So many people have been yoyo dieting for so long, they’ve given up. They’ve tried everything to lose the weight, but they just can’t keep it off. Well, I’m here to tell you that it IS possible. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

I was intrigued, as I often am, by what I heard on the news the other night. Here where I live in Sydney Australia the government has taken measures over the last few decades to dramatically reduce our road toll. I mean in the last twenty years or so it’s dropped so much, almost by three quarters.

Now that’s a pretty good thing right? Absolutely. Each year there are over a thousand lives being saved just in my state alone because we now have random breath testing so drink driving is way down. We have compulsory wearing of seat belts; we have speed cameras and more police on the roads.

Now these days we take all that for granted but I remember when random breath testing was first introduced, there were howls of protests from the civil libertarians about the invasion of privacy. Same thing with speed cameras, in fact people still complain about speed cameras today.

Anyway the news item was about the fact that our state government has announced that they’re going to spend an additional, I don’t know, a hundred million dollars or so over the coming years with the aim of reducing the road toll even further by another hundred and fifty so a year. A good thing? Saving one hundred and fifty lives per year? Absolutely.

But here’s the thing that intrigues me. While we’re doing that at the very same time the incidents of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and cancer is rising dramatically, so dramatically in fact that the one hundred and fifty lives that we’re going to save on the roads every year pales into insignificance, they’re but a small fraction of the lives being lost to these four diseases.

And there’s very clear evidence that much of the incidences of those big four, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer is to do with lifestyle choices that people are making. Those lifestyle choices are what we’ve been talking about these last few weeks on the program, healthy living to a ripe old age is very much a lifestyle choice statistically for most of us.

Not for all of us of course, not all disease is preventable. I met a woman recently whose husband’s life is wasting away through Motor Neurone Disease; children contract Leukaemia and type 1 Diabetes. So of course I am not saying that every disease is totally preventable through a change in lifestyle.

But we know that heart attack, by far the biggest killer in most countries today, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer were all as rare as hens teeth at the turn of the 20th century and yet here we are today a century later and they’re global pandemics taking countless lives, disabling many people and all because we’re putting the wrong things in our mouths and not exercising. People are dropping like flies whilst at the same time governments are struggling to fund their medical systems that are groaning under the load of this burgeoning health problem.

Whichever way you cut it, whether you look at the cost in life, the suffering, the misery or the economic cost lifestyle diseases, those diseases that Doctors bundle together and call Metabolic Syndrome are exacting a massive cost individually, socially and economically.

And no one seems to be doing very much about it. I wonder what would happen if my state government spent as much effort and money and focus dealing with these lifestyle diseases as they do in reducing the road toll, I wonder what would happen? Let’s lower our gaze for a moment and take a look not at the global or national or state level, let’s lower our gaze and look at our own personal attitudes towards good health.

What, if anything have you decided to do about your health? And coming back to the question I asked at the beginning of the program, how much do you want to have a healthy life, I mean really?

If you’ve been able to join us these last few weeks on the program you’ll have heard me tell you on more than one occasion that I have struggled with my weight for most of my life until just the last three or four years and for most of that time my attitudes and behaviours reflected the very same attitudes and behaviours of governments around the world who by and large are ignoring the impacts of poor diets and lack of exercise on their people.

I simply ignored the problem. I somehow convinced myself that it wouldn’t happen to me. I tried not to go to the Doctor too often so that he wouldn’t order a blood test and tell me how bad my cholesterol and triglycerides and blood sugar level were, so that he wouldn’t tell me that I was heading for a heart attack or diabetes. I simply ignored the problem hoping it would all go away.

Well I guess it would have gone away because I’d have been dead sooner rather than later. I’m just telling you that way it is for me, and the reality I was heading towards. With that much extra weight on my body, twenty five kilograms or fifty five pounds and eating the stuff I was eating, it was going to kill me sooner rather than later. And if you know you’re carrying too much weight, shoving the wrong stuff down your throat and not exercising then my friend I can tell you, it is going to kill you sooner rather than later.

