In The Jesus Diet, best selling author, Terry Toler, debunks the entire concept of dieting for health and weight loss and takes the reader right to the Scriptures and tells us what Jesus said about the subject. In a practical and simplistic way, The Jesus Diet shows you how to access wellness and healing through the power of the Lord’s Supper and other teachings of Jesus.
#1 Best Seller on Amazon
Targeted Age Group:: Adults
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
I went through my own struggle with illness. When I discovered the truths in Scripture about wellness and health, my life was transformed.
Book Sample
CHAPTER 1
LIVE FREE OR DIET
Are you tired of hearing the word “diet”? I am. On any given day, some forty-five million Americans are on one. Women tend to diet more than men and as many as forty-five percent of women are dieting at any given time. Hundreds of diets promise instant results and guaranteed weight loss, but few deliver on that promise. They not only don’t work but are confusing and often contradict each other. Some studies say that a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet is the way to go, while others suggest a high-carbohydrate, low-protein diet is the key to health. Both argue the other is bad for you. I’ve tried both. You probably have as well.
Radio, television, books, and magazines are littered with experts dispensing advice. For years, they told us to eat whole grains. Now, we are being told the gluten in wheat is making us sick. The Gluten-Free Diet is certainly gaining in popularity. I tried it years ago when there weren’t many options, and the food tasted like cardboard, or at least what I imagine cardboard would taste like if I were to eat it. Some of the gluten-free foods are actually pretty good now and most restaurants have a gluten-free menu. But generally, people don’t stick with it even if it does help them feel better. I heard one expert recently say you should avoid gluten-free diets because you won’t get enough nutrients. Which is true? Or are they both wrong?
Voices all around you are giving contradictory advice. “Coffee is bad for you.” “No! Coffee prevents cancer and heart disease and is good for the liver.” “Avoid eggs at all cost.” “Sorry! New studies show that eggs are actually good for you.” “Eat this and don’t eat that.” “Wait a minute! We were wrong. Forget what we told you before. You should eat that food. It is good for you after all.”
Enough already! How are you supposed to know what to do? Why doesn’t the world—with all its expert “good” advice—just admit that they really don’t know what they’re talking about?
Fad diets are everywhere. Unscrupulous marketers are making a fortune on our gullibility. We’re inundated with television and radio ads hyping the newest “revolutionary” idea with outrageous claims of success. Have you noticed most of these ads run in January and February after we’ve gained a few pounds at Christmas and made our New Year’s resolutions? The ads quit running around March because the diets don’t work, and most people have abandoned their New Year’s resolutions by then. Did you know that ninety-five percent of all diets fail, and most people eventually end up weighing more shortly after they quit a diet than when they started it? We Americans spend more than 60 billion (with a b) dollars every year on weight loss and weight-loss products. Seriously? We spend billions of dollars on something with a ninety-five percent failure rate!
And the latest crazes are getting crazier every year! Have you heard of the Cabbage Soup Diet? All you have to do is eat cabbage soup several times a day and restrict all other calories and you’ll lose ten pounds in seven days! Of course, you will! If you eat only soup every day, you will lose weight. You don’t have to go to medical school to figure that out. But how long are you going to keep it up? Even the creator of the Cabbage Soup Diet issues the disclaimer that you should not be on the diet for longer than seven days.
So, then what is the point? You lose ten pounds in seven days only to gain it all back when you start eating real foods, and after you go off the diet, you go right back to your starting weight. Not only that, but your body is mad at you for making it eat cabbage soup for seven days! It thinks you were starving to death and there must be a famine in the land. When you start eating again, your body thinks it needs to store as much fat as possible, and within a few days, you weigh more than when you started the diet. You’re worse off than if you had never tried it. The website for the diet even states the following: “The Cabbage Soup Diet is not suitable for long-term weight loss.” No kidding! No one is going to follow that diet for very long.
If cabbage soup doesn’t tickle your taste buds, there is always the Cotton Ball Diet. Weight loss turns out to be much easier than anyone ever thought. All you need to do is dip five cotton balls in orange juice and eat them before every meal. Supposedly, the cotton balls settle in your stomach and make you feel full faster. I can see how that would work. If I ate five cotton balls, even if they were dipped in chocolate, I doubt I would have much of an appetite! Before you run off and buy a gallon of orange juice and a bag of cotton balls, you might want to know that cotton balls are not easily digestible and can create blockages in your intestines, meaning, you might need surgery to have the cotton balls removed. If they become infected, surgeons might have to remove part of your colon. Other than that, it’s a great diet! Having part of your colon removed is certainly one way to lose weight.
There’s the Baby Food Diet. I read that Jennifer Aniston, Lady Gaga, and Reese Witherspoon have all tried this diet. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to take eating advice from Lady Gaga. You eat fourteen jars of baby food every day. Seriously? I can’t see myself going to a business meeting, and when my associates order steak, lobster, or fish, I pull out baby food! I think I’ll bring baby food to the next church pot-luck dinner and see how that goes over. Let’s see how many people choose baby food over pies, cakes, and mashed potatoes. I don’t remember that far back, but I doubt I wanted to eat baby food even when I was a baby. I like solid foods. I think that’s why God gave us teeth. The only reason babies eat baby food is that their parents force it down their throats. Someone would have to force fourteen jars of baby food a day down my throat right after they waterboarded me. They should call it the Torture Diet!
There is the Vision Diet. You wear blue-tinted glasses at every meal. The blue tint is supposed to make the food look less appetizing, so you eat less. I don’t think it’s very popular. I can’t recall ever seeing anyone at a Mexican restaurant wearing blue tinted glasses. Again, I don’t see myself pulling out blue-tinted glasses at a business meeting or a church picnic. Along the same lines, there’s the Clothespin Diet. You clip a clothespin to your nose to block the smell of the food, and then you’ll eat less. I haven’t seen anyone at McDonald’s with a clothespin on their nose either. I think I’ll pull out a clothespin at homegroup next week. I would love to see the reaction when I tell everyone it is my new diet plan!
