With all the advances in medicine and science, the rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer are skyrocketing. Diseases that were almost unheard of a century ago are now pandemics. Why, what’s going on?

Something’s Not Quite Right

That’s right, we’re going to talk about some things that aren’t in the Bible in this series – and as a Bible teacher that’s something I’ve struggled with a lot in planning and preparing these messages. Just for a few programs, we’re going to do something that I as a Bible teacher do very rarely.

Because there is something going on in our world that you won’t find in the Bible. Obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardio vascular disease, diabetes and cancer.

That’s not to say that they didn’t exist back in Biblical times – with medical knowledge as it was a few millennia ago, of course, when someone died, let’s say of a heart attack or stroke, they didn’t know the cause back then – people just died. But by the late 19th century and early 20th century, we knew how to identify these diseases, it’s just that they didn’t exist.

In the early part of the 20th century just a two or three thousand Americans each year would die of cancer. Today, that number is over 650,000 – and it’s only that low because medical science has come up with ways of reducing the morbidity rate of those who a myocardial infarction – that to you and me, is a heart attack.

The rates of heart disease are much higher still, with up to a third of the population of the average westernised, industrialised country suffering from some debilitating effect of cardiovascular disease. If you were an Australian or an American at the turn of the 20th century, your chances of being obese were remote, around one in 25. Today, your chances of being an obese adult are around one in 3 and climbing.

People, something terrible is going on and we need to talk about it. I am someone who all his life has struggled with his weight – I used to weigh 110 kilograms (that’s 220 lbs) and I’m not what you’d call tall.

My problem was that I was always hungry – I lost lots of weight lots of times, but I always stacked it back on again. So in my early fifties I decided three things. Firstly all these low fat high impact diets hadn’t worked for all of my life. Second – if I didn’t do something about it – given what my blood tests and my doctor were telling me – I was going to be dead sooner rather than later. And third – I had to go and find out the answer – why was I constantly hungry, how could I change my appetite and how could I live a healthy lifestyle at a healthy weight.

I’m not alone. There are huge numbers of people in that same place. So I went and did the research, found out the answers – which, by the way were contrary to what my doctor was telling me – and without much effort, changed my diet in such a way that my appetite reduced dramatically.

And my friend, once your appetite reduces, losing weight requires almost no willpower at all. If you’re not hungry as much, you don’t eat as much. What happened to me? Well, I lost 25 kg (55 lb) over a year and a half, slowly. The fatty liver syndrome (a precursor to cirrhosis and cancer) that I’d suffered from all my adult life just went away. And my doctor is amazed at by cholesterol, triglyceride and blood sugar readings. He’s never seen such a drastic improvement in just a short time.

So here’s what I’m going to do. These next few episodes of Christianityworks I’m going to share very simply and plainly my journey from obese, to healthy. It’s a journey that left behind the starvation diets, because I found out what I needed to wind back the clock on the western diet, remove the things that were causing my problem and eat a diet that is healthy, that I enjoy and that gives me the energy that I never thought I had. No fads. Not starvation. No rocket science.

God has given you and me the most amazing bodies – and as it turns out this is the only body that I’m ever going to get on this earth and that is the only body you’re going to get on this earth. It’s time to start looking after them – and I’d like to share how to do that with you today, and over the next few episodes.

Your Amazing Body

The body we live in is something that we take largely for granted. It’s just … there. It’s been there as long as we can remember and sometimes we live as though it’s going to go on forever.

But this body that you and I are encapsulated isn’t going to go on forever. You know what they say: there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. One day your body and mine will quite literally, give up the ghost.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diet and food and in particular our digestive system – how we process food.

I’m now in my mid fifties and for most of my adult life, I’ve struggled with my weight. You get to your mid fifties and you know that you’re getting to the pointy end of this whole healthy eating and living thing, because it’s at this age that many people suffer heart attacks, discover they have diabetes, end up with cancer – the three big killers in western society and in any country that has adopted elements of the western diet.

We’re going to talk a lot about that over the coming few days. But today we’re going to kick off by just realising how utterly amazing our body is. If we’re going to head to a healthier lifestyle – which many, many people need to do – there’s this decision that needs to take place about how we eat and live and exercise and sleep.

Healthy living is a deliberate decision that we need to make – and when we do, all of a sudden, within just a couple of weeks we stat feeling so much better that we can’t imagine going back to the old ways of living.

And part of making that decision is realising how incredibly precious this body is that we’re living in. So let’s kick things off by taking a look at just a handful of amazing facts about your body. Are you ready? Here we go. Did you know that:

You produce 25 million new cells every second – 24/7 for your whole life? 25 million – that’s more than the population of Australia. And each of the 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds.

Your nerve impulses travel at over 400 km or 250 miles per hour. And just one sneeze generates a wind gust of 166 km or 100 miles per hour.

Your heart will beat around 100,000 times every day or 2.7 billion times in an average life of around 75 years. And your lungs, with a surface area big enough to cover a tennis court will inhale around 2 million litres or half a million gallons of air each and every day without you even thinking about it.

Your eyes can distinguish over a million different colours and take in more information than the largest telescope we’ve ever built. I’m presuming that’s the Hubble Telescope out there in space.. And as if that weren’t enough, your nose is your personal air conditioning system – it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters out impurities.

Just take a look at your hand for a moment – in just one square inch in the middle of your hand you have about 9 feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors. And when you touch something, those sensors send a message to your brain at around 200 km or 124 miles an hour.

Your eyebrows are there to keep sweat out of your eyes, you make around one litre of saliva a day. And if you were able to stretch all of the DNA in your body from end to end, it would be enough to take you to the sun and back almost 700 times.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about the amazing chemical factory that your body is. It has the most finely tuned, complex processes that scientists and medicos are really only beginning to unwrap for regulating temperature, complex bodily functions like appetite, sleep – do you know that science doesn’t yet fully understand what sleep is all about yet. They have theories, but they don’t actually know.

And all this in a body that is made up 70% of plain, simple old water – H2O. My friend, we’ve just scratched the surface in the last few minutes of how amazing your body is. Go ahead – look in the mirror this is you that we’ve been talking about hear. Your body. The one you’ve been given. The only one you’ve been given as a matter of fact.

And as amazing and robust this body of yours is, it is also incredibly fragile. If you lose use of the main chemical factory in your body – your liver – you have about 7 hours of life left, because without it, you can’t function. Yet a rapidly increasing proportion of our society, particularly those who are overweight, have fatty liver syndrome which can lead to cirrhosis which can lead to cancer of the liver – all totally preventable.

Somewhere between 60 and 80% of adults in developed economies are overweight or obese – that’s up from around 20% at the beginning of the 20th century. And right there you have heart disease, diabetes and increased risk of cancer. People – something has to give here. This finely tuned, previous, complex glorious body in which you live needs some looking after. Now perhaps you’re one of the small minority who exercise and who have a healthy weight.

Over these coming few days and weeks, we’re going to be chatting about how you can start to look after your amazing body, how you can get into healthy living and increase the odds of you living to a ripe old age – a healthy, ripe old age.

Is that just moderately interesting to you? The way our society and our health is headed, people, something has to give and what I’m hoping is that it’s not your body that’s going to give up the ghost sooner than it should. What I’m hoping is that over these coming few weeks, we can talk about some things that will get you excited about healthy eating and healthy living – because not only is your body going to thank you, but if you’re someone who knows you need to do something about this – you are going to feel so much better. So much. That’s a promise.

It should be no surprise that we have an amazing body because it was handcrafted by God Himself. He designed it, and He made it and He gifted it to each one of us – my body to me, your body to you. It is a precious, precious thing.

The more I study and learn about the body, the more I marvel at the faith required for an atheist to say – there is no God. Really? If there is no God, how did these finely tuned, complex systems and feedback loops and balancing mechanisms and protective mechanisms happen in our bodies? By chance?