Here’s the problem I had. See I had tried and tried and tried and tried to do something about it but each time I lost a whole stack of weight and yes I’ve lost and then gained 20 kg or 44 lb at least seven times in my life, each time I failed and I’m not used to failing at things. With everything else in my life whenever I’d set my mind to do something I’d always succeeded, even giving up a three pack a day cigarette addiction.

You’ve heard that saying no doubt, “where there’s a will there’s a way” and over the last couple of weeks on the program I’ve been sharing that with you. It took me many months of reading and research to discover that the whole “low fat” diet thing didn’t work, it’s not working across the globe and it certainly wasn’t working for me.

It took months of reading and research to discover that fat wasn’t my problem but in fact the historically unprecedented and dangerously high levels of refined carbohydrates, sugar, white flour and the like that were in my diet, that are in the western diet, were in fact breaking my finely tuned appetite control mechanism and causing me to eat more as well as clogging up my arteries and if you weren’t able to hear those messages you can listen to them all right now at www.christianityworks.com. Please do, they’re there, they’re free and they could help save your life quite literally.

My problem was that I’d lost my will because I’d tried so many different ways that didn’t work and if you’re someone who struggles with their weight and health issues or perhaps you’re married to someone who does or someone else who is close to you struggles with their weight and health I want to tell you that now is not the time to give up on your health, now is the very time to do something about it and the answer is in short, just remove the sugar and the refined carbohydrates from your diet.

Much of conventional medicine, in fact your local Doctor may not be able to tell you that because they’re still clinging to the low fat message which doesn’t work and they’re not up to date with the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the culprit, sugar and other refined carbohydrates.

If your will has waned, if you’ve lost hope of ever getting to a healthy weight, if you’ve resigned yourself to a early death or at the very least serious health problems and disabilities arising from your diet now is not the time to give up. Where there’s a will there’s a way and as I was praying about what to share with you today I really just felt God nudging me in this direction to tell you, “Don’t Give Up!”

If you’ve been bashing your head against a brick wall for a life time, struggling with your eating habits, with your weight each and every day you eventually have to come to the conclusion that all the diets that you’ve ever been on haven’t worked. To quote Einstein: “the definition of insanity is continuing doing the same thing and expecting a different result”.

It is time to try something different, I want to encourage you to try this, get rid of the refined carbohydrates out of your diet. God doesn’t want you sick; He doesn’t want you dying before your time. Remember where there’s a will there’s a way.

A century ago, obesity, heart diseases and type II diabetes were as rare as hen’s teeth. Today, they’re a global pandemic. There’s a reason for that – and part of that reason is that way, way too many people are on a media junk food diet.

Over the past few weeks on the program we’ve been talking about health, specifically your health, the impact of the western diet laced as it is with historically unprecedented levels of sugar and other refined carbohydrates, a diet that’s killing us. But how have we gotten to this point? Why is it that we’re shoving all this bad food into our mouths when in fact we know it’s bad for us?

It turns out that the media is doing a lot to influence that and in fact not just the way we eat but things that we believe and do which often end in pain and destruction. So today I want to just throw the challenge out there for each one of us to think about what we’re consuming through the media and how that’s impacted in our lives? Are you on a media junk food diet?

Lets face it we construct much of our reality through what we see, hear and read in the media and these days the media is filled to overflowing with reality this and reality that. Reality TV shows have become de rigueur on the box at night in many a household which play more like infomercials than news followed by current affairs shows that are so blatantly infomercials that it’s hard to tell where the program ends and the ads begin.

So when it comes to the media you have to ask yourself, what is reality or as Pontius Pilate put it all those years ago, what is truth? It’s this profound and sometimes sinister unreality of the media that we so readily consume that struck me the other day when I was in a TV recording studio.

It was seriously the greenest room I’ve ever been in and that’s before they turn on the Stalag seventeen lights that always have me yearning for the relative comfort and anonymity of my beloved radio studio. Of course once the video’s been through the post-production it will look pretty different, just like a bought one.

