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December 2017

Dec 31
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Women, Weight Gain and Eating Disorders: Some Observations

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All physical structures with a high degree of coherence or rigidity have a natural frequency at which they vibrate when struck by an external force. Non-rigid systems that are closed in terms of finite inputs and outputs, but with at least one feedback loop, also have a natural frequency at which they resonate or oscillate when the input values change. Changes in input variables will have an impact on the other values in the system after a set, repeatable and predictable time delay based upon the value of input variables and the position and sensitivity of the feedback loop.When a structure or a system of this sort experiences an influx of energy from an outside source, the result of the input will depend upon the magnitude and frequency of the input. To the extent that the input is a unique, solitary event, or a recurring event at a frequency not in keeping with the natural frequency of the system, the vibration or oscillation of the system will decay according to the friction of the environment. To the extent that the input is repeating and the frequency of repetitions corresponds to the natural frequency of the system either directly or in some harmonic multiple, then the system or structure will continue to vibrate or oscillate. If the amount of energy being absorbed is greater than the friction of the environment, then the vibration will increase in amplitude, limited only by the friction of the environment.

The human metabolism is such a closed system with a limited number of inputs, outputs, and at least three feedback loops. The main input is the caloric content of food eaten, and the main outputs are the amount of energy expended in activity and metabolism. The primary feedback loop at least in terms of response time is appetite. The natural frequency of the appetite response is a matter of perhaps 20 minutes. Food eaten produces a higher blood sugar level, and appetite decreases commensurately. As the sugar in the blood is used, the level drops, appetite is stimulated, and the process repeats. A secondary feedback loop is that of metabolic rate. When the blood sugar level drops, the body slows its metabolic rate to consume blood sugar at a slower rate. When food is eaten and the blood sugar level rises, then the metabolic rate will go back to normal. The response time of this loop is a matter of hours. A third feedback loop is the process of establishing a body weight set point. As the body takes stock of the availability of food and the amount of work required on a regular basis, the body will tend to a weight that allows a margin of safety without requiring too much food. The margin established is variable, as we will see. The body actually learns about the availability of food by the regularity of meals and their caloric content. When the timing of meals or their caloric content vary, the body concludes that food availability is a problem, and will tend to a wider safety margin, that is, a higher set point. Conversely, when meals are regular and of high quality, it will tend to a lower set point. The same principle applies to energy requirements. If there is little work to do on a consistent basis, a lower set point will be tolerated. If large bursts of energy are required on an inconsistent basis, the set point will rise. In the case of both food and energy calculations, the body will respond to inconsistency with a higher set point, and to consistency with a lower one. The natural frequency of the set point response is muchslower than those of appetite and metabolism. This set point also appears to change faster when the set point is being raised, and slower when it is being lowered. The natural frequency of this loop is a matter of days going up and weeks coming down. This is, of course, a concession to physical safety.

Of particular interest in the matter of the vibration of structures or the oscillation of closed systems is the system’s sensitivity to input values. Sometimes the vibration or oscillation itself actually affects the response of the entire system. This can occur in either direction. Increasing vibration can make the structure or system more or less sensitive to input values. If oscillation decreases sensitivity, the system will tend to a stable vibration. If oscillation increases sensitivity, it will produce an unstable system with swings of greater and greater amplitude. The human metabolism is a system with increased sensitivity when it is in oscillation. The body’s natural response to caloric privation is to slow the metabolism. Subsequent doses of blood sugar will be used more judiciously by the body, as metabolism has been slowed. The body will perceive the next caloric intake as being larger than it really is, and respond accordingly. Blood sugar will rise for a longer period and be used slower. All this will be interpreted as increased variability, and the body will respond with a higher body weight set point.

