Part 2: Salt, Sugar, and Social Media
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Part 2: Salt, Sugar, and Social Media
A personal essay about how and why I quit
When we were newlywed, my husband used to say to me, “Your family lives to eat, but my family eats to live.” I couldn’t really argue with that statement. There’s truth to it, but I would add that in my family, food doesn’t just grab our taste buds; a meal is an event of laughter and deep conversations. It’s sharing memories and trading recipes. It’s a chance to catch up on the family news and marvel at how much the babies have grown. It’s an opportunity to gather in a circle, grab the hand of the person next to you, and pray. Yes, the food is delicious, but it’s mainly a valid excuse to be together because…you gotta eat.
The food I grew up eating had lots of salt and flour. I would venture to say that just about every meal had to have these two very crucial ingredients even to be considered a meal. Breakfast, seasoned eggs, and a stack of pancakes. Lunch, a ham sandwich on sourdough with a bag of chips. Dinner, Sulbury stack, mashed potatoes, and greens. But here’s the problem; now that I’m older, I just can’t eat salt or flour like I used to. Each of these examples includes foods that I haven’t had in years because, in 2015, I discovered that gluten makes me mentally and physically sick, and salt has the potential to send me to an early grave.
While salt and gluten are my frienemies, my husband fights the sugar menace. His memories of baking go as far back as age six, when his mother taught him how to make cookies. This connection with baked goods and desserts takes him to a place of comfort and love. The problem is he loves sugar, but sugar doesn’t love him back. While sugar is the bait, diabetes is the trap. Though he has not been diagnosed, it runs in the family.
Our issues with certain foods haven’t been entirely ignored, but they certainly haven’t been our first priority. After all, there’s work, school, soccer games, band rehearsals, tutoring sessions, church ministry, business opportunities, family trials, traveling, vacations, celebrations, and emergencies. The calendar of things takes us away from planning healthy meals to searching the cabinets and asking, “What do you want for dinner?”
As I mentioned in my previous post, I ended 2022 in a whirlwind of stress and anxiety fueled by social media. Add to that high blood pressure, and you’ve got the perfect storm for disaster. Stress causes high blood pressure, which causes anxiety, and anxiety causes high blood pressure, which causes more stress. It’s a trap. But at the start of this year, God moved us to make the decision to go on a forty-day Daniel Fast and to give an offering beyond our tithe. We also committed to reading God’s Word together once a week. Through fasting, praying, giving, and reading, I got my peace back, my marriage back, and my health back!
We knew after week one of fasting that our first step needed to be how we shopped. No longer did we reach for boxed meals and processed sauces; instead, we spent more time in the produce section. We searched and found recipes that fit within our criteria and stayed committed to making healthier choices. One of the greatest discoveries we made was homemade hummus which we now eat weekly. (It’s so much better than store-bought). Because we cut out many foods that were high in sodium, I was able to determine which foods my body could and couldn’t handle. I started to make note of certain fruits and vegetables my body liked. I was also able to find out very quickly the positive impacts of cutting out processed meats. It was personal, educational, and life-changing.
Was changing our diet hard? Yes. Were we hungrier than usual, absolutely? (Except for my son. He was allowed to eat meat because he’s a teenage boy. He fasted the internet, though). Were we perfect at it? No, not at all. But what fasting did was create a culture of discipline in our household. Dying to our desires and saying no to certain foods spilled over into other areas of our lives. The effects were different for each of us, but for me, fasting food gave me the self-control I needed to kick my bad social media habits.
If you’ve used social media as long as I have, there are two deeply rooted feelings about quitting; one, you’ll miss out on something, and two, you’ll lose all of the great posts you've written. But as I was fasting, I looked up from my phone and found that I wasn’t missing anything. God showed me that with my family, friends, and clients, I had more than enough connections and engagement. He taught me to focus on meaningful connections and to trust Him for just the right future clients. To calm my worry about losing posts, I copied my most significant posts to a Google document. Afterward, I was free to deactivate my account without feeling as if I’d lost everything. Maybe one day, I’ll take the next step and delete it for good. The most important step I took to untether myself from social media was to keep my commitment to daily prayer. Becoming more proficient in prayer canceled my craving to control and led me to the peace that social media could never fulfill.
Overall, with the help of the Holy Spirit, I was able to reclaim that peculiar gift called self-control. It helped me to stop and pay attention to the little choices I often didn’t take time to think about in day-to-day living, like making lunch versus grabbing anything eatable at the cafe or praying versus worrying or communicating with the ones I love versus scrolling. Praying and fasting helped me to pay attention to the present moments in life before they become a blur of weeks, months, and years.
Will I maintain the strict diet of the Daniel Fast? No. But I now recognize the Holy Spirit's power within me to control what and when I eat! Will I stay away from social media for the rest of my life? I’m not sure. What I do know is that social media wasn’t really the problem in the first place. It was a crutch I used to quiet my mind from all the stuff in my life that I could not control. Social media no longer has the power to steal my time, peace, and connection because I’ve put prayer back in its rightful place.
The scale now displays a number I haven’t seen since I was newlywed which has had a dramatic effect on my blood pressure. In fact, my blood pressure came down so much lower than usual that my husband laughed at me for taking it multiple times back to back because I just didn’t trust the numbers I saw on both of my BP monitors. The mental and spiritual benefits of fasting are also praiseworthy. As a family, we’ve read and discussed the books of Joshua and Acts, and we're currently reading Romans; Glory to God. My anxiety no longer has permission to hijack my peace; Hallelujah. I’ve honed in on my ability to use prayer and self-control when everything feels out of control; Praise God. And my husband and I have made a concerted effort to nurture our relationship by way of the Spirit with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control; Thank You, Father.
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Part 2: Salt, Sugar, and Social Media
What a great read. I resonate with so many things you said. God called me to fast too and so many things were revealed during that time. Fasting is a way of abstaining from things that are harmful for us. We usually consider this just to be food, but there are so many other things like you mentioned, social media being one of them.