There I was standing in this bright green TV studio when it struck me how easy – no, no, not just how easy – how routine it is in the media to make something appear to be that which it is quite clearly not, whether it be a green screen that magically gets transformed in a up-market backdrop or an apparent reality television show which is actually meticulously planned, carefully constructed and scripted, a series of totally artificial events.

Or a newspaper article which purports to give a factual account of events but which was actually largely written for the most part by the richly remunerated PR agency of a large corporation or a powerful lobby group with the expressed purpose of surreptitiously having us see their version of reality for their own purposes.

And then this PR piece with more spin on it than a Shane Warne leg break (apologies to those who may not appreciate the cricketing metaphor) is dished up by a newspaper’s lazy or inexperienced journalist or by a under-resourced news room or perhaps both topped off by an editor focused squarely on the bottom line as fact, as news. Or as a sensational headline designed more to sell papers, increase circulation and bump up the cost of advertising space in a competitive commercial market than it is to keep you and me informed in that great tradition of journalistic impartiality and excellence.

Are there still some reputable journalists out there? Well of course there are but as margins in traditional media are squeezed they’re becoming fewer and farther in between these days. And in a cut-throat commercial media world whose bottom line is share holder value plain and simple, sad as it is to say, things are not always what they seem.

So in the context of this reality here’s my question for you, given the role the media plays in constructing your reality do you just swallow it hook, line and sinker without thinking too much about it or do you consume media critically, thoughtfully and selectively? After all we are what we eat. Could it be, quite unwittingly, that we’re on a media junk food diet and if so what’s it doing to who we are? It seems to me that for all his faults at least Pontius Pilate was asking the right question, what is truth?

And one of the areas in which media influences us hugely is in defining what constitutes healthy living, healthy eating. The mantra the media keeps trotting out is that the western diet is good for us. I don’t know if you were able to join me on the program last week when I rattled of some incredibly unsettling statistics about the so called western diet and how it’s impacting your health.

Here are just a few of them as a quick reminder. Our sugar consumption has gone from around 7 kg or 15 lbs a year back in the 1800’s to around 70 kg or a 150 lbs a year, that’s a tenfold increase. In that same time obesity in the US population and reflected right around the world in countries who have adopted the western diet has gone from a rarity, around one in twenty five of the population at the turn of the 20th century to commonality, one in three of the population with fully two-thirds of the population being overweight.

Heart disease was virtually unknown at the turn of the 20th century; today it’s the single biggest cause of death by far in countries on a western diet. And yet the media promotes sugar-laden foods as being healthy. Think about it, when I mention fruit juice do you consider that to be healthy or not? Most people would say healthy and yet with the fibre removed from the fruit juice becomes incredibly unhealthy because it’s a delivery platform for high concentrations of refined sugar.

And 50% of that refined sugar is fructose one of only a few substances that we ingest that our body cannot turn into glucose, which is the energy we’re able to burn. So instead it turns it into fat. By the time you’re drinking the last mouthful of a glass of juice the first mouthful is already pumping around in your blood stream as elevated triglycerides.

What’s been the major influencer of our perceptions of fruit juice as being healthy? Well all those ads on television that show happy families and a nice sunny kitchen having a healthy breakfast, pouring a healthy glass of orange juice. Same with the sugar-laden cereals. Some of them are as high as 45% sugar by weight. They’re promoted as being healthy food for us to eat and to give our children to give them energy yet they’re one of the key contributors to Metabolic Syndrome which lies at the heart, pardon the pun, of the lifestyle diseases of cardio vascular disease and diabetes that are crippling our society.

Again promoted through healthy images on TV eggs are bad. No, actually they’re very good for you and have almost no impact on your cholesterol levels but that scientific truth is lost because in the media we’re told that eggs are bad and on it goes.

Look I’m no Doctor nor am I a medical researcher, what I do have though is some common sense and common sense tells me that in the last four decades or so while the media message has been that fat is bad therefore go on a low fat diet our population, hey that’s you and me, has been getting steadily fatter.