There’s the Ice Cream Cleanse. You only eat ice cream every day. Now you’re talking! That’s certainly better than the Cotton Ball and the Cabbage Soup Diets. If you’re only going to eat one thing every day, make it ice cream. For me, I’d probably prefer the Chocolate Pie Diet or the Macaroni and Cheese Diet. Honestly, I love chocolate pie and mac and cheese, but I don’t want to eat either of them every day no matter how much I love them.
The weirdest one I read about was the Tapeworm Diet. I hope you aren’t squeamish. In this diet, you take a pill that has a live tapeworm egg inside it. When the egg hatches, it settles in your stomach and intestines and eats everything you eat—that prevents the calories from getting into your bloodstream. It prevents the nutrients from getting into your body as well, but that’s the least of your worries. The reported side effects are diarrhea, pain in the abdomen, nausea, feelings of weakness, fever, neurological issues, vision problems, organ failure, blockages of ducts, liver failure, and eventually death. You’ll lose weight though, especially after you die!
You can’t make these things up.
I think the word diet should be classified as a dirty, four-letter word and we should all be forbidden to speak it. Our mouths should be washed out with soap every time we say the word. That could be a new diet: The Soap Diet. Every time you have a craving to eat something, you wash your mouth out with soap. I imagine the soap taste would curb your appetite. If it did, you’d lose weight. I may be on to something. The Soap Diet could make me millions! That’ll be my next book.
Fad diets aren’t going to go away. Entrepreneurs will keep coming up with advertising gimmicks to play on people’s emotions and get them to waste their money on their newest schemes. We’re impulsive and impatient people looking for a quick fix to a serious problem. We’re willing to try even the dumbest things, like the Grapefruit Diet. In this diet, you eat grapefruit every day while restricting your calories to a thousand a day. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that if you only eat grapefruit every day and little else, you will lose weight.
That is why these plans are so misleading. Read the fine print. Most of them say they should be used in conjunction with a low-calorie diet and exercise plan. You can eat chocolate cake every day, and if you restrict your total calories to a thousand a day, you will undoubtedly lose weight! But you’ll gain it back and then some when you quit the diet, which you inevitably will. There’s no way you can stay on these plans for the rest of your life. Did God really intend for you to eat just grapefruits? When He created cotton, did He really intend it to be used for food?
These diets would be funny if they weren’t such a serious problem. People are really hurting and suffering because of their desperate need to lose weight. I realize the anxiety, depression, and social pressure to be healthy scares people and drives them to try almost anything that will help them lose weight. That’s the reason I wrote this book. It’s not to make fun of diets or people who go on them but rather to show you there is a better and more effective way to lose weight. It has been right there in the Bible all along; we’ve just never really seen it. I’ll share more on this later.
The word “diet” is not really a bad word. Webster’s Dictionary defines it as food and drink that is regularly consumed. The word “diet” comes from the Latin word “diaeta” and the Greek word “diaita,” which literally mean “way of living.” That’s the best way to look at a diet. It’s healthiest when it’s considered a way of living.
Webster’s has a second meaning for the word, which is “a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly for weight loss.” That’s a more common and familiar definition and a more modern phenomenon. However, the true definition of diet is not about restricted eating. I want you to take that second meaning out of your vocabulary. After reading this book, you’ll never go on a “diet” again. This book is based on the first meaning, not the second. It’s called The Jesus Diet because it’s based on a way of living modeled by Jesus, reaffirmed and taught by Paul in the epistles through revelations he received from Jesus.
The Jesus Diet is going to transform what you think about food, drink, diet, weight loss, and health once and for all. I’m so glad you picked up this book and are reading it. When you first saw the title, you might have thought it was another fad diet or unique angle to dieting. That’s okay. Even if you were searching for another angle or gimmick diet, at least you’re interested in knowing what Jesus said about the topic.
I guarantee you that the Jesus Diet is not a fad diet. You may be worried that the Jesus Diet requires eating locusts and wild honey like John the Baptist did. You may think it’s like the Daniel fast and severely restricts meat and any food that “tastes good.” You may think it’s based on the Mediterranean Diet since that is generally what Jesus ate. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of those diets, but this book is nothing like them. In fact, it’s not a diet at all but a way of living. That’s why the word diet is marked through in the title. It’s based on a few simple principles Jesus taught that we have mostly overlooked and are a diet only in the sense of it’s our way of eating.
Most diet books tell you what you can and can’t eat. Most suggest meal plans and even recipes. You won’t find anything like that in this book. A friend of mine asked me at church last Sunday if the Jesus Diet means that he can’t eat meat and that if it did, he wasn’t going to read it! I told him it’s nothing like that at all. Let me reassure you. You’ll be amazed at what you can eat on the Jesus Diet.
The Jesus Diet has transformed my life. Once I began implementing its principles, I immediately saw a change in my overall health. My wife has studied health and wellness for more than ten years. She was skeptical when I first started talking to her about the Jesus Diet. She wasn’t sure it would work. She proofread every chapter I wrote, and by Chapter Five, she was convinced that it works. She said she couldn’t believe we had never seen this before. She started implementing the principles of my book and has experienced the same improvements in her health that I have.
It works. I believe that the Jesus Diet will be a tremendous success. It will not have a ninety-five percent failure rate like the other diets. I believe that the Jesus Diet is going to transform how the body of Christ approaches diets, food, and wellness.
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