That takes a level of faith that I simply don’t have. The psalmist had it right, when in Psalm 139 he wrote:

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

And it is not an unreasonable thing for God to want us to look after that amazing body that He’s gifted us with; a body that is absolutely essential to the life we live. He has a plan for you, He has a plan for me, plans that – if we abuse our bodies with an unhealthy lifestyle – are not going to be realised.

So over the coming days, we’re going to be talking about how anybody can live a healthy lifestyle. No brutal diets, no fads, just a simple, healthy way of eating and living that certainly has changed my life, and might just change yours as well.

A Short History of Food and Health

As we chat about living a healthy lifestyle, I know what some people are thinking. There’s like this guilt thing going on because you know that you’re carrying a bunch of extra weight and you know that that’s because you put too much of the wrong stuff into your mouth and you don’t exercise. Am I right? And so you’re sitting there, squirming, feeling not just guilty but hopeless because you’ve tried every diet that there is under the sun, and nothing’s worked. If you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because I’ve been there too.

Here’s my dark little secret: all my life until a couple of years ago, I have struggled with my weight – as a child and as an adult. In fact, I have lost more than 20 kg at least seven times in my life. If you still measure weight by the pound that’s around 45lb. And each time, other than the last time, I’ve put it back on again. I starved myself, I did low fat diets, I exercised until it wore my feet out.

I tried everything – and each time, I put the weight back on again. And what drove me nuts about that was the fact that I am an incredibly self–disciplined, focussed, outcome oriented guy. When I set my mind to something, I pretty much always achieve it. As evidenced by the fact that I have lost over 20 kg more than 7 times in my life, that takes a lot of discipline and willpower and yet, I’m being completely transparent with you here – each time I put it back on again.

The question you have to ask yourself is why? And I’ll tell you why. I was always hungry. And when you’re always hungry, you eat. But why was I always hungry. That’s what was driving me to distraction. There had to be a reason. It turns out there was and there is and it’s that reason – the root cause of obesity – that we’re going to talk about today.

And to do that, we need to take an historical perspective. What if anything has changed over time in terms of our eating habits, and our health outcomes? That’s not an unreasonable question to ask, because it may give us a clue or two as to the cause of the sky rocketing increases in obesity and its health outcomes – heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

Well some things have changed. They’ve changed dramatically. According to the Author of the book “Sweet Poison”, David Gillespie, In 1910, just over one in five US adults was overweight and fewer than one in five of those was obese (so one in 25 of the hole population were obese). A century later, two out of every three adults is overweight and half of those people are now obese (so now, one third of the whole population are obese). Writes Gillespie – in just 100 years, the chances of a given US adult being overweight have gone from very unlikely to highly probably and the trend is accelerating. If it continues, by 2036, a person with a normal Body Mass Index will be as rare as an eight–leaf clover. And in Australia our statistics are just as shocking. .

That’s a dramatic change. And remember, back then, there was no concept of a low fat diet. There were no so–called healthy margarines. People ate lard and dripping and bacon and eggs for breakfast. Yet back then, very few were overweight and today the majority are.

That doesn’t make sense. And here’s another fact. Did you know that heart disease was almost unknown back then? In fact it wasn’t until the mid 1920’s that cardiology became a speciality. Now to be sure, life expectancy has gone up in western societies. In the US, before 1900 75% of all Americans dies before age 65. Today more than 70% will live to be over 70.

That comes from the dramatic eradication of many diseases like polio, typhoid and a bunch of diseases that used to kill people, but they now are almost unheard of. And yet the deadly irony of all this is that heart disease – which was virtually unheard of at the beginning of the 20th century – is today the single greatest killer in the western world. It will kill 650,000 Americans this year.

Those facts beg the question – what’s changed? And it confounds logic that more medico’s aren’t asking that same question. Some are, but most of the medical community seems to me to be focussed on treating heart disease – something they’re doing quite well, because the death rate from heart disease is falling – rather than asking how can we eliminate heart disease altogether, since it is only a produce of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The answer to what causes heart disease lies in the research of a naval physician Dr Cleave who came up with the “Rule of Twenty Years”. Cleave made a careful study of hospital records of third world nations, mainly Africa, and was struck that virtually no single native came down with common diseases of Western cultures such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Those diseases weren’t merely less frequent, they were virtually non–existent. His research further led him to conclude that the culprit was the western diet which was high in refined carbohydrates – sugar, white flour and so on.

Conducting further research, Cleave observed that about 20 years after a society introduces refined carbohydrates to its way of life, diabetes and heart disease will simultaneously begin to appear. If you want to know more, Google Cleave’s “Rule of Twenty Years” – Cleave is spelled C-L-E-A-V-E – Cleave found that the average inhabitant of the British Isles was consuming just 7 kg or 15 lb. of sugar in 1817. By 1955 that had grown to around 50kg (110 lb). and today, Australians and Americans are consuming upwards of 70 kg or 150 lbs. of sugar. That doesn’t count the other refined carbs like chips, rice, flour, bread, cakes and so on.

The medico’s will tell you quite simply that all those refined carbohydrates are turning our blood stream into porridge. You may have heard the term atherosclerosis – which literally means porridge of the arteries. And it’s killing us in droves.

The thing that distinguishes the so-called western diet from traditional diets is not the fat content. The Inuit in Alaska traditionally only ate meat and fat and had zero heart disease. The thing that distinguishes the western diet is the highly refined carbohydrate content – and people it’s killing us.

Let me prove the point to you about the increase in refined carbohydrate content. Question – how many times does the word “sugar” appear in the Bible? I’ll tell you. Exactly zero times, because sugar wasn’t known back then. “Sweet cane” is mentioned 3 times, but as an exotic delicacy from a far off place:

Jeremiah 6:20 – Of what use to me is frankincense that come from Sheba or sweet cane from a distant land?

The other sweet thing was honey, but you had to fight the bees for that, and it was a rare delicacy. And finally fruit, but only in season and only if you lived near the apple tree in question. Sweet things were very rare.

In fact, historically, that’s been true until sugar went into mass production in the late 19th, early 20th century to support, of all things, cocoa and chocolate sales. The first can of fruit juice (which is effectively sugar separated from it’s antidote, fibre) didn’t go on sale in Australia until the late 1950’s

So if we want to track the cause of this rapid acceleration in western diseases, we need only correlate the increase in consumption of refined carbohydrates, with the increase in cardiovascular disease.

My biggest secret to getting back into good health again, including the loss of 25 kg – is virtually removing all the refined carbohydrates from my diet. People think that that’s extreme, radical – everything in balance is the answer. Berni are you crazy. And I guess, in the context of our sugar laden culture it does seem extreme.

But in a historical context, it’s the sugar-laden diet that most of us are eating that’s extreme. And people, it’s killing us. In droves!

People are getting fatter, it seems, by the minute. Obesity, even amongst children, is becoming a global pandemic. Over the past few years, Berni Dymet has lost 25 kgs – that’s 55 lbs – in weight. And is effortlessly keeping it off.

Secret Number 1

Are you ready for secret number 1? Here we go. Back in the 1800s we ate about 7 kg (that’s 15 lbs) of sugar a year. Today, that’s topping out at 70 kg (or 150 lbs). The crazy thing is, we kind of think that’s normal, but before the early 20^th century, the only way you could get sugar in your diet at all was to fight the bees for some honey (there was no farming or mass production the way there is today), or to be near an apple tree when it was in season (once a year), or chew on a log called sugar cane because 99% of it’s log, and only 1% of it is sugar.

What we consider normal today, in a historical perspective, is grossly abnormal. It’s our high consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates that’s very clearly at the heart (pardon the pun) of so-called western diseases of obesity – cardiovascular disease (that’s heart attacks and strokes), and diabetes. In fact the research shows that within 20 years of a western diet high in refined carbohydrates, making it into a country, almost like clockwork, heart disease, stroke, obesity and Diabetes simultaneously appear, but don’t just take my word for it. If you’re online, go to YouTube and watch the video “Bitter Truth” by Professor of Paediatrics, Robert Lusdig. The high refined carbohydrate intake isn’t just killing us and disabling us. It means that in many countries now, childhood obesity (previously unheard-of) is a pandemic.