Controlling human weight needs to take these factors into account. To achieve a low margin or safety or body weight set point, behavior should be changed at a rate inconsistent with the natural frequency of the feedback loops discussed here. Thus, to avoid oscillations in blood sugar and appetite, food should be eaten slowly. A meal should last longer than the response time of the sugar loop, or more than 20 minutes. People who defuse this loop by eating in less than 20 minutes will tend to overeat; their satiety response doesn’t have a chance to kick in, and when it finally does, the person will experience wide swings in appetite. Further, in order to avoid problems with the secondary feedback loop of metabolic rate change, meals should be eaten at the same time of day each day and should not vary in terms of their caloric content. Thus, the body will be soothed into thinking that all is safe and predictable, and a lower margin of safety will be tolerated. Finally, any changes in the overall levels of caloric intake or exercise should be consistent over a matter of weeks or months for the body to arrive at a new set point it considers safe. Any restricting or bingeing at a faster natural frequency will tend to set the body weight loop into oscillation, and a much higher set point will be the result. This is the beginning of an eating disorder.

Eating disorders occur when there is an interaction between the physical responses of the body to food, i.e. these three feedback loops, and the cognitive and emotional perceptions of the individual. When these perceptions lead to behavior that corresponds to the natural frequency of any of these three feedback systems, then a disorder may be said to exist. The system can go one of three directions. If the person succumbs to appetite demands, they will gain weight uncontrollably, as caloric intake will outstrip energy needs. Here is your binge eater. If they cope with the increased caloric content by increasing exercise or by purging the contents of their stomach before digestion, then a stable weight can be maintained. Here you have your bulimia nervosa patient. If they are unwilling to deal with the unwanted weight gain, they can diffuse the loop by restricting caloric intake unilaterally. This is the beginning of anorexia nervosa. This latter response is somewhat more involved, as it requires a high tolerance to appetite stimulus and hence great self control. Familial and developmental factors seems to enhance this response.

There’s a great deal of speculation about why there are so many more women with eating disorders than men. Perhaps it’s because digital, black/white, all or nothing thinking is more common among women. That kind of “throw in the towel” mentality in the face of hunger pressures and dietary failure feeds into this harmonic vibration of the body’s search for metabolic homeostasis. Cultural pressures for favorable body image and beauty are felt more strongly by women than men in our society. Further, estrogen has an affinity for sugar and resultant weight gain. Women of reproductive age show increased sensitivity to these feedback pressures as pregnancy is interpreted as a danger factor by the female body.

Dec 31
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”Thou shalt do no murder…”

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I once saw an article in a church newspaper entitled “McVeigh Execution Compels Reflection on Death Penalty” under the broader heading “Restorative Justice.” As is typical of most “Christian” pronouncements on the subject, it was an offense to anybody who knows Biblical theology and human psychology. By way of response I will quote somebody who does not suffer from the slipshod thinking so prevalent in today’s pulpit and editorials, Martin Luther. This is taken from his sermon for the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, preached in 1530. He begins by making a distinction between secular and sacred kingdoms, and goes on to deal with the unique responsibilities of the secular government.

“…In this civil kingdom or government there is no forgiveness of sin, but rather punishment for sin. That is why Holy Scripture calls it the sword in Genesis 9 and Romans 13:4. God did not put a useless piece of paper into the emperor’s hand, but rather the hardest and sharpest sword with which to execute punishment; not a pen, but a sword. God gave the emperor a sword to indicate that civil government is not to forgive but rather to use the edge of the sword to punish crimes. If civil government were to forgive crimes, you and I would lose everything. When a thief steals everything there is in a house, when a murderer robs and kills whomever he meets on the street, if the prince of a territory and the judge of a city were to ignore and forgive crimes, we would all lose our property, our bodies, and our lives.

“When thieves insist on stealing and murderers insist on killing, then the emperor and his agents have a responsibility to address the problem in a different way than I or some other preacher of the Word and servant of peace would address it. It is not appropriate for us preachers to wield the sword; our job is to proclaim grace, to forgive, and to announce forgiveness in the name of Christ. To repeat, the job of the emperor and his forces is to punish evildoers, not to forgive them (Rom. 13:4).

