by Bill Cowley
October 8, 2006
It has been almost two years since I stopped eating meat and started the journey toward raw foods. As I reflect back on this time, which started with a two week stay at The Creative Health Institute in Michigan, I realize that, more than anything, this period has represented a beginning toward a new outlook and lifestyle. While there is still much to learn and accomplish with my diet, I would like to share where I stand at this time.
I don't get ill symptoms in the same way that I used to get them. Before, I was very susceptible to colds, sinusitis, flu, headaches, and joint pain. Now I do not get colds, sinusitis, or the flu. When such symptoms begin to appear, they quickly dissipate and never fully develop. Instead, my energy level falls, and I get some mucus lodged in my throat.
Other times I get this mucus when my diet slides and I get a buildup of mucus from the foods I have eaten, as the mucus is produced by my body to envelope the hard-to-assimilate proteins and fats it has been given. In fact, many of the improper foods that contain hard-to-digest proteins and fats produce a congestive paste that is itself congestive. I also get mucus in my throat as a result of it breaking up and becoming dislodged from my tissues. This is long-standing impacted mucus that comes loose over time as a result of an improved diet.
However, while I don't get sick like I used to, I do still get headaches and joint pain. They are very predictable, and recur according to the success or failure I have in maintaining a correct diet of fruits, vegetables, and nuts and seeds. When I give in to the cravings for foods other than these, or when I get cravings that lead me to eat too much of even the right foods, headaches and joint pain are for me the eventual, inevitable result.
My body, though far from being totally free of toxic matter, has nevertheless - as a result of changing to more easily assimilated foods - gotten cleaner to the point that it now has the ability, due to increased metabolic energy, to immediately confront and eliminate the foods that it before would have to store because of a lack of metabolic energy that resulted from the continual difficult digestion of foods incompatible with human physiology.
This newly formed process of immediate confrontation and elimination, though beneficial in the long run, causes me short-term distress and gives me the headaches and joint pain that seem so debilitating, if only for a period of days. My body, instead of being forced to store foods because of being digestively overtaxed, now immediately lets me know that the wrong foods have come into it.
The body reacts differently as a result of effective dietary change because symptomatic illness and disease vary according to the level and location of toxic residue in the body. It is our areas of weakness and prior injury that often become points where we feel the effects of these toxic residues.
It is, in reality, a matter of cause and effect that is not understood because it seems an oversimplification. Those in the medical community, since they traditionally focus on symptomatic alleviation, deal unnecessarily with complex diseases and cures because the control group - the human population - on which they base their hypotheses and conclusions is in the process of creating diseases that are largely hidden from doctors by time and the body itself.
Thus, doctors generally view disease as an exterior attack rather than an interior process. We, as well, are deceived into believing that disease is mysterious and complex, as we are all locked into a scenario that is both long-standing and pervasive. This deception, far from being an overt act by doctors, is in fact accomplished spiritually. As the Bible tells us (Ephesians 6:11), although we struggle in the flesh, it is not against the flesh that we struggle, but against spirits in high places. Human society - the result of the developed sum total of human history - is merely the means by which such spirits, under Satan's control, accomplish such persuasive training. As a result, because we allow ourselves to be locked into this control by our own selfish desires, we come to believe that it is the developed history of the world by which we are to live - and this history includes belief in the types of food that have been developed over the course of thousands of years to feed increasingly sedimentary populations.
Food has been, and still is, used as a way to gain power by controlling its means of production and distribution. As this avenue has developed over the course of time, those who profit by controlling the means of food production exert influence politically by their wealth, and socially by information and advertising, so that that their influence is not undermined.
The individuals and groups in control become deceived into believing in both the importance of their power and in the rightness of their views. When confronted with truth, whether from others or in their own hearts and minds, they circumvent this truth in order to maintain the power they have secured. They become both deceived and deceiver.
In fact, such a scenario relates not only to food, but to any avenue by which worldly wealth and power are secured - whether it comes from land, air, food, or water, and whether it involves construction, instruction, politics, the military, information services, or other various means. We are all both affected by this scenario and take part in it as well, to the extent that we develop personal agendas that are related to it.
Worldly agendas, then, can, and do, affect every part of our lives; but nowhere has this effect become more sinister, pervasive, and subtle than in the foods we eat - particularly in the enslavement we have to cravings for foods that putrefy within us and poison us because they are not suited to human physiology.
Cravings are, without a doubt, the biggest hurdle I have encountered to creating optimal health. I believe that these cravings are both physically and spiritually driven. Physically they are connected to the toxins that my new diet causes to be released into my bloodstream, and spiritually they are connected to the things of this world that I continue to possess or desire to possess.
These physical and spiritual motivations are, in effect, so interrelated that they are virtually one and the same, and I must overcome both if I am to overcome the food cravings they fuel. Gluttony and greed have the same master, and I am not free of that master. It will be only through focusing my faith on Christ and putting on the full armor of God that I will defeat them.
Nothing is more basic to human existence than physical sustenance. My life, as well as yours, revolves around this reality. The path that God provided for us in this regard is clearly laid out in the book of Genesis. However, even when the day comes that I obtain the clarity that a cleansed body supplies, I know that love, not just clarity, is the ultimate goal; and it must be obtained spiritually, not physically.
Moreover, where the works that love entails are reflected in the physical, they originate in the spirit by the grace of God. The effect of proper food is to maintain the purity and clarity of the physical temple God has given us. Our temples are the means by which we accomplish the spiritual work God has for us in this physical world. The spiritual world itself is a new challenge altogether. Where our dietary quest has the wonderful payback of optimal health, great vitality, and spiritual and mental enlightenment that clarifies knowledge, Satan's legions still work to overcome all of this by yet again fueling our cravings.
The “gloves come off”, so to speak, because while we are no longer deceived by our physical diet, we can still be tempted. Clarity, no longer deceived, is now threatened by temptation. Jesus knew this threat well in His own life, for as clarified as He was, Satan still tried to tempt Him by granting Him the power of this world. Satan does no less to us. This selfish being, granted dominion over the things of this world because of both his selfish sin and ours, still has ways to persuade us against our clarity if that clarity is not grounded in non-doubting faith in Jesus Christ. Satan, then, can use even our clarified body against us. What we have to combat him is the spirit of Christ, as we are told that we are to live not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Our spiritual food now becomes more important than our physical diet; but it was really that way all along.
As a final note, I believe there are people who, though deceived by diet, may be as clarified, and perhaps in some instances more clarified, in spirit than those of us not so deceived. They are so because they have so much of the love of God in them that it counteracts the deceiving power of Satan. We have all known people like this. Though deceived, their hearts live in Christ; and He grants that their hearts are not hardened or deceived, though their minds might be.
Thus, it is greater to have a non-deceived heart that loves others in Christ than it is to just have a clarified mind and body through diet. The sum total of our sin as humans precludes knowledge and wisdom to anyone in all areas, but our individual faith in Christ guards against the unpardonable sin of a hardened heart. Where God pardons us, He also decides to whom He gives specific gifts and abilities. All else we must take to Him in prayer.