So here’s my number 1 secret for losing the 25 kg which I have lost, and am now able to keep off without ever having to think about it: I have as completely as possible removed both sugar and other refined carbohydrates (white flour, peeled potatoes, white rice) from my diet, and I know you might think that I’m crazy, but hear me out. When I came to the conclusion that refined carbohydrates were at the heart of my problem, my wife and I went through our pantry and we removed everything that contained refined carbohydrates: Barbecue sauce, 42% sugar by weight; the breakfast cereals were 35% sugar; fruit juice (see I thought fruit juice was healthy); cakes; chips; chocolates; cookies; white bread; Thai sauces – pretty much anything and everything that had been refined and prepared by someone else, and do you know? There was almost nothing left. It was really demoralising – I mean really, and the first week for me was hard not having any sugar, ‘cos I was addicted to the stuff. I used to kid myself that I wasn’t, but actually I was.

The researchers bred rats without taste-buds, and they put two clear fluids in their cages: One was water with sugar, the other was water with cocaine, and each rat became addicted to the sugar solution.

The change in our diets was radical because just about everything out there has sugar and flour in it. We became a bit like our friend Bill who’s a Celiac. He always has to check everything before he eats, and now, we’re kind of the same. I check the label; I ask the waiter, and I will not allow refined carbohydrates to enter my mouth.

Now I know, I know; you think I’m nuts. Well let me tell you what happened. The weight just fell off me. Now let me tell you: I still eat butter, cheese, bacon – all the high-cholesterol things that traditional medicine tells you is bad for you. I’m going to talk more about that a little bit later, because my doctor is over-the-moon with my blood test results.

I eat as much as I want whenever I want, and I lost 25 kg (that’s 55 lbs). It was the moment I removed all those refined carbohydrates. Look, the withdrawal of sugar lasted about a week, and then I was fine. But when I removed those refined carbs, I lost my appetite; I just wasn’t that hungry anymore, and here’s the science behind that. When you eat refined carbs with a high glaecemic index, your body digests them very quickly. In an instant, your blood sugar spikes, so now your body’s pumping insulin into your bloodstream because insulin is the stuff that processes the blood sugar into energy, and the surplus into fat.

A spike in your blood sugar produces a strong insulin response, and the insulin is so effective in mopping up your blood sugar quickly, you’re left with a really low level of blood sugar, and what does that tell your body? It says: ‘I’m hungry!’ What’s your response? You eat. You go for something that’s going to give you a quick fix, so your blood sugar pumps up rapidly again, and down again and up again and down again … Your insulin is pumping way too high, and right there, you have the beginnings of insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and Diabetes.

As soon as you remove the spikes, most of your hunger goes away. That’s the reason I can eat whatever I want whenever I want – because I now want less food and I want it less frequently. And that my friend, in a nutshell, is how I lost 25 kg. And have for the first time in my life ever kept it off without trying. All I do is I avoid refined carbohydrates. I don’t have to think what I eat; how much I eat; when I eat … That’s easy to do. I walk past those sweet muffins at the café which they put right at eye level to look and to smell stunning, and do you know? There’s not a single twinge of desire in my body to have one because I’ve broken the addiction to the sugar and the carbohydrates. I no longer need the fix, so I look at that, and I don’t want it. I’ve been through the withdrawal, and the desire is gone.

Now what I’ve just told you may sound completely counter-intuitive. How can the guy still be having bacon and eggs for breakfast, and losing weight? But the truth is, almost every truth is counter-intuitive. Hey; love your enemy. Take up your cross. Blessed are the meek. Those things are all counter-intuitive, and yet it’s true.

But God’s also given you and me a brain, and I don’t want you just to take my word for it. Here are three sources that I access frequently to wrap my mind around the rights and the wrongs of what to eat:

The first is the book “Sweet Poison” by lawyer and author David Gallesby, who like me was grossly obese, and given his gifted legal mind, he applied his forensic investigation skills to understand what was going on with his epidemic of weight-gain, and how to lose weight.

The second is that YouTube video by Professor Robert Lusdig called “Bitter Truth” (it’s right there on YouTube), and finally there’s a fantastic blog and website by a brilliant young doctor, Peter Attier. The site is called www.eatingacademy.com All 3 are brilliant, and if you’re a person whose lifestyle and waistline and blood sugar tests and blood lipid tests aren’t what they should be, my friend, it’s time for you to wrap your mind around this stuff, and do something about it because next month, next year, could be too late.

My secret number 1 for losing 25 kg is this: Get rid of the sugar and other refined carbohydrates in your diet, and watch the weight fall straight off you.

Secret Number 2

When I reduced the sugar and refined carbohydrates in my diet, not only did the weight come tumbling off without me having to starve myself or go hungry, but my blood cholesterol and triglycerides (those things that tell you whether you’re at risk of heart attack or stroke) – they improved so dramatically, it had my doctor asking, “What have you done?”

See, for years, he’d been telling me to reduce my cholesterol by going on a low-fat diet: Limiting dairy products (no more than 2 eggs a week) – the traditional things that doctors tell you to do, and for years I’d been trying to do that, but it just didn’t work. In fact, I’m not the only one. The whole idea of low-fat diets emanated from a flawed study done by a man named Ansell Keyes back in 1939. He promoted the ‘Fat makes you fat’ message, so he did this study of some 20 countries, and he chose just 7 of those to demonstrate that increased fat consumption was making people fat.

Had he reported the findings of all 20 countries, he simply wouldn’t have been able to say that; and in fact, had he chosen 7 different countries out of the 20, he would have proven exactly the opposite, but there’s a certain elegant simplicity about the message that fat makes you fat, so by the 1960s and 70s the idea of a low-fat diet was in full swing, and it’s still being promoted today.

The only problem is that over that same time, obesity rates have climbed dramatically. See, the low-fat thing, whichever way you look at it, isn’t working. And that, my friend, is something that I’ve proven over my life, as over and over again, with the yoyo effects of dieting, losing over 20 kg (45 lbs) 7 times in my lifetime, and each time stacking it back on again, whilst watching my fat intakes very carefully and wondering why I still had a fatty liver (which is a precursory to cirrhosis and cancer), and why I just couldn’t keep the weight off.

So, finally, having lost 25 kg (55 lbs) these last few years the easy way, virtually eliminating processed and refined carbohydrates from my diet, I came upon secret number 2: Replacing those bad calories, the ones that kept causing my blood sugar levels to spike and then to plummet, making me hungry all the time, with good calories. Now whilst Ansell Keyes was promoting the low-fat approach to dieting, there was another man (you may well have heard of him) called Doctor Robert Atkins – famous for the Atkins Diet, promoting low-carbohydrate diets, which didn’t limit the fat intake.

Now I’ve read the Keyes studies and I’ve read the Atkins approach, and whilst I always thought that those Atkins people were nutters, I decided to give it a go. So I replaced the chips and cakes and bread rolls and mash potatoes and all that stuff with three things, and here is secret number 2: Lots of vegetables. Every colour; every variety; cooked; raw; salads; stews … You name it and I am into vegetables. Secondly with protein: Lots of meat and fish of all kinds. Well, neither of those things are particularly controversial, are they? But the third one is: Fat. And not the fats that they tell you are healthy – the polyunsaturated margarines (the research is telling us that those manufactured oils, created in a laboratory and in a factory are actually bad for us), but saturated fats – animal and monounsaturated fats, like olive oil.

