Practicing principles from ‘creation’s garden’ vital for God’s health plan

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic. According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, which means they now outnumber undernourished people at about 600 million. 
  
Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that “the United States has the highest prevalence of obesity among the developed nations.” And Alabama ranks as one of the worst states in America with the second- highest rate of adult obesity, according to Trust for America’s Health. 
  
But this information comes as no surprise to Patricia Hart Terry, author of “Made for Paradise: God’s Original Plan for Healthy Eating, Physical Activity and Rest,” a new release from New Hope Publishers.
  
“We have made a lot of excuses as a nation; we have tried low-fat, low-carb and high-protein diets, plus every diet pill imaginable; but the bottom line has remained the same. We get heavier and heavier,” she wrote. 
  
Terry, chair of the department of nutrition and dietetics at Samford University in Birmingham, worked in nutrition education in Venezuela for 11 years as a Southern Baptist missionary. She was the first person appointed by the then-Foreign Mission Board to work in the area of nutrition. While on the missions field, she realized the importance of “practicing the three principles from the creation’s garden: healthy eating, physical activity and rest.”
  
“These three principles and their practical application are not common practice, but they are common sense,” wrote Terry, wife of The Alabama Baptist Editor Bob Terry. “This concept is not a diet. It is not an exercise routine. It is not psychotherapy. These principles are guides for healthy living with the emphasis on living. The most exciting part is that scientific evidence is beginning to prove that these principles really are the basis of health and wellness.”
  
New Hope’s Director and Publisher Andrea Mullins said her company “recognizes the direct impact a healthy lifestyle has on the missional life. When Christians feel good, they can fully engage their part of God’s mission.”
  
Tina Atchenson, publicity and advertising manager at New Hope, added, “Dr. Terry offers a realistic, fad-free approach to healthy living. Her desire, which is evident in the book, is to encourage believers to build a healthy lifestyle, not just to lose weight but to live as God intended — a balanced and reclaimed healthy life.”   
  
In her book, Terry explains the importance of eating healthy, locally grown foods, which can be found in farmers’ markets. 
  
“Over 90 percent of the food that we buy in Alabama is imported from out of the state,” she said. “The closer you are to your food source, the more nutrients are in that food. It’s a time issue but also when foods are grown in huge quantities … the soil becomes depleted and you don’t have the nutrients you used to have in small farms and gardens.”
  
Terry also encourages readers to “just get moving” and increase their daily steps to about 10,000, the number needed to balance out the amount of food that people eat daily. “Most people get around 3,000, and people with sedentary jobs don’t even get that many.”
  
Terry also focuses several chapters on the significance of getting adequate rest, explaining that the body’s rate of metabolism is directly related to light and dark cycles of the day. She added that rest is needed to help the body repair itself.
  
“We need to have so many hours of sleep in the dark because there are different chemicals made in our bodies in the dark and there are different chemicals made when we are in the sunlight,” Terry said.
  
She urges Christians to view their bodies as “marvelous” gifts from God. “Man, as meant to be, is the temple of the Holy Spirit,” Terry wrote. “Every Christian is the priest of that temple. We have the responsibility to take care of it by the Creator’s Handbook (the Bible).” 
  
In the future, she hopes churches and small groups will use her book to help provide wellness education.
  
“We can see what God intended in the way He created the world, and in the story of the Garden of Eden,” Terry wrote. “When He made us, He had already made a world for us that would regulate our metabolism by the sun and provide just the right foods for our bodies to function as they should. He gave us physical work to do. He provided a day of rest. That’s all we need to know.”
  
The book is available at www.wmustore.com and in LifeWay Christian Stores.