“Unfortunately, what is happening today is that officials in the civil government, who are reminded of their responsibility to punish, not only are indifferent and lazy about punishing crime, but actually aid and abet the criminals. We must diligently teach this doctrine, so that people will learn and know that civil government must be stern and severe. The Turks know how to discharge this responsibility; they waste no time in disciplining. Whoever disobeys given laws loses his head. The result is that there isn’t nearly as much unrest or rebellion among the peasants, city folk, knights and household servants as there is in our country.

“This negligence in regard to secular government is to a large extent the result of the monks, who in their sermons taught that princes and lords should always be merciful and should not practice capital punishment. By doing this, they brought secular government to the point where rulers pleaded conscientious objection when it was their duty to execute criminals. Our Lord God could easily enough have instituted that kind of civil government if that had been his pleasure, or if such a government would have been good and useful for the world. But God deliberately commands civil government to make use of the sword; they are to use it in punishing civil evil…

“…Therefore, secular governments must punish, not spare, criminals. However, the fact that secular officials often neglect this duty is the fault of the pope, the monks, and the false preachers who fail to teach the proper distinction between the spiritual kingdom and the secular kingdom…”

I could go on, but the Rev. Mr. Luther has made his point. We see that capital punishment is not an Old Testament thing, but a Bible thing. It is endorsed in the New Testament as well as the Old. At no time does God say, “I’ve changed my mind,” as the nouveau Marcionites in most churches would have us believe. Capital punishment is not for the benefit of the criminal, but for society as a whole. The threat of death may lead the criminal to repentance, but that is not the point. The point is that when a person commits a heinous crime, they forfeit their civil rights, and society as a whole is duty-bound to make a spectacle of them. In the Bible, the death penalty was imposed with the explanation, “You must purge the evil from Israel.” Particularly in the case of murder, if I can kill without giving my own life, the life of the victim is no longer sacred. We are stewards of human life, and to abuse it by coddling criminals is to prove ourselves unworthy stewards.

I close with a critique of the usual quotation of Exodus 20:13. It should read, “Thou shalt do no murder.” The use of “kill” dates to the King James Bible, which is a misleading translation. In only four cases is the Hebrew rasah translated kill, two times in reference to the ten commandments, and two times discussing cases where killing somebody is technically justifiable. In 14 other instances it is translated as a variant of murder.

The Rev. Robert McLeod

Dec 31
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Lent and Other Such Practices…

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I was recently in the company of an evangelical youth pastor who made a comment that is au courant in many Christian circles, but nevertheless wrong and destructive. The topic was the observance of Lent and other such “relics” from the past, and of course he was against it. “Where in the Bible,” he protested, “does it mention Lent?” At first glance, he’s got a point. If you construe “Biblical” as meaning “mentioned in the Bible,” then Lent is not Biblical. Then again, a lot of other things then are not Biblical, including you and me. If we were to think a little, which may be hard for evangelicals, we might learn that Lent and many other ancient traditions are actually in complete agreement with the thrust and purpose of the Holy Scriptures. Let me explain.

The continued relevance of the season of Lent can best be appreciated by reading the Gospel lection for the first Sunday in Lent, Year C, Luke 4:1-13. This is the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert, his first action after being baptized by John the Baptist. The devil attacks Jesus along three lines. First there is the physical: do what your body says demands, in this case eat food. Surely none of us is familiar with temptations of a physical nature. Then there’s the spiritual angle: worship amiss: deny God’s authority. Note that the devil says all the kingdoms of the earth have been given to him, and Jesus does not deny this. When Adam obeyed the devil instead of God, all the earthly property over which he was steward were given to the enemy. Finally, there’s the intellectual attack: the devil even quotes Scripture, but misconstrues the clear intent. Note that the devil knows his Bible, probably better than most Christians. For all these challenges, Jesus does the same thing; he quotes Scripture himself to refute the enemy. He cites the Bible to show that obedience to the devil is in every case contrary to God’s express will.