See, I no longer restrict my fat intake. In fact, hang in there ‘cos I haven’t gone crazy. My high-sugar content cereal breakfast of fruit juice and tinned fruit and muesli; total sugar content, around 45% by weight, has now been replaced by eggs fried in butter, bacon, spinach, and fried tomatoes. Why did I do that? As an experiment. Here was an alternate theory: ‘Cos the low-fat one I’d believed in for most of my life, the low-fat message that made so much sense, had simply failed to deliver and hadn’t worked.

And as much as that was totally counter-intuitive, that having so-called bad fats in my diet would help me lose weight, I had nothing to lose; I gave it a spin, and I decided to do it for 3 months. I would not restrict my fat intake, but would make sure that very few refined carbohydrates ever passed my lips. Remember that green, red, yellow, purple, orange vegetables are all actually packed full of carbohydrates, so I still have plenty of carbs in my diet. The difference is that the carbs I’m now eating in vegetables are packaged inside fibre, which makes them much slower to digest, avoiding any spikes in my blood sugar, and the tummy-rumbling plummet in blood sugar that follows.

So, what happened? What were the results? Well, firstly, I am now seriously addicted to vegetables, and I’ve rediscovered a whole bunch of fantastic vegetables that I’d forgotten.

Secondly, the fat that I’m eating has not increased my cholesterol or triglyceride readings. To the contrary: Bad cholesterol and triglyceride readings are down, and good cholesterol, the HDL type, is high. The reason is simple. See, most of your cholesterol in your body (85%) is actually produced by your liver and your small intestine, and your diet has very little influence over your blood cholesterol levels.

And finally, I simply wasn’t as hungry anymore. Not as often, not as much, and to this day I can basically eat what I want (other than refined carbohydrates) and not put on any weight. The key is, I want a lot less because I’m not that hungry anymore.

Now if you’d told me at the beginning of my 3-month experiment that this would be the outcome, I’d have said to you: ‘You are nuts!’ Do I still get hungry sometimes between meals? Yeah, occasionally, so I go for a handful of incredibly healthy nuts, a piece of cheese, some left-over protein, chicken, or whatever happens to be in the refrigerator. 25 kg (which is what I’ve lost over the last few years) is as heavy as a heavy suitcase, and I was carrying that round in my body. I mean, no wonder my joints were hurting. No wonder I didn’t want to exercise. No wonder I was always tired. I spent most of my adult life carrying that incredibly heavy suitcase strapped to my body in the form of fat. That’s a scary thought.

When you think about this stuff, as radical as this approach might seem, in a historical context, it’s not radical at all. It’s simply winding the clock back a century or so to eat exactly the sort of foods that my grandparents were eating in the late 1800s and early 1900s when (listen carefully) heart disease, stroke and diabetes were as rare as hens’ teeth. Before Ansell Keyes sold us this lie that that fat makes you fat. Hey, I’m not your doctor, and I’m not here to give you medical advice, but because so many people have asked me, I’m just telling you what I did, and how it worked.

Secret Number 3

See, I have a confession to make. I have never, ever, ever enjoyed running. Every now and then you hear of some big fitness event being organised, and they have the hide to call it a fun run. What, are they mad? Running has never been fun for me – ever, ever, ever. In fact, in my younger years, I trained to be an officer in the Australian army – 4 years at the royal military college of Duntroon, which is the UK’s equivalent of Sandhurst and America’s West Point. And do you know? I was almost kicked out in my final year for failing the cross-country run by 22 seconds – twice! So when I talk about exercise, I want you to understand where I’m coming from, and what I’m going to say is perhaps not what you think I’m going to say.

The prevailing wisdom is that in order to lose weight and get into shape, you need to do exercise. And by spending all those calories on exercising, and restricting the calories you consume, you create a calorie deficit that causes you to draw on your fat reserves and lose weight. That’s the theory. In fact, the whole exercise and fitness industry is worth billions of dollars every year. It’s booming, and have you noticed? People are getting fatter and fatter.

If you’ve been able to join me this week, you’ll have heard me share with you that I have lost more than 20 kg (that’s 45 lbs) 7 times in my life, and each time except this last time, I’ve put all the weight back on again. Anyone who’s ever tried to lose that kind of weight will tell you that 20 kg is a Herculean effort; it’s huge. Think about it. Each kilo of human body fat contains 7700 calories of energy, so to lose just 1 kilo, you need to create a deficiency between the energy you spend and the energy you consume of 7700 calories. That’s hard work.

And so when I lost all that weight all those times before, I would set about creating as much of a deficit between my energy output and energy consumption as I could possibly force my body to do, in order to burn the fat. Hey; at one stage, I was walking 20 km a day (that’s 12-and-a-half miles a day) and consuming only around 1100 calories. In other words, I was starving myself. It took a lot of time; it required a lot of work; a lot of dedication; a lot of willpower over many, many months to lose the weight that way; and as soon as I stopped doing it, I’d put it straight back on again.

Bottom line: With my own life and blood and sweat and tears I have proven that exercising doesn’t help you lose weight in a way that will cause you to keep it off, and the reason is that if you’re constantly hungry, well that’s something you can’t sustain. You can’t fight your appetite every day for the rest of your life.

When you spend calories exercising, your body automatically wants to replace them by eating, and if you bother to study the research (which now I finally have), that’s exactly what the research tells you. Study after study proves exactly that fact.

So here’s my secret number 3: Exercise is not a mainstay in helping you lose weight because it increases your appetite. Now if you’re living on a diet high in processed and refined carbohydrates, you’re actually breaking your finely tuned appetite control mechanism. By applying secret number 1, drastically reducing those refined carbs in your diet, to allow your brilliantly sophisticated appetite control feedback loop to start working properly again, and now all of a sudden you’re going to eat less; not because you’re forcing yourself to, but naturally because you want to – because your appetite system is working the way that God meant it to work. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Now all of a sudden, exercise takes on an entirely different role in your healthy lifestyle. You’re no longer beating your head up against a brick wall, trying to exercise to lose all this weight, which the studies tell us simply doesn’t work. Now, you’re exercising to be healthy.

Do you know what the biggest single indicator of an impending heart attack is statistically? Is it high cholesterol? No. Is it high triglycerides? No. Is it high blood pressure? No. It’s not even being overweight. The single greatest indicator of an impending heart attack statistically is a lack of exercise. But when you’re carrying all that weight, you don’t feel like exercising. Believe me, I know.

I used to sit there on the couch in the evening, having consumed a high-carb snack like chips or something, and I’d feel so tired and lethargic. I couldn’t bring myself to get up, put my runners on, and walk out the front door. But once I’d lost the weight, by doing what I’ve been talking about (modifying my diet, taking the refined carbs out and replacing them with really good stuff – the stuff our grandparents were eating when heart disease and Diabetes were rare as hens’ teeth), I discovered I had so much energy that I needed to exercise, so these days I walk rather briskly about 7 km (or just under 4-and-a-half miles) most days. It takes me about an hour, and if for some reason a couple of days go by without me being able to get out there and go for a walk, I start getting really twitchy and just … I just have to get out there and exercise because I have all this energy.

Sometimes I run for part of it, but only because I have excess energy to burn and I feel like it. I never take a watch; I never time myself; I don’t make it a competition against myself or anybody else. I just get out there for a brisk walk and I enjoy the fresh air, and I do it because I feel like it – not because I have to. I’m not training for a marathon; I’m just getting my body to be mobile.

Now walking may not be your thing. You might enjoy bike-riding or swimming or playing basketball or going to the gym. We’re all different, but once the weight has started to come off you, once you’ve removed those refined carbs, replaced them with good calories and the weight is just falling off your body, I guarantee you are going to want to go and exercise. Your body is amazing. The desire to exercise when the weight comes off is as certain as night following day. It’s natural.

