In 2002, the National Center for Health Statistics under the governance of the Centers for Disease Control conducted interview surveys of 31,044 adults to discover the frequency with which these people used Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) to supplement their health care. An estimated 43 percent of those surveyed said that over a one year time frame, they used prayer at some point for personal health.
Many dieters in weight -loss programs which emphasize the spiritual as well as the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the individual experience success through prayer. Why does prayer seem to lead to weight-loss success?
Prayer is communication with God. The battle to maintain or lose weight through wise dietary choices sometimes seems like a lonely struggle. But for some communication with God is like sharing your difficulties with a best friend, one who listens to all of your words without interruption.
Prayer temporarily removes you from the moment of temptation and causes you to focus on something besides the food you were contemplating. Meditation can have the same effect. Talking to God turns your focus from the food to the one to which you are speaking.
When you pray for help with your diet, you are asking for support to resist temptation. Just knowing there is support can give you strength to move past the temporary urge to consume unnecessary calories. Prayer can prompt you into a different course of action. Weight loss programs often stress the importance of having support for a diet to be successful.
Many dieters who combine prayer with changes to their eating patterns have smaller or larger degrees of faith that they will receive an answer to prayer. When you pray, the faith or belief that someone higher than yourself loves you and desires you to be healthy may prevent binges.
Prayer acknowledges that you no longer want food to be a slavemaster over you. Food is a tool to access the necessary energy to carry out the day's responsibilities. Food should never be in control of the dieter. Prayer ends food's powerful control over your life and allows God to have the control over your most vulnerable area.
Prayer is a positive action. It is not just wishful thinking. Prayer can be an affirmation of your desire to overcome temptations to eat an unbalanced diet or overeat. A positive action reinforces a positive attitude. This has been discovered in individual case studies of patients with chronic diseases.
Prayer reinforces the belief that with an all-powerful God in control, all things are possible. It allows you to believe you can have victory over your food urges. When you pray, you reaffirm your commitment to your short term and long term goals.
Stress can cause you to crave starchy foods like pasta and bread. The reason your body longs for these foods is because they stimulate the body to produce serotonin, the "feel-good" chemical. Prayer can reduce stress by encouraging relaxation. When you are relaxed, the body no longer senses the need to produce serotonin and your craving for starchy foods like potato chips is reduced.
When you pray, you clear your head and refresh your mind. A carefree mind enables you to find the strength to conquer challenges, even those bad food choices encountered throughout a busy day.
Prayer seems to be so much a prescription for healthy living that studies continue to show a correlation between faith and physical well-being. For many dieters who use prayer to resist food temptations, the proof is in the prayer.