What is truth? Truth is what works. If it’s true then it should work right? If it’s not true it doesn’t work so I’ll come back to it again, just because you see glossy images of truth on television doesn’t mean that they’re true. Just because they tell you that sugar laden foods are good for you doesn’t mean that they’re not killing you.

I remember back when I was young there were ads for cigarettes on television. They glamorised smoking even though smoking kills people on mass. So let me ask you again, when you consume media do you do it critically, do you weigh what you’re being told or are you like way too many people on a media junk food diet?

For most of my life, I was obese. Not anymore. Having lost over 25 kgs (that’s around 55 lbs) I’ve now kept it off for years – and it’s effortless. Now that’s something that a few people I know are going to want to wrap their minds around and as things turn out, when it comes to losing weight and keeping it off, your mind matters.

When I was a young man I spent four years at the Royal Military College Duntroon training to be an officer in the Australian army. As well as a university degree and training in leadership and tactics and all the sorts of things you’d expect we did things like drill on the parade ground for hours and hours on end and an awful lot of physical training and that physical training was tough.

We spent hours each week in the gymnasium, running, jumping, doing obstacle courses, jumping off towers, swimming through water and for someone like me who’s not, I have to tell you, a natural athlete well, I think I still carry some deep mental scars with me from those gruelling physical challenges.

I remember once we were broken up into groups of thirty or so and we were each given a five tonne truck on the end of a really thick rope and for the next hour we had to drag our five tonne truck around a circuit of a few kilometres. We came to a slight rise and I have to tell you it was virtually impossible for us to pull that wretched truck up that little hill.

And I remember this as though it was yesterday the brutal physical training instructor yelled out at the top of his lungs ‘come on boys its mind over matter, I don’t mind and you don’t matter’. We got it over the hill. I can laugh about it now but I tell you back then it was brutal.

It’s pretty amazing the things we can achieve when we set our minds to it. In fact the mind, the human will is an incredibly powerful thing. Now I’m a Christian and I know that there are certain things I cannot do for myself. I can’t gain God’s favour by myself but only through faith in Jesus Christ who died and rose again for me. I know there are certain sins that I can’t overcome by myself but only through the power of the Holy Spirit who enables me to will and to work for God’s good pleasure. Philippians chapter 2, verse 13.

But at the same time I know that God’s given me a mind and a will and I know that He’s given you a mind and a will and I know that we can choose to deploy that mind and that will effectively and when we do we can achieve amazing things. I wonder sometimes if people don’t cop out a leave it all to God when His intention is for us to apply our will and determination to do something incredible. Do you know what I mean?

I think of the Apostle Paul, he was sitting there in a Roman dungeon on death row when he wrote these words. He said:

Brothers and sisters I don’t consider that I’ve made it my own but one thing I do forgetting everything that lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

And again this, he writes to his friends to the Church in Corinth, 1 Corinthians chapter 9, verses 24 to 26:

Don’t you know that in a race the runners all compete but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath but we an imperishable one. So I don’t run aimlessly nor do I box as though I’m beating the air but I punish my body and enslave it so that after proclaiming to others I myself shouldn’t be disqualified.

He’s a really strong guy; the human will, the human mind and our sense of determination can be an incredibly powerful thing. Now of course we all have different personality types, Some people like my wife and my daughter are more emotional heart people, they experience the world and contribute to it through their emotions more than through their will or through their strength and that’s good, we need those sorts of people who are gentle and encouraging.

I’m more your strength and will kind of guy and my value add comes by helping people and organisations to crash through problems, to achieve things when the odds are clearly against them and that’s good because we need those kinds of people too. So for me it’s easy to set my mind to something and to achieve it, it’s a natural fit. For the more emotional, heart people it’s much harder. Whichever personality type we’ve been given by God we do each have a mind and there comes a time when we need to apply our mind and our will and our focus in order to change how we’re living.

