diet-related disease, sickness and breakdown. We don’t have a chance to change our own health or reverse a health epidemic until we find a way to tell the truth about who we are and how we are designed to live -every single day- breathing, listening, asking, looking and moving to nourish our health as both individuals and as communities.
This is our chance to rest and remember who we are and how we are naturally designed to be healthy, whole, holy and human. Being healthy is not a lifestyle, it is a commitment to the growth and development of ourselves, our neighbors and our world. It is a life of living how we are designed to be givers and receivers of truth, love, hope and joy.
DeeAnn Dean 