Now we have to ask ourselves, why was the devil interested in tempting Jesus? The clear answer is that if he could get him to do the his bidding, Jesus would be diverted from fulfilling his divine destiny. Jesus could experience comfort and success in every way imaginable; physical satisfaction, the adulation of the world, and he could justify it all by an errant reading of Scripture. But more importantly, he could avoid the Cross, with all its agony and shame. In other words, if the enemy could get Jesus to do any of these things, he would divert him from his divine mission of redeeming a sinful humanity. He could either obey the devil or his Father, but he could not do both.

Now you will say, I’m glad he knows his Bible, because he resisted temptation and was able to institute God’s plan of redemption. He has succeeded and with regard to our justification, there’s nothing left to be done. As Jesus said on the Cross, “It is finished.” And in fact many people operate as if Jesus has done it all, and there’s nothing left for us to do. There is no longer anything that is out of bounds morally. As Oswald Chambers says derisively, “Christ died for me, I go Scot free.” But the only problem with this very popular conclusion is that this Gospel lesson is accompanied by an Epistle lesson, Romans 10:8b-13. To be sure this lesson mentions justification, but it also mentions something else: salvation. Whereas most people tend to conflate and confuse these two terms, thinking that Paul is just repeating himself, he’s is in fact drawing a distinction between them, saying they’re not the same.            If you examine the two accounts of the last judgment in Mt. 25 and Revelation 20 you notice something peculiar: they don’t mention our sins, the bad we did. They mention something else entirely, the good we either did or did not do. Thus we see that while being forgiven is essential, it’s not the end of the matter. In addition to being forgiven for doing wrong, we need to be empowered to do right. We are forgiven by the death of Christ, he is the Savior of all. But we also need to be empowered by his ongoing life, and clearly, he is NOT the Lord of all. Forgiveness is universal, there’s not limit to the power of the blood of Christ. But salvation is particular, we can refuse to have Jesus as our Lord. This is where the temptation of Christ comes in, and why we have this Gospel lesson at the beginning of Lent. The devil failed to deter Christ; He fulfilled his mission. So now the devil turns his attention to you and me, so that he can get us deterred from our mission. If he can derail us in fulfilling our part of the equation, it doesn’t matter that he failed in the desert. There is absolutely no difference if we are condemned for our sins, or condemned for doing nothing with our lives. So that’s why the devil, having failed with Jesus, comes after you and me. He wants us to cling to sin, not that we might be judged for having done wrong, but so that in clinging to it we grieve the Holy Spirit and end up an empty pod. He tells us to do what our body demands, he invites us to worship him instead of God, and he gets us to read Scripture with our desires in mind, instead of God’s clear intent. In other words, he does to us exactly what he did to Jesus, and unlike Jesus, many of us fail.

So what we see is that the temptation of Christ is not just relevant to Jesus in his role as the Son of God, it’s also relevant to us in his role as the Son of Man. It’s something he went through in history to be sure, but it’s also something we have to go through in our personal history. If churches abandon historically validated practices like the observance of Lent, they run the risk of producing Christians who will fail when tempted as Jesus was. Resistance to the enemy is not developed overnight. That’s why we must have an annual observance that develops our minds and character so we can prevail when attacked. Historical churches do these things because they have proven helpful across the millennia. They may not be Biblical in a superficial sense, but they are Biblical in that they make the Biblical story come alive in our day and age.

 

Dec 31
0

Through Their Eyes

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Nobody, and I repeat, nobody, is a bigger supporter of the current administration’s approach (Bush 43) to containing the criminal and military agenda that Islamic fundamentalism presents to the West than I. Say what you will, since 9/11/01 there have been inconveniences, costs and anxiety, but there has been no attack on U.S. soil. President Bush and the American military have successfully transferred the battlefield from these shores back to where it belongs, the Middle East and Afghanistan. For this victory, and it can be called nothing less, we should be grateful. That said, I think it begs the more important questions of how this agenda developed in the first place, why it appears to enjoy popular support in the Muslim world, and how it can be diffused in the future.

