When I was very young, I used to have a little pot belly on me, a bit like Pooh bear. In honesty, I have always enjoyed food, often found to be finishing up my sisters plates if they couldn’t eat it all, and almost always going back for seconds at primary school lunchtime (unless liver or kidney was on the menu!). I was also very active, for being without the internet or computer games in those days, in boredom I used to join up with other 9-10 year old friends who lived in the same part of town, and we’d go climbing trees, swimming in the sea, and building go-karts in order to race them down a nearby hill, so my healthy appetite was offset with much exercise. The pot belly remained in spite of this, and I remember complaining about my big tummy to my mother once, who said that ‘it would all move up to my chest once I was older’… and to be honest, she was right! Once I hit my late teens, my belly disappeared and I became very thin, just like my rock idols who I worshipped; partly because I was becoming an adult male and my metabolism had caught up with my food input, and I was becoming stronger with more muscle in the body, and partly because I had taken up smoking at 15, and had lost that veracious appetite I had in my earlier youth due to chemical suppression (this was a bonus to me, not a hindrance).

When I was 17, I left home on my own to spend almost an entire year in Pakistan, teaching English at a school in the North West Frontier Province, and there I (stupidly) drank water from a hose (due to a crazy thirst from being hours directly in the boiling sun), and then virtually immediately contracted amoebic dysentery as well as sunstroke, from which I very nearly died because in my delirium I simply refused to go to the hospital. In my terrible suffering, I lost so much weight through loss of body fluids (from both ends) and a lack of food or water that I honestly looked like a skeleton after the third week of it, until someone finally went to get me the medicine I needed to combat it, and I then slowly but surely recovered from the severe illness. Even though I put weight back on fairly quickly after that episode, I remained light and thin for many years afterwards, perhaps due to my increased use of weed and other drugs (and the lack of appetite resulting), and also due to always being fairly skint as I continued to travel the world on a shoestring.

As I went into my 20’s, in spite of my smoking addiction (mainly joints and bongs but lots of cigarettes too) I remained very active, learning at 22 to become a scuba dive guide (scuba had now become a large hobby of mine) and going to frequent gigs, festivals and parties, and dancing the nights away with beautiful girls all night (I loved to dance). I became VERY thin by the time I was 25, because my weed smoking habit had reached an all time high (in more ways than one), and I had become totally disinterested in food, except for the necessity of surviving. In many ways, I was quite disciplined in my eating, because I actually in hindsight think I had some kind of body dysmorphia, and still saw myself with a Pooh bear belly when I looked in the mirror (surely, it was an evil spirit in me who was corrupting the image I had of myself), when in fact this was the lightest and thinnest I would ever be, since the illness.

As many of you who have watched my testimony on YouTube know, I met Jesus and was born again in the Spirit on my 26th birthday, which was the most wonderful day of my entire life. Of course, there were some immediate changes I made to my life because of that experience and the continuing relationship I was building with Him from then on, but most of the changes were gradual, as my faith deepened and my understanding of sin widened over time. After around six months of personally knowing His Holy Spirit’s conviction, I had quit smoking everything cold turkey, and had stopped every kind of sexual activity (I had been very promiscuous and also had a chronic masturbation habit up to this point, never beforehand believing it was sinful). I also entered into the darkest period of my life around this time, which is all a bit hazy now, where I discovered that I was FULL of evil spirits that wanted to destroy me, much to do with my previous sinful exploration into witchcraft and sorcery. In the mental torment and spiritual chaos that ensued, God was very faithful to protect my actual life, yet still (thankfully) allowed me to reap a nasty taste of the consequences of my many sins, and I had to discover much about the spirit battle on my own steam, rather than the modern luxury of watching a YouTube video about it (there was no home internet available to me in those days, so I had to read about it all from books… Derek Prince was a BIG help).

One of the unexpected side effects from quitting smoking was that my taste buds seemed to come back to life, and I realised that food was completely delicious. Because I had come home to live with mum and dad after a 2 year trip to New Zealand, and had returned so thin and wimpy, my mother made perfectly sure I was now being well fed, out of concern for my health. Coupling this with the enhanced flavour sensations and also an abrupt ceasing from my wild partying (and therefore the dancing exercise) led to me putting on weight very quickly. As I mentioned earlier, this was the darkest time of my life, being terribly tormented by evil spirits, and before I found deliverance I was reckless and unpredictable, as I tried to assimilate in my mind which voice was the Lord’s and which voices were demons, sadly often getting it wrong (although strangely, the Lord has used that period of time of confusion to truly reveal His true voice to me, and I can now easily discern between His and the evil spirits voices – a wonderful bonus!).