We’ve been chatting these past weeks about living a healthy life to a ripe old age and a whole bunch of that has to do with the way we think because how we behave, the things we do, are born out of our thoughts. I heard a preacher, Joyce Meyer once say ‘where the mind goes the man follows’, you know what, that’s absolutely true. It’s true in every aspect of our lives.

If in the tens of thousands of words that I think each day I decide to think about this person who is annoying me and I play out how I can get revenge. Fifteen different ways if that’s what I think about, how do you imagine I’m going to treat that person the next time we meet?

Whereas if I think about that person with compassion, if I realise where he’s coming from, the difficulties he’s been through, the pressure’s on him, if I spend my thoughts about him understanding him I know I’m going to treat him quite differently when I meet him right?

The same is true with our health. I know people who all their lives have thought of themselves as being old, complaining about this ache and that pain, whinging about getting older and this and that and the other and then I know other people who simply refuse to accept delivery of old age, they just keep doing what they’ve always been doing.

My very good friend Graham who’s now well into his seventies, just a few years ago, I think he was about sixty eight years old at the time, he walked the famed World War 2 battleground the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea which is a gruelling physical achievement. He still exercises today, perhaps he’s not quite as fast as he used to be but for him nothing’s changed.

See some people approach their health with a defeatist attitude, ‘oh I’m never going to lose weight, I’m never going to succeed’. Others apply their mind and their will and their determination to their eating habits and their exercise habits and they reap the rewards. How we think actually matters.

Again the Apostle Paul wrote this in Romans chapter 12, verse 2. He said:

Don’t be conformed to the ways of this world, instead be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Let’s just apply that thought for a moment to this whole healthy living thing we’ve been talking about. What Paul’s really saying here is that if you want to be transformed, that is if you want your life to change and therefore your outcomes to change then you have to renew your mind. Mmm we might say it a bit differently today; you have to change your mind. You need to think differently and when you do you’ll start to figure out the great things God’s got planned for you.

I can tell you this my friend Gods plan is not for you to end up with Type 2 Diabetes because you ate chips and chocolate and drank gallons of sweet fizzy drinks, it’s simply not His plan, you got it. And God’s plan for you is not for you to give up your health and let your body become prematurely aged and disabled because instead of getting out there for a half an hour every few days for a brisk walk you sat at home on the couch in front of the television telling yourself you’re too tired, you didn’t have time and you weren’t fit enough.

God’s plan for you is not for your arteries to become clogged because you pumped too much sugar into your system and overwhelmed its ability to function properly. None of that is God’s plan for you. It’s time to change your mind. It’s time to believe that God has a good and perfect plan for you and to the extent that your body is being ravaged by the deleterious effects of the western diet, He’s given you the will, the capacity and the amazing body to turn that around.

No matter what age you’re at, no matter what stage of life you’re at, no matter what fitness level you’re at, no matter what you think or feel you’re mind matters, it matters a lot and you can decide to start living a healthy life right now, here today, now.

Through some hard, bitter experience over the last half century – I’ve discovered something important. Good health is a choice. Once we know the facts – each one of us can choose to eat and live healthily or not. What choice will you make?

Have you been able to join me over these last few weeks as we’ve been chatting about living a healthy life to a ripe old age? Well if you have you’ll know that I put forward some very simple propositions about health, your health and because I know, well maybe you missed some of the programs or perhaps you’re tuning in today for the first time, I’m going to join the dots on all of that for you right now.

Here they are, proposition number one. There are some diseases and health outcomes that tragically we can’t do anything about but obesity, cardio-vascular disease, that’s heart attack and stroke, diabetes and some forms of cancer aren’t like that. Why? Because the scientific evidence clearly points to the fact that they are direct consequences of consuming a western diet.

Proposition number two: we know that because at the beginning of the 20th century those diseases that the medical community lumps together under the term Metabolic Syndrome were an absolute rarity. Back then just 3,000 or so Americans were dying each year of cardio vascular disease, today that’s up over 650,000 a year and in fact would be much higher than that if medical science hadn’t found more ways to reduce the death toll once someone actually does have a heart attack or a stroke.