Let me ask you something: Is this good news or what? I mean, you and I have been given this incredibly amazing body by God. He hand-crafted you and He hand-crafted me in our mothers’ womb, and laid down every strand of DNA that makes us who we are. The moment this western diet gets dumped on us, the fizzy drinks full of sugar; the white bread; the sugar-laden cereal; all the stuff made with white flour; the fruit juices that have the fibre removed and leave the poisonous sugar in … The moment that gets dumped on us, either from birth (because we’re born in a western country) or as the western diet gets introduced to the country where we live, we end up breaking the finely tuned appetite control system that God designed and gave to each one of us.

That’s what we do: We break it; we fool it; we keep having our blood sugar spiked, and then it plummets and we’re hungry, and up and down and up and down, and that’s where insulin resistance begins. That’s where premature ageing begins. That’s where Diabetes and metabolic syndrome and heart disease begins. You take all of that stuff away, you lose weight; you feel so much better, and you want to go and exercise. And you know what exercise does? Exercise attacks the triglycerides in your bloodstream. Exercise puts all sorts of good hormones back in your bloodstream.

May God bless you as you take hold of your life (your eating habits) and get your body, the only one that you’ll ever be given here on this earth, back into a healthy condition – the sort of condition that God meant for it to be in.

Every minute of every day, you and I are getting older. Have you ever wondered what causes your body to age? Well there’s been a lot of research into that and there are some very simple things you can do – to slow down that process. Interested?

Eat Healthy, Be Healthy

You and I have been given such an amazing body, and it’s the only body that we’ll ever get. It’s been wonderfully, exquisitely, uniquely handcrafted and yet so many of us are abusing it into an early grave. All because of what we’re putting into our mouths. You are what you eat – literally.

Way to many people are contracting diseases that, just a century ago were rare as hens teeth. As we saw last week on the program, cardio-vascular disease was almost unknown in the early 20th century. Today, the World Health Organisation estimates that through heart attack and stroke, cardio-vascular disease kills 16.7 million people every year. That’s one third of all deaths worldwide. And please don’t think that this is all coming from wealthy countries. Two thirds of those deaths are coming from low and middle-income nations. There’s probably not a one of us who doesn’t know someone who’s had a heart attack or a stroke.

Well, if we had been having this discussion back in 1901, almost none of us would have known anyone who’d had a heart attack or a stroke. And yet by 2020, the World Health organisation estimates that there will be around 25 million cardio-vascular disease deaths worldwide. It’s on the increase. It’s the same with cancer, same with diabetes, same with obesity. People we are eating ourselves into an early grave. And the more research that comes out, the more it all points to the so-called Western Diet.

I believe, I know that God gave you and me the most amazing bodies, and the reason we’re dedicating a few weeks to talking about this stuff on this program, is because I want to help you avoid becoming a victim of your western diet influences.

The thing that sets the western diet apart as we’ve seen if you’ve been able to join me, is not it’s fat content – there are plenty of instances of traditional diets high in animal fats where the people have a zero rate of cardio-vascular disease, diabetes and obesity – the thing that sets it apart is the high content of processed and refined carbohydrates.

Sugar: there’s sugar in just about every processed food you buy in the supermarket, white flour, white rice. Sweet drinks, sweet sauces, sweet cereals, sweet just about everything. Last week I shared with you that my top secret for losing 25 kgs (that’s 55 lbs)  that’s a lot of weight, was simply removing refined carbohydrates from my diet.

I just want to talk about that a bit more today, because people are shocked. Some think I’m crazy. Others put it down to another fad diet thing. I told someone about it recently, and they said, ‘but aren’t you hungry?’ We are so conditioned to believe that refined carbohydrates are a normal part of a healthy diet. But they’re simply not!

If you turn the clock back a century – back to the days when cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and a string of other diseases (which today are pandemics on the increase) were almost completely unknown – the one thing that stands out like a sore thumb, is that refined carbohydrates were a complete rarity in people’s diets.

People want to know, ‘Well, Berni, if you don’t eat bread and cereal and tomato sauce and cakes and biscuits and chips and stuff, what in goodness’ name do you eat?’ That’s the question I’d like to answer for you today, as I sit here with my blood pressure normal, my blood sugar normal, my triglycerides and bad cholesterol low, my good cholesterol high.

I wish I could have invited you to dinner last night. It was awesome. My wife Jacqui cooked a roast vegetable salad while I grilled some tandoori chicken on the BBQ. The salad was stunning. She cut up zucchinis, peppers or capsicums, mushrooms, baby tomatoes, onions, beans (I actually can’t remember all the veggies that were there) and drizzled them with healthy olive oil and roasted them for half an hour in the oven. Preparation time – about 10 minutes.

We then tossed the roasted veggies in a bit of vinegar, added a little salt and pepper and served them up warm with the tandoori chicken that I’d cooked. What was missing was any sauce with sugar in it. What was missing was roast potatoes or white rice or white pasta that would spike your blood sugar level and produce nasty triglycerides in your blood.

But do you know, those veggies contained all the carbohydrates my body needs. I had a stack of them too; they tasted exquisite. The meal contained mostly carbs, some protein and some fat – the way a meal is meant to – only the carbohydrates were tucked away inside a whole bunch of natural fibre, which made them slower to digest. Meaning I wouldn’t get hungry for a long time, and my blood sugar wouldn’t spike.

That’s how people ate back at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact that’s how they’ve been eating for millennia – plenty of unrefined carbs, unrefined grains which are slow to digest, with plenty of fat – animal fat included and plenty of protein. If we had the courage to turn the clock back 150 years on our diet, to a time when obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease were virtually non existent, what we’d doubtless discover, is that many of the diseases that are the products of the 20th and 21st century western diet would go away. And the exciting thing is that the food is fantastic.

My biggest insight? Vegetables rock. Animal fat, rather than increasing my cholesterol levels, actually keeps your blood sugar under control, keeps your appetite under control, and doesn’t make you fat. The research is done. The studies are in. And I’m walking proof.

There is so much fantastic, natural food out there, and if we were prepared to go for it what we would discover is a whole new food sensation, a healthier body, a body that ages much more slowly, a body that is mentally and physically sharper and far less prone to 20th century diseases.

Are you serious about looking after that one body you’ve been given? Really? So, what are you going to do about it? You are what you eat.

Slowing Down the Ageing Process

Now that I’m in my mid fifties, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research about is the process of ageing. What I’ve observed is that you can take two people of the same age, and one looks much younger than the other. A smoker will often look much older than a non–smoker of the same age. A person who is significantly overweight will often behave much older as their leg and hip joints struggle with the weight, than a person who is not overweight.

I see people who are my age using walking sticks, or hobbling, or finding it hard to get up out of a chair. Is that a random process, or is it something to do with the lifestyle that we lead? Does the process of ageing strike according only to the programming in our DNA, or are there environmental factors that influence ageing? In other words, is there something that you and I can do – in how we live – to slow down the ageing process.

That’s not a new thought, there’s a lot of research going on in this area as our population ages. There are a few different theories of ageing. The most widely accepted one in the medical community is the free radical theory of ageing. You’ve probably heard of free radicals, but, much like me before I became interested in the ageing process, you haven’t paid much attention to them.

In a nutshell, the free radical theory of ageing goes like this: Many of the activities of life produce free radicals in our body – these are unstable molecules in search of a spare electron – we won’t go too much into the molecular science here, or we’ll be at it all day. Heavy exercise produces free radicals. Pollution produces free radicals. And these free radicals are unstable and highly reactive, looking to soak up a free electron from anywhere. Now, every cell in your body needs oxygen to survive – to create energy. Without it, you die. In your cells, energy is produced by tiny structures called mitochondria. It’s a complex process, but think of the mitochondria as the power plant in each cell.

