"Stay conscious to what you are eating and why." To this "why" I might add "and when." So many people (I used to do this, and still have to catch myself every now and then) eat when they're not hungry (which is "why," too!). They eat because they're celebrating, sad, bored, angry, tired, or to entertain themselves, to keep themselves company while they watch TV, etc., etc.
Another thing I've noticed is that people believe they need to cut certain foods out of their diet altogether because they're "fattening" or bad in some other way. Balance is a spiritual quality and I think we need to find our own sense of balance in our eating habits, but to stop eating some particular food (let's say, chocolate or potato chips) is just a form of idolatry...we're just making that particular food into a little god. Thanks, Michelle, this is such an important topic!

Thanks, Michelle...it's so freeing when we stop "idolizing" food!

Again Michelle - what a wonderful topic for the age! You are bound to become the next Christian Science Jenny Craig!

As introduced in Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the Seven Deadly Sins is, as we know, gluttony. The way that Dante defined it was "excessive love of pleasure."

Keeping that in mind, second to all those wonderful pharaceutical ads on TV are probably those for all kinds of different foods. No wonder our society is so hypnotized that we can't resist a pit stop at the nearest McDonalds! We think that this will bring us pleasure and don't even consider that we are wildly tipping the scales from spiritual to material every time we eat something that we don't need. As Mrs. Eddy says in S&H on pg. 392:24: we must always "[s]tand porter at the door of thought." (I LOVE that!)

The Lord's Prayer puts it succinctly - "give us this day, our daily bread." To me, that means in all kinds of ways, what we need for this day, and this day only. That also reminds me of something that I read in the latest edition of "We Knew Mary Baker Eddy" on pg. 240. In a letter to a dear friend Mrs. Eddy wrote," God bless you and every day show you a little more of Infinite Love. Just your daily bread, more you will not digest." While she was not speaking specifically of actual food in that letter, she was speaking of God's love and our ability to absorb His meaning on a daily basis.

From day to day we are meant to absorb what we can and what will help us down the right sprititual path. Pushing the envelope does nothing but waste the resource. No matter what form it takes!

Thanks for your constant encouragement and validation, Michelle. It means a lot!

I liked how you linked our comments!
Your blog today reminded me of a period in my life when I had to deal with stressful situations in work and at home. Because of this, I simply had no time to think about eating; I started eating more than usual and got fat. I've never been through this before, which made ​​me feel very uncomfortable with myself and with the image I had of myself. So I started doing a crash diet, and calories and weight became very important to me. Still, I could not go back to my normal weight easily. I lost weight only after many months, and after much suffering, because I stopped eating many things that I liked. Shortly after that I started a new stage in my professional life that involved living outside my country for long periods of time. I was afraid of getting fat again, because I did not know what kind of foods to eat and was afraid of not being able to weigh myself every day to control my weight.
That was the turning point in my thinking, because I realized that the only thing I could do was pray. Through prayer I realized I was acting according to a human sense of balance, which involves counting calories and measuring weight. This is not the way God expresses the balance in each of us.
Sometimes I think there's a subtle line that separates the human perspective of a spiritual point of view, especially when it comes to an issue like balance in eating, a subject that is so covered by the media. It is easy to find a definition (or more settings) about what it means eating in a balanced manner.
And that's what caught my attention in your blog: eating in a balanced manner has nothing to do with managing matter, has nothing to do with food or body.
Balance has to do with putting the kingdom of God first. You emphasized gratitude as a way to do this. And it was more or less what happened to me: after asking God to guide my thoughts and my actions, I realized that I was so grateful to have the opportunity to work in another country, learn about another culture (that includes eating different things), that this good experience could not bring elements of error, like imbalance. I just forgot about the calories and weight, but I focused on gratitude and trusted that God would guide me to what was right. But, as you emphasized in your blog, that does not mean not to think about eating. It means replacing human thoughts by spiritual thoughts.
When I returned home several months later, I realized that my weight remained the same.
I am still learning about balance in eating, that's one thing one have to put into practice every day.