Proposition number three: it’s not just the Americans who’ve gained masses of weight this last century and a bit, it’s every country that’s adopted the so called ‘western diet’. A hundred years ago just one in five people were overweight, today depending on which country you live in somewhere between a half and two thirds of all people living in societies that consume the western diet are overweight.

Proposition number four: and this one remains controversial to this day, not all people are going to agree with me here, the answer is not the idea of a low fat diet that’s promoted generally by the medical and diet professionals. Since the 1960’s when we had the idea that fat makes you fat therefore reduce fat in your diet, that idea was dropped onto our heads, we have continued to gain weight, a lot of weight, even blind Freddy can see it’s not working.

Proposition number five: the culprit according to the latest research is in fact that the western diet is high in sugar and other refined carbohydrates. That makes our blood sugar spike up and go down like a yoyo and it’s the sugar not the fat that’s clogging up our arteries. So since the low fat diet clearly isn’t working it’s time to wind the clock back to when our grandparents were eating plenty of bacon and animal fats and eggs but almost no refined carbohydrates to a time where obesity, cardio-vascular disease and diabetes were almost non-existent.

And finally proposition six: once we’ve done that the weight comes off easily and naturally because our God-given appetite control system is no longer being gummed up and fooled by all those refined carbohydrates and so we naturally start feeling like eating less and doing some moderate exercise.

The big kicker for me is realising the historical context, the idea that metabolic syndrome only started happening into the 20th century and correlating that with the massive increases in sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diets over exactly the same period. See study after study shows the correlation of introducing the western diet into societies and almost like clockwork twenty years after that introduction diabetes, heart disease and stroke go from an almost zero levels to epidemic levels. That’s it in a nutshell, that’s what we’ve been talking about these past few weeks.

And over these last couple of days, and this is what I want to chat a bit more with you about today, making a decision to be healthy. Here are the medical facts, not from me but from the researchers. If you remove refined carbohydrates from your diet, sugar, white flour, white rice, potatoes, you statistically almost remove the chance of heart disease, Diabetes Type 2 and stroke, and on average that would add at least twelve years to your life.

And remember it’s not just about adding years to your life but life to your years. Many people become disabled in their older years simply because they’ve been consuming the high carb western diet for most of their life. That’s why I’ve called this series “Healthy Living To A Ripe Old Age”.

And so over these last few weeks I’ve been setting out the facts for you, as controversial as some people still think they are, so that you can make up your own mind. If you’d like to catch up on some of the programs that you may have missed in this series you can online at www.christianityworks.com but facts aren’t enough.

Talking about them and thinking about them is not enough; we need to do something about them. It may be that you’re living a healthy lifestyle now, it may be that you’re fit and healthy and full of energy and your blood tests show that you’re at a low risk of cardio-vascular disease and diabetes, hey if you are great but you are by far in the minority, by far.

If you’re part of the grossly unhealthy majority then you have a decision to make and let me set out the decision very clearly so you can’t miss it. You can choose between these two options. Option one: You stick with what you’re doing at the moment. You keep eating the white bread, the sugary cereals, the sugary sauces, you keep eating loads of pasta and rice and potatoes, you keep drinking the sweet drinks, you keep slogging away at the occasional diet. That’s option one.

And option one will mean that you, like most of the rest of the population, will develop insulin resistance. You’ll probably have a fatty liver, you’ll probably carry around five, ten, fifteen, twenty or even more kilograms of excess body fat, you’ll keep feeling tired and lethargic and one day your Doctor if you dare to visit him will tell you that you have diabetes.

Or one day you’ll feel a sharp pain in your chest, a myocardial infarction known to most of us as a heart attack the most common outcome of which is death. Or one day, sooner than you may think, you’ll suffer a stroke. Keep sticking with option one and your body will age prematurely, you’ll be far more likely to suffer one or more disabilities as you age and you’ll almost certainly die before your time. And if you think I’m being brutal about this hey that’s nothing compared to the foot amputation that the average diabetic eventually goes through.