The process involves free radicals. Most of them are contained, but some of them escape, a bit like some of the muck that comes out of the exhaust of a car. As soon as the free radical escapes, it’s out there looking for a spare electron. And when it finds one to grab, the molecule that donated it now becomes an unstable free radical. And those free radicals do all sorts of horrible things in your body if they go unchecked, they create a chain reaction of molecular instability. A researcher in this field Dr Harman puts it this way:

It is likely that the life span of an individual is primarily determined by the rate of mitochondria damage, inflicted at an increasing rate with age by free radicals arising in the mitochondria, in the course of normal respiration. Eventually as your mitochondria become less efficient from the accumulate free radicals, a vicious cycle begins. You produce more and more superoxide radicles and have less and less defence against them. Finally your body’s various defence mechanisms are overwhelmed.

This is exacerbated by very heavy exercise, by smoking, by pollutants and they tell us, by a diet rich in refined carbohydrates. That could explain for instance, why smokers often appear to be much older than their non–smoking peers.

But here’s the good news: this whole destructive process of free radicals is counteracted by things called antioxidants. Think of the effect of free radicals as the process of oxidising or rusting your body. Anti–oxidants are substances that have free electrons to give away, to stabilise free radicals, to bring your whole system into balance.

Where do you get them? From foods rich in antioxidants, namely fruit and vegetables. In fact the brighter the colour of the fruit or vegetable, mostly the richer they are in antioxidants. Broccoli, spinach, berries, red and green and yellow capsicums or peppers, the brighter the better.

An antioxidant is simply a substance that quenches a free radical by donating an electron, thereby ending the free radical chain of events that destroys mitochondria, and causes the body to age, and eventually to die. There’s a very, very, very good reason why they keep telling us to eat lots of vegetables and fruits – because they’re healthy for us and – this is how they contribute to our health (as well as the vita nutrients that they pump into our bodies).

Contrast that with a diet high in refined carbohydrates which creates an over supply of insulin – hyperinsulinism it’s called – to deal with all the sugars you’re pumping into your body. And as one researcher put it, hyperinsulinism puts you in the ageing express lane.

Agree with him or not, Dr Robert Atkins puts the whole thing in perspective as he writes this about the historical context of our diets:

No human civilisation ever, has consumed a preponderance of carbohydrates in the form of refined products with most of their original vita-nutrient content discarded, until the 20th century westernised diet became prevalent.

Eat your fruit and veggies – which by the way are stunning – and ditch the refined carbohydrates, and in one fell swoop you’re introducing the antioxidants you need to slow the ageing process, and removing the greatest single cause of putting people into the ageing fast lane.

That’s it in a nutshell. God has a mighty plan for your life, but that plan can’t and won’t be fulfilled if you prematurely destroy the precious body that He’s given you. Listen again to the Apostle Paul and what he says about this body you’ve been given:

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

And what we’ve been talking about, actually, is exactly what our parents told us around the table – eat your vegetables. It ain’t rocket science, is it?

The Impact of Exercise

Now if you were able to join me last week, you’ll know that in this whole healthy living series, we had a bit of a chat about exercise. But if you heard that message, don’t tune out, because we’re going to circle back and pick up something important that could change your life.

I know that there are some people listening today who don’t have easy access to motorised transport but way too many people are living a sedentary existence. Sitting in front of computer screens all day –rarely walking anywhere, let alone working up a sweat. I’m like that and so, for much of my adult life, I did almost no exercise whatsoever.

And the less exercise you do, the less you want to do. Deep down, I knew that my sedentary life style wasn’t exactly making me healthy. When you added to that a diet high in refined carbohydrates, sugars and the like, I was heading for diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. I was an absolute Monty for a heart attack or stroke.

My father died of complications related to Type II Diabetes – and it seemed that I was walking in his footsteps.

Did you know that single biggest statistical indicator of an impending heart attack isn’t your blood triglyceride or cholesterol levels – it’s a lack of exercise. Inactive men for instance have nearly four times the risk of developing diabetes compared with just moderately physically active men. Active lifestyle by the way is also linked with significantly reduced cancer risk. And exercise is the key factor – THE KEY FACTOR – in preventing disability as you age. People who exercise regularly have a substantially lower risk of becoming disabled later in life. In fact the research clearly demonstrates that disability is not an inevitable part of aging. It can easily be defied by moderate physical activity, starting … now! It’s also a key overall factor in your longevity of life.

Are you getting the picture here? Am I making you feel uncomfortable by being that direct about all of this? Oh good. That’s what’s meant to be happening, if you’re one of the people who is where I used to be. I want it to sink in that you are cruising towards a certain early demise – if not immediate death, then an unhealthy, uncomfortable life.

Now so far in this series I’ve talked a lot about dietary choices and the impact of those choices on our health, our wellbeing and our lifespans. But now I want to tell you some things that are going to get you motivated to start introducing deliberate exercise into your routine. Three simple things to get you moving off your backside.

Here’s the first one: Some exercise is better than no exercise. Let me say it again, some exercise is better than no exercise. And you would be surprised at how low a level of exercise starts to reduce your risks around cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Are you ready? A brisk walk for a half-an-hour at least three times a week will significantly improve your health outcomes. Every day or most days is better. But just three half-hour walks at whatever constitutes a brisk pace for you, is all it takes. I know, I know – you don’t have time right? You have a long commute. You have kids to worry about. You work long hours. I know all of the excuses cause I used to use them all.

Remember to tell them all to your cardiologist when you’re lying on the stretcher in the emergency ward, trying to live through your heart attack would you? At some point we all need to come to grips with how utterly ridiculous the “I don’t have time” excuse really is. If you don’t have time to exercise, then you’d better get your affairs in order, because you’ll be making time to be sick … or dead.

Here’s the second simple thing that is going to get you moving – learn to exercise your options. We don’t all like the same thing. I absolutely love walking. You may not. Okay then, choose something that you do enjoy. Some people love to get on a treadmill and watch TV or listen to music or a podcast. A guy I used to work with Ron, he’s retired now, he loved swimming in the mornings and now, in his mid seventies, owns a sheep farm and is a fit as a fiddle. There are so many options and most of them are free. Just pick one – the one you like, the one you enjoy – and do some moderate levels of exercise.

There is never a time where I am telling you to become a marathon runner. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that very heavy exercise creates lots of free radicals, reduces your immune response, and can impact severely on your bones and joints, particularly as you get older. Moderate exercise at a brisk pace, three, four or five times a week for a half-an-hour is all we’re talking about.

And here’s the third great bit of news: when you exercise moderately you’re going to change your dietary choices almost automatically. Why? There’s a simple psychology that when you invest the time and energy in a bit of exercise, you’re not going to want to undo it all by shoving a packet of crisps or a bar of chocolate down your gullet. And really, I found that the positive reinforcement of moderate exercise really helped me change my dietary behaviour that contributed significantly to weight loss.

Doesn’t matter what age you’re at, what fitness level you’re at, it is never too late so start with some moderate exercise. And the wonderful thing about the amazing body that your God has given you is that it will guide you as to what is the right level of exercise. Starting off with something that works for you is absolutely the right thing to do – and little by little, as your fitness levels improve and your dietary levels change, you end up feeling so much better. Yesterday afternoon I went down to the local gym that I’m a member of (which is in itself a miracle) and ran and walked 6 km in 45 minutes, worked up a sweat, pumped some iron, and came out feeling fantastic.

That is such a long way from the days when I was grossly overweight … it all started with the first step. Remember – some exercise is better than no exercise. And your life depends on it.

You have been given the most amazing body. Complex. Intricate. Beautiful. Totally amazing! It’s God’s gift to you – and it’s been purchased with a price. So what makes us think that God’s not interested in how we treat it? Huh?

Don’t Smoke

It’s something I understand really well because I used to be a very heavy smoker. It’s just over 30 years since I gave it up, but I remember it as though it were yesterday and still today, there are some times when I feel as though I could have a smoke. Frightening – the grip of that addiction, and depending on where you live, you may have seen a reduction in smoking recently. We certainly have here in Australia, but let’s just stand back. This is a global radio program, heard in over 160 countries around the world, and so let’s look at the global statistics. Here they are.

