Facts Are Our Friends...

"Facts are our friends."

This quote from Pastor Johnny Hunt, current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is applicable to most areas of life. Most of us have at least one area of our life where we're not really interested in the facts, because this lack of knowledge helps us look past our own faults and shortcomings. I am reminded of the classic story "Snow White", where the evil queen asks, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" She was more interested in the mirror's opinion, and how she compared with everyone else, than she was in the mirror's reflection. She was enraged when the mirror declared that, with Snow White's arrival, she was no longer the fairest in the land.

In ministry, we have been known to fall into some of these same tactics - a fellow pastor asks how many we are averaging in church, and I have heard many pastors round the numbers WAAYY up. A crowd of 150 can easily become 250 through the power of the "guesstimate"; the latest trend is to add up the total number of people in every service, and that's the "attendance". If Sunday School attendance is 100, morning worship 150, Sunday evening 70, Wednesday night is 40, it is perfectly acceptable now to say that your church is running about 360 (well, 400, if you count those who would have been there if they could have been, and a few more if you count those who attended the monthly service in the nursing home).

The same thing holds true for our eating and exercise habits. Unless we are very intentional about tracking everything we eat accurately, we will often paint a very distorted picture of what our diets actually look like. One thing I discovered during ABL is that the rule of thumb is, you usually eat more than you think, and you usually exercise less than you think. This past weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and I ate some things I would not have normally eaten. I am on a stabilization plan with PHC, in which certain foods are gradually re-introduced back into the diet. I ate well outside of that list this weekend (not excessively bad, but a few things that weren't on the list). Predictably, my weight is up a little bit - with a three-pound swing in two days, I can tell you that it is water weight. When I sat down and plugged yesterday's eating into my fitday.com profile, I was rather shocked to discover that my sodium intake was THROUGH THE ROOF! During the competition, one of the pleasures that I allowed myself was the Chargrilled Chicken Sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, and I would indulge myself with this treat almost every Monday night following weigh-in. It was in the PHC book as an acceptable eating-out alternative; I ate it without giving it too much thought. Every week I faithfully wrote it down in my food journal, and I always had a good laugh about it with Savannah, my nutrition counselor at PHC. Previously I had recorded it in my fitday.com journal as a piece of chicken and a couple of pieces of bread, and figured, "ah, that's close enough". This morning, I looked up the actual nutrition information for the sandwich at thedailyplate.com (which lists almost every food you can imagine from every restaurant chain you can imagine), and discovered that my treat is probably responsible for every single mid-week gain I had during the competition. The calories aren't bad (about 300), but the sodium is off-the-charts (1120 mg). That wasn't too bad for weigh-in day, because most of us didn't eat anything between a light, early breakfast and weigh-in time at 7:00 PM. But when added into a typical day's eating, the results can be quite alarming. Yesterday (Memorial Day, remember), I ended up at nearly 4800 mg of sodium, almost four times what I would get in a normal day. Now, I can fix this... today I will be eating very low sodium foods, and will be drinking water like crazy to get my body to stop retaining the fluid.

Here's the point: you can't fix the problem until you can accurately define the problem; you can't accurately define the problem until you know the specifics. And you won't know the specifics until you overcome your fear of the facts. Fear of facts is why we won't get on the scale, or check our bank balance, or be accountable with our time. Ignorance may be bliss, but bliss can be a very dangerous thing.

Addendum: I mentioned a website in this post, thedailyplate.com. This site has now been incorporated into www.livestrong.com. Just go there, and in the search box at the top right of the page, type the name of the restaurant or the food item you are looking for. If you tell it to search in "food and fitness" instead of "all", you will get where you're going much faster. You don't need an account to access this information. If you do decide to register for an account, you will have access to features similar to fitday.com, where you can input your food and track your progress.