Then there’s option two: Option two is apparently harder in the short term. Option two means saying ‘you know I’ve heard the message about the impact of sugar in particular and other refined carbohydrates in my life’. It’s about being an early adopter. It’s a bit like suspecting that smoking was bad for you in the early 1970’s when due to the deceit and lobbying of the tobacco industry that fact was still very much in dispute.

Option two means ditching pretty much everything that’s processed, everything that’s laced with sugar and refined carbohydrates, which is rather a lot, and winding the clock back a 150 years on your diet. Option two as I’ve discovered means explaining yourself over and over again to people when you refuse the dessert by saying, “no I’m sorry I don’t eat dessert”.

It means being ridiculed, it means breaking your sugar addiction and it means returning to old fashioned food like bacon and eggs for breakfast, pork roast for dinner, lashings of vegetables, the sorts of things your grandparents ate before Metabolic Syndrome existed. That’s option two.

And what will happen to you is that your body will shed weight, your Doctor will marvel at your blood test results, people will look at you incredulously as you’re eating your scrambled eggs for breakfast and wonder how you ever did it and you won’t be anywhere near as hungry, anywhere near as often as you are today.

Oh and just by the way your risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes and some cancers will over the next year or two plummet with the statistically likelihood of any form of disability as you age reducing dramatically while all the while your life expectancy goes up and up by an average of twelve years. They’re the choices, option one or option two. Which one will you choose?

Obesity was the scourge of my life, for much of my life. But now, having lost over 25 kgs (that’s 55 lbs) and kept it off, I’ve realised that the changes I made, needed to be permanent ones. In other words, when you’re on a good thing, stick to it.

These days somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the population in any country in the world that’s adopted the so-called western diet is struggling with their weight. That’s an awful lot of people, and if you’ve been able to tune in to the program over these past three weeks you’ll know that I’ve spent each day talking about this reality.

Normally on “A Different Perspective” I look at emotional and spiritual issues and that’s great, that’s important. It’s important for us to work through the many stresses and challenges that we face in life but I’ve deliberately, over these last few weeks, focused on our bodies – my body and your body – because it’s the one body that we’ve been given. It’s the only body we’ll ever have on this earth and way too many people are abusing it through the food they put in their mouths and the lack of physical exercise.

I won’t go through the stats again but they are horrendous, countless people are dying a premature death or living with sickness and disability needlessly because of their diet and lack of exercise. What I will say again, forgive me if over the past few weeks you’ve already heard me say this before but it is really, really important. What I will say again is the key thing that appears to be killing us is the sugar and refined carbohydrates in the western diet.

Today for instance in countries like Australia and Canada and the UK and the USA and increasingly in many countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America that have adopted the western diet, we are eating around ten times the amount of sugar than we were eating in the mid to late 1800’s.

Back then in the UK for instance the average sugar consumption was around 7 kg or 15 lbs a year per person. Today it’s up around 70 kg or a 150 lbs a year. Why? Because it tastes great and the food companies who manufacture food have figured out that if they put lots of sugar in people are going to buy more of it.

Just as cigarettes are the delivery platform for addictive nicotine so manufactured and processed foods are a delivery platform for addictive sugar. The objective is the same, to get us hooked so we’ll buy more and if you don’t believe me try and go without a sugar fix for a whole week, not one bit of sugar in anything, you’ll have to check every label very carefully, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now here is the dilemma that I want to share with you in this last program about health, diet and exercise, a series that I’ve called “Healthy Living To A Ripe Old Age” and who doesn’t want that huh? It’s a dilemma that millions of people are struggling with, it’s a dilemma that I struggled with for about, let’s see now, fifty years.

When those of us who are overweight and that’s a past tense thing for me now but when someone whose overweight goes on a diet they struggle and struggle and they starve themselves and they go to bed hungry and they exercise and they lose something between a moderate amount and a significant amount of weight.