In what may be news to some, pan-Arab military expansion is nothing new. When offered a choice between the effete and overly intellectual Christianity of the 7th century and Mohammed, most residents of North Africa and the Levant chose the latter. While Christianity was arguing about the person of Christ and the nature of the Trinity, Mohammed offered a chance to fight, to win, and to have sensual, if delayed, rewards. Until the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in the First World War, a large, aggressive and ideologically unified Arab block was a real, if distant, threat to the West. The difference today is not that Islam has recently sprung to life, but that modern communication and transportation have reduced the distance between the West and it.

That brings us to the present day, and the misunderstanding and outright antagonism that separates the Muslim and “Christian” worlds. Nowhere is the incomprehension on our part greater than in the area of Arab perception. How is it, we ask, that Islamic fundamentalists seem to enjoy widespread support for their actions amongst their compatriots and coreligionists? After 9/11, it was reported that Osama was the new nom du jour for newborn baby boys across the Arab world. Polls also indicate that many Arabs believe in conspiracy theories that put the responsibility for the attacks on the U.S. government and military, not on Al Queda or Arabs at all. Coupled with this, the reluctance or inability of Iraqis to embrace the principles of democratic government and religious tolerance when freely offered is the source of profound consternation to all Americans hoping for an end to the civil disturbances in that country. How can we have so misjudged the expectations and abilities of a people we are, at great cost to ourselves, trying to help?

The fact is, the pious Muslim looks at all things through a religious lens. Because of this, Islam is a religion of strong behavioral strictures that makes Christian temperance seem lilly-livered by comparison. A classic example was the luncheon engagement offered to Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia by Winston Churchill as the latter passed through Cairo on his way back from brokering the conclusion to WWII. Churchill was told that the Saudi head of state would not tolerate the use of alcohol or tobacco in his presence. Winston recounts the following: “I…said to the interpreter that if it was the religion of His Majesty to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.” Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 397,8. Even we in the West can adopt the stereotype, a prime example being the film Robin Hood, where Robin’s Mohammedan companion is portrayed as possessing piety, self-control and scientific knowledge, while the Christian is likened to the dissipated Friar Tuck, whose passion is beer and the excessive consumption thereof.

Personally, I’m on Winston’s side on the debate about what God thinks about the desirability of having a drink, but you get the point. On more important moral issues, however, I tend to side with the Turk. Do Muslim nations practice abortion as we do, sacrificing 1.29 million humans a year as retroactive birth control? Guttmacher Institute, Year 2002. They are rough on their women, but do they have the same levels of sexual exploitation, rape and venereal disease as more “advanced” Western societies where women are “free?” Look at us; we swill alcohol, import illegal drugs in scandalous quantities, provide the world with pornography, watch gambling on television, abuse those in authority and blaspheme the God we claim to obey. Is it any wonder Muslims want no part of us as a culture? What we consider freedom, they deem license, and I’m not so sure they don’t have the more accurate view.

So as we lament the lives lost on September 11th and all those who continue to perish in the Iraqi civil war, let us try to see life through the eyes of those we’re trying to help. Why mourn the thousands, when we are careless with the millions? Why ridicule the backwards Bedouin who has not experienced a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, when we use those blessings to discount all that might be termed moral, just, and eternal? I don’t believe God deals with civilizations on a strict quid pro quo basis, but He might start, and who could blame Him? Is He speaking to us through the voice of the Muslim fanatic? He may well be. I’ve come to believe it’s easier to please God with good behavior and bad doctrine, than with good doctrine and bad behavior. The prophet Isaiah warned against trusting in horses and chariots and ignoring God almighty. We need to continue to be vigilant with our military and security response to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, but we can’t ignore the valid critique that these same extremists offer of our culture as a whole. We would be right to heed Isaiah’s warning in our own day.

• The Rev. Robert McLeod

Father McLeod is an Episcopal priest, and is the author of Everything You Know is Wrong: The Case for a New Reformation.