During this time of agonising mental and spiritual torment, I ended up in mental ‘hospital’ three times, every time caught by the police for doing things that can only be described as madness (maybe I’ll describe them more in another future blog). The result was that during these periods of weeks of incarceration, being unable to be active at all (for we were not allowed outside of the unit), and being fed lots of fattening hospital food during the day and night, I continued to increase dramatically in weight. This was also combined with the medication they were giving me, where one of the known side effects to this anti-psychotic was weight increase.

All these ‘perfect storm’ factors together meant that I put on a lot of weight very quickly, and I have to this day never been able to lose any of it, even many years later; in fact, I worryingly continue to increase in weight. I’m certain that now I’m hitting 40 years old, that age is also playing a factor, for my amount of exercise has lessened and lessened as my food intake and age has increased. It’s a physiological fact that the older we get, the less food we need, yet my appetite remains voracious. In honesty, today I’m in an awkward position, for the Lord has given me major deliverance from many evil spirits since those days of darkness, and spiritually speaking, I’m the most free I’ve ever been; yet since those days I have in fact taken on one main evil spirit that is now a nemesis I must recognise and combat; the spirit of gluttony. In order to try to counteract it, I will sometimes fast for certain periods of time, but I always end up resorting back to comfort eating afterwards, all because of that age old love of food. As it stands now, I weigh 17 stone (238 pounds), which (in my opinion) is WAY too big. I have conquered many obstacles in my life up to now, thanks to God, but now I need His help to overcome this one. I can’t do it without Him, I’ve already tried.

For some of you, you may be thinking that this weight is still light for an adult 5′ 11″ male, but let me challenge you by saying that human beings do have an optimum weight according to their height, and that we should be conscious not to cross over it, out of respect for the Lord. The Lord has revealed to me recently that He does NOT like or condone my love for food, and He never will (although I have always instinctively known this). Therefore, it is up to me (or you, if you are also feeling convicted, as I do) to put in the work and effort to combat this underrated evil spirit, that sadly controls the lives of so many Christians, as well as others. It’s not really spoken of in churches, but love for food can easily turn into lust for food, which is what gluttony is. Certain foods light up the brain like a dopamine hit, like sugar, and our world is saturated with the stuff. Nevertheless, we must strive against giving in to it, practising temperance and control.

There are a couple of other factors that I want to discuss here on this issue. Firstly, there’s a weird result of losing interest in the way I look due to a loss of vanity, thanks to the Lord’s influence in my life to seek humility; now I have a real APATHY about being too fat; the problem is as much mental as it is physical or spiritual. It sounds silly, but down to many years of no sexual activity, and a mental forsaking of the probability of ever marrying and having a family, has only fuelled that apathy. But, I want to declare that this is a completely unhealthy outlook on life, despite have some kind of pseudo spiritual reason to it (in the name of humility). My understanding is that in spite of the fact that these bodies will one day fail and perish, and that they will be replaced by new, eternally spiritual ones, that they still nevertheless ARE a temple of the Holy Spirit, and should be maintained as such. Perpetual singleness is no excuse to ever neglect the temple, even though I confess that evil spirits have reasoned with me by saying that it is better to look as unattractive as possible to make it easier to remain single. This is warped logic! And I hereby reject it.

Secondly, there is the internet and the computing age that we live in; the virtual enslavement to a screen. This is a predominant factor in my life, for better or worse. As those of you who read my posts or receive my fellowship over Skype know, I am very busy on the computer, attempting to edify and exhort other believers and trying to strengthen the body of Christ spiritually, perhaps talking (as I am now) about my failures in a blog, or giving out little nuggets of wisdom as the Holy Spirit inspires me; maybe I just try to find time to talk with you personally, and just be a prayer partner and a friend to you. Of course, this all takes a lot of time, and as I have a full time job during the day, there are only so many hours of an evening or weekend in which to do such activities. This means that exercise and working out physically takes a back seat in my life. I used to love going out for walks and make videos for my YouTube channel, but lately even those have become less and less frequent, as my internet presence on other social media becomes more and more obvious. Whilst He doesn’t condone my love for food, I believe the Lord understands the compromise I have to make in this way in order to help the church to the best of my ability, for it’s obvious to me that the best way to reach people with a message now is not to yell it on the street, it’s instead to voice an opinion on social media. However, this doesn’t help my weight problem!

In conclusion, we all battle with something. I believe you and I continually fight the evil spirits in our flesh, and that it is a daily battle to overcome them and subdue them. Each of us will deal with different types of spirits; some deal with anxiety or depression, for example. Some deal with suicidal thoughts. I’ve personally overcome those; but for me, it’s now gluttony, for the love of food and a neglect of spiritual practices like fasting.

May my confession of weakness here inspire you to honestly and realistically assimilate what YOU struggle with, so that you can also ask the Lord for help to overcome it. Gluttony is a big problem in the West, even in the church, and it’s not something we usually like to talk about.

Maybe that’s why it’s so prevalent.