Me, I lost over 20 kg more than seven times in my life. 20 kg is about 45 lbs. Each time it took me six to nine months of starving myself and going hungry. Can I tell you? It was really, really hard. I mean, as disciplined as I am it was really hard. I used to go to bed with my tummy rumbling and say to my wife ‘I’m starving. If only I could have some sausages with onion and gravy and mashed potato’, it was so hard.

And yet each time I’d put the weight back on again. I swore that I wouldn’t but I did. It’s enough to make you cry and I did. My friend this has gone on, the whole crash diet overweight cycle, for all of my adult life until three years ago and the really frustrating thing is I blamed myself. I told myself that it was my fault because I was just being undisciplined.

Come on, when you look at someone whose obese, you see them in the shopping mall or at the bus stop, you judge them right? You think to yourself, “how can they let themselves get that fat”. That’s what makes this whole overweight obesity thing so diabolical not only from a health prospective but from an emotional prospective.

I felt so bad about myself because I just couldn’t keep the weight off and let me tell you it’s that guilt that the advertisements for every diet fad and plan and product under the sun tap in to. It’s that guilt that has the personal fitness industry booming, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry even in a small country like Australia with just twenty three million people.

And yet despite all the personal trainers, all the diets, all the protein shakes, all the diet clubs and plans and all the magazines that are sold with the latest Israeli army diet or whatever it is people in countries that have adopted the western diet are becoming inexorably fatter. Hello, is something not working here or what?

Not only could I not keep the weight off but the same was and is true of 99% of all those who are prone to being overweight or obese. And the reason is you can’t spend your whole life swimming against the tide. See people who are naturally thin simply can’t understand what it’s like anymore than I can understand what it’s like to be an alcoholic.

My problem wasn’t a lack of discipline; my problem was that I was always hungry. I would get to about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and I’d be completely ravenous, my appetite was demanding that I put food in my mouth and so I did. It took me fifty long, hard years of my life on the yoyo diet thing to discover that discipline wasn’t the answer.

As I said to you, you simply cannot swim against the tide the whole of your life. You can go against your appetite for a few weeks or a few months, that’s what dieters do but you can’t do for your whole life. The answer is not discipline and self control, the answer my friend is getting your appetite back into the finely tuned balance that God created it to be in.

Obesity was a rarity at the beginning of the 20th century, now it’s an epidemic. That change correlates with the development of the western diet high in refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour and white rice. So in desperation I listened to some people who many in mainstream medicine considered to be, well … loonys.

People like Robert Atkins and the whole Deakin diet thing and many others who said fat is not the problem in your diet, it’s the refined carbohydrates that we’re eating these days that we weren’t eating a century ago when there was almost no heart disease and almost no Type 2 Diabetes and almost no obesity and almost no strokes.

So I took the plunge, I removed refined carbohydrates and not only did I lose a stack of weight, twenty five kilograms, but now that I’ve lost the weight and it’s been a few years now, I’m not putting it back on again. See refined carbohydrates make you hungry, they keep you hungry and they make you eat more because they mess with your appetite control system.

Remove them from your diet to the greatest extent possible and you just stop being as hungry. Now when I lost the weight I could have introduced some sugary things, some white bread, some pastries and chips back into my diet but I didn’t. You know why? Because they’re addictive and before you know it you’re eating more of them because they make you hungry and you put the weight back on again.

Next to accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour and then marrying my beautiful wife Jacqui can I tell you, this is the next most profound change in my life, it’s that big. I’m fit, I’m healthy, I’m alert, I feel good about myself just because I removed those refined carbohydrates particularly the sugar from my diet. It’s that big for me.

That’s why I’ve spent these last three weeks on the program telling you about it. You need never, ever go on a diet again. Do this one thing for me, just try it, remove the refined carbohydrates, sugar, white flour, rice, potatoes, pasta, nothing else and your appetite reduces. It’s that simple and hey when you’re on a good thing stick to it.