About one-third of the adult male population smokes, with smoking-related diseases killing one in ten adults globally. Today, that means smoking causes four million deaths a year, but if current trends continue, by 2030, it’s going to be killing one in six people. Today, one person dies every eight seconds from smoking, and why wouldn’t they? About fifteen billion cigarettes are sold daily. That, believe it or not, is about ten million every minute, and to put all that into perspective, about twelve times more British people have died from smoking than died as a result of World War II.

Now I could continue to rattle off the statistics ad infinitum, but you’re getting the point. Right? These days in most countries, every cigarette-packet sold comes with a warning. Here in Australia, we have some of the toughest plain packaging and warning laws in the world, with grim photos of cancerous lungs and feet with toes rotted off them, and by the way, those cigarettes are hellishly expensive.

So, why do people start smoking? It’s mostly psychological. Peer pressure for young women; people are seduced to try a smoke by its glamorisation, and once they’re hooked, the physical and mental addiction makes it really hard to quit. If you’re a smoker, the single-biggest thing that you can do to improve your health, extend your life-expectancy, and increase your sense of wellbeing is quite simply to give up smoking.

As I said, it’s just over 30 years ago that I gave up smoking. It was around 7 pm on 24 January 1983, and this is the story of how I quit smoking. It was an early evening; I was in a hospital-room as I watched someone die of cancer. She’d been a smoker earlier on in her life. The cancer had spread right throughout her body; she’d left a note, ‘Make this the end’, so they withdrew the treatment, food and fluids, and I watched her take her last breath.

As I walked out of that hospital-room, I threw a half-packet of cigarettes (Benson and Hedges extra-mild) into the grey metal bin outside the room. Cold turkey. I haven’t smoked since. It’s a pretty dramatic way of giving up cigarettes, but then smoking has a very dramatic outcome.

I had started just a few years earlier, in my late teens. I was in the army, at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in the Australian officer’s training academy. We went on an exercise and a huge, cold, wet storm had blown in. Young, incredibly fit men were dropping from exposure. Our packs were miles away; the trucks couldn’t get through on the treacherous roads, so we had no wet-weather gear; no cold-weather gear; no tents (or hutchies, as we called them for some reason back then). We were at the mercy of the elements.

One of the blokes generously offered me a durry (that’s what we called cigarettes back then in the army); it was the only warm thing going, so I took it. Of course I coughed and spluttered as the smoke invaded my body, but that was it. That’s all it took. I was hooked, and in a few weeks, I was smoking three packets of twenty-five cigarettes a day. That’s seventy-five smokes every day! This was back in the day when you could smoke at your desk; I could easily go through a packet on a night on the town; between that and the alcohol, I’d wake up in the morning with my mouth feeling like the bottom of a cocky’s cage, as we used to say. Charming.

I was a chain-smoker. I tried to give it up, but to no avail. As bad as it was for me, as much as it made me cough and splutter and wheeze, as much money as it cost me, and as antisocial and disgusting as smoking is, I just couldn’t give it up, until I watched that woman die. The days, weeks, months and years that followed weren’t easy. The cravings were huge. For years later, I would still reach into the top drawer of my desk to pull out a packet of cigarettes. I’d check to make sure my lighter was in my pocket before I went out, but the thing that did it for me, one craving at a time, was the memory of watching that woman breathe her last breath, and the grief that it wrought in a husband, in a family … In a very real sense, her death saved my life.

Of course, I could get run over by a bus tomorrow, and despite my level of health and fitness, I could prove to be a statistical aberration and drop dead of a heart attack or stroke or cancer; that’s always possible, but it’s far less likely today than if I was still an obese smoker.

What’s the lesson I learnt? Simple. I actually like my body. I like feeling incredibly well. I like sleeping well at night and being alert during the day. I love being able to exercise, and it’s a great feeling to know that, all things being equal, I have a long and healthy life ahead of me. I’m now in my mid-fifties. To put it bluntly, I would never, ever want to go back to smoking.

So, given that I’ve made it through exactly 30 years without a cigarette, you know what? I’m thinking I can probably make it through one more day. Smoking hastened my father to an early grave, and I had a good friend, Tom Curran, who died in his early fifties, and another work-colleague, Russell Abbott, who died in his late fifties.

Perhaps you’re a smoker. If you’re listening to this, it’s time to quit. These days your local doctor can help you; there are patches and sprays and lozenges, that can be deployed to ease you out of your dependency, and I know how tough that is, both physically and psychologically, but it’s time to take the plunge. There are government programs; there’s all sorts of help available, no matter how young or old you are. I had a very simple message for you today: Don’t smoke. Do whatever you have to do to give it up, craving by craving.

Now perhaps you have a loved one or a friend or a colleague who smokes, and perhaps today God’s speaking to you through what I’m saying, and convicting you to get involved, and to help them and to encourage them. I know as a non-smoker, you think it’s a filthy habit, and you wonder, “How can they possibly smoke?” Hey; I used to smoke three packets of fags a day and I see someone smoking today, and I’m asking myself exactly the same question. How did I ever do that? But understand that they are seriously addicted. It’s tough. It’s really tough to give up smoking, but having the understanding and the support, and the help of a family-member or a friend or a work-colleague is so powerful.

The alternative for that smoker, whether it’s you or someone else, is a massive heart attack at a young age, or lung cancer or gangrene, or any number of other horrible things, that will lead to a really grim and ugly death. Hey; God has a plan for your life, and for my life, and for everyone’s life. I know that ‘cos that’s what He says in His Word – the Bible. It’s a good plan: Sure, with ups and downs; sure, with challenges and trials, but it’s a good plan – a plan that for all too many is cut tragically short by this horrible smoking thing.

I remember thinking to myself when I was a smoker, “Oh, it’d never happen to me”. Folks, the research is clear. The facts are in. It absolutely will happen to every smoker. Smoking on average shortens a life by around (wait for this, it’s staggering) twenty-five years. That’s rather a lot. The message is simple: Don’t smoke.

Sweet Dreams

Sleep. It’s something that we don’t give much thought to, isn’t it? We simply take for granted that we get tired, we go to bed, we wake up, we get going again, and that’s the next day. But have you ever been so tired that you can’t keep your eyes open? Have you ever been sitting through a meeting or sitting on the lounge at home, and you just can’t stay awake? At that point, sleep’s the only thing that matters. Our body is telling us it’s time for bed, and there’s nothing that’s going to change that. We just have to sleep.

The record for the longest period without sleep is (wait for it) 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes during a rocking-chair marathon of all things. The person who holds that record reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech, memory and concentration loss. In fact, so important is sleep to us, many of us take cat-naps with our eyes open even. People around us, we ourselves, are often not even aware of it.

Now, new parents will know that feeling because the birth of a child typically results in somewhere between 400 and 750 lost hours of sleep for those parents in the first year of a child’s life. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, and I know how tough it is when children come along. I remember sitting at my desk at the office nodding off, because I simply hadn’t had enough sleep.

Now a normal person takes somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to fall to sleep in bed at night. If you fall asleep in less than 5 minutes, then that’s a good indication that you’re being sleep-deprived, and dreams – that’s a whole different thing. We could talk for hours about dreams – the ones we have during rim sleep, that’s rapid eye movement sleep, are typically characterised by bizarre plots, whilst non-rim dreams are repetitive and thoughtless with very little imagery. And by the time the average person dies, they will have spent around 25 years of their life asleep. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet, even though 99% of what medical science knows about sleep has been discovered just in the last 25 years, did you know that even today, science can’t tell us what sleep is for? Why we have to sleep? Sure; there are theories, but there’s no one scientifically proven reason for sleep. The amount of sleep we need? That varies from person to person, but pretty much, is somewhere between the 6 to 8 hours a night range, and we all know that our sleep is something like a cheque account with an overdraft facility.

This is something I experience a lot. During the week, because I’m an early starter, I can be sitting at my desk at 4 am, preparing these radio messages. Sometimes I don’t get to bed till 10 or 10:30 at night, so I could end up with as little as 5-and-a-half to 6 hours’ sleep. If I do that for a few days running, I end up with a sleep deficit, and then on Friday night, I’ll sleep for maybe 10 or 11 or even 12 hours to catch up. If it’s been a particularly hectic week, Saturday night might be a longer sleep-night as well so that by Sunday, I’m caught up and I’m feeling fine again. I’m sure you’ve experienced that too.

But here’s the thing: Some people live in a constant sleep deficit. That’s what I’d like to chat with you about today. Because if you’re not getting the sleep you need, then there’s every chance that your life isn’t all that it should or could be. You know that feeling of constant tiredness? And some of that is caused by some of the things that we’ve been talking about these last few weeks on the program. If your diet is stuffed full of refined carbohydrates, then you are going to be carrying a bunch of extra weight.

If you’ve been able to join me on the program, you might have heard me telling you about the large amount of weight that I’ve lost over the past few years (25 kgs, or around 55 lbs.), so I can tell you there is a huge difference between the quality of sleep that you get when you’re a healthy weight as compared to being overweight or obese, as I was. I sleep so well these days. It makes a huge difference to my life. Back when I was carrying around all that extra weight, I was always tired. I didn’t sleep well, and life was a misery.

With all my heart, I believe (in fact, I know) that you and I have been put here on this earth by God with a purpose, and part of that purpose is to live the abundant life that Jesus promised to bring us. That doesn’t mean that each day’s going to be a sensational experience and that nothing bad’s going to happen to us, but overall God’s plan for you and for me is for us to live an abundant life – a life overflowing with God’s goodness; a life when the overflow of His goodness to us has a huge impact on the people round us.

Well, let me tell you, abundance and exhaustion simply don’t go together. You can’t live an abundant life when you’re tired. God knows that. Psalm 127:2 says that God gives sleep to those whom He loves. God gets it, but sometimes we don’t. We think that we can burn the candle at both ends – staying up late; getting up early in the morning, to do all the things we have to do.

You know, 18 hours without sleep has the same impact on you as a blood-alcohol reading of .05, which in many places is the legal limit for driving a vehicle, and today I guess I just wanted to give you (pardon the pun) a bit of a wakeup call about your sleep. If you’re not getting enough of it, enough good-quality uninterrupted sleep, then you’re not living the life that you could be living because you’re always tired, and from a health perspective, that’s not a good thing either.

Not only does a lack of sleep lead to more accidents and a far lower level of mental alertness, it can put you at a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease (that’s heart attack and stroke), high blood pressure, and Diabetes. Your sleep matters to your health and to the quality of your life, even if the scientists can’t tell you exactly why that is, so here are some practical tips for getting a good night’s sleep. I’m sure some of them will be familiar to you, but here we go.

Firstly, make sure that the room where you sleep is dark and quiet and well-ventilated because your body temperature needs to drop by about a third of a degree for you to be able to sleep well.

Next, get rid of all the distractions. Do you sleep with your mobile phone by your bedside with E-mails coming through and SMSs, or do you leave the TV on in the bedroom all night? Don’t! Those things disrupt your sleep, and they affect you during the day.

Then try to go to bed at pretty much the same time every night, and get up around the same time in the morning. The more your sleep patterns are in a regular routine, the better you’re going to sleep.

If you find that snoring or discomfort interrupts your sleep, then lose some weight. Just 3 or 4 kg can make the world of difference to the quality of your sleep.

If you have some ache or pain that wakes you in the night – a bad knee, a sore hip, a shoulder pain, get it seen to. All too often we let those niggling things linger on, not realising how much sleep they’re actually robbing us of.

Try to have some kind of routine – something that you do each night before you go to bed, to train your body that it’s sleep time. For me, it’s a cup of hot tea. I do that most nights, and it’s funny how the body goes, “Whoop! Must be bedtime”. That should include a wind-down period, especially for men. There needs to be a clear separation between using your mind for something complex like work, and winding down to the point where you can rest. In that last hour before I go to bed, I won’t let anyone get me to use my mind for something complex, otherwise I simply won’t be able to sleep.

And the last one is to lay the cares of the world aside. I do that by praying. Many-a time I’ve gone to bed with worries and burdens – things you could end up turning over in your mind for hours and you toss and turn and you have a restless night … I always just lay them down in prayer. I give them to the LORD my God for Him to deal with overnight, and those things (99 times out of 100) give me a great night’s sleep.

Remember: You can’t live an abundant life when you’re tired all the time. Sweet dreams.

Your Body is not Your Own

If you’ve been able to join me over this teaching series, either here on radio or online at Christianityworks.com, you’ll know that we’ve rattled through some amazing statistics about how complex, how powerful, how intricate and amazing our bodies really are, but we don’t need statistics to tell us that. Just stop and think about all the things that your body does for you, and that you’re able to do using your body, without even having to think about it.

Just the right amount of oxygen is what you take in. You expel the waste products, CO2 and all the other stuff without even thinking about it. You can see millions of colours, and your mind interprets what you see in an instant. You move without thinking. You have such an amazing body. You can recall billions of bits of information in an instant, and why wouldn’t you have an amazing body? God gave it to you. It’s His design; it’s His hand-crafted exquisite gift to you, and it’s the only body that He’s going to give you in this lifetime. My favourite Old Testament Scripture is this. Psalm 139:13-18. The Psalmist’s writing to God. He’s saying:

For it was You who formed me in my inward parts. God, You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works; that I know very well. My frame wasn’t hidden from You when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In Your book was written all of the days that were ever formed for me when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are Your thoughts, o God, how vast is the sum of them! I try to count them; they are more than the sand. I come to the end, and I am still with You.

Your beautiful body, hand-made by God Himself. He was there; He saw it; He made it happen; He chose the genes to lay down to make you who you are. You are so beautiful in God’s eyes, and though some of us (me included for much of my life) don’t treat our body with the respect that it deserves, it still is a beautiful creation.

Let me ask you something: If Jesus knocked on your door today, and showed up with the most amazing present for you, would you just toss it in the corner and treat it with neglect? I hope not. And yet when we abuse our bodies by eating the wrong foods, by not exercising; not resting; by doing all the things we know we shouldn’t be doing, that is in effect exactly what we’re doing. We’re tossing this amazing gift that Jesus has given us, our beautiful bodies on which our very lives depend, we’re tossing them in the corner and treating them with neglect, and that my friend eventually comes back to haunt us.

If you’re pumping lots of sugary and refined foods down your gullet, if you’ve become (sad to say) a couch potato and you’re not working up a sweat once a day or at least every other day, I can tell you this one thing for certain: The statistics tell us that you’re going to die young, and that’s no way to treat your beautiful body, this gift from God. Listen to what the apostle Paul says about how we treat our bodies to his friends in Corinth. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20:

Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

Okay. In this context, Paul’s talking about sexual immorality, but the principle of glorifying God in our bodies applies equally to how we treat our bodies from a diet, exercise and rest perspective. The Bible doesn’t talk much, if at all, about obesity or cardiovascular disease or Diabetes ‘cos none of those diseases existed way back then. They were lobbed in on us as we started eating the so-called western diet high in sugars and refined carbohydrates, somewhere along the way, in the 20^th century. See, this is why we’ve been talking about this stuff. It’s really important, but by and large, it’s not in the Bible except for this reference where God tells us to look after our bodies – to glorify Him in our bodies.

Friend, with all I am, I want to implore you today to take your body seriously; to respect it; to look after it. Because in doing so, not only are you going to be feeling a whole bunch better, not only are you going to be living a whole bunch longer, but you’ll be honouring God – glorifying God in your body, this body of yours that was purchased at the most amazing price, by the death of Jesus Christ on that cross. And that, my friend – honouring God, hey; that’s not such a bad thing to do.