Atkins Diet
Saadia Gaon, a 10th century Babylonian Jewish scholar,
once wrote to the Jewish community in Egypt and told them ‘You
eat to live, you do not live to eat.’ His advice does
not seem to be well heeded in modern Jewish communities where
food is one of the most important elements of Jewish celebration.
Every life cycle event is accompanied by copious amounts of
food; every festival has some kind of food associated with it:
doughnuts at Chanukkah, cheesecake at the forthcoming festival
of Shavu’ot. And what is the main feature of the most
spiritually significant day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur?
No food is permitted, ostensibly to encourage Jews to focus,
for one day of the year at least, on higher matters, while ignoring
their stomachs…
In August 1995, I took up the post as the Reform Rabbi in
Glasgow – a city hardly renowned for its dietary prudence.
As the new Rabbi, I visited many congregants’ homes and
it would have been most insulting to decline the seemingly endless
supplies of bagels, cakes and biscuits offered to me by my new
hosts. As a consequence, by the time Yom Kippur arrived two
months later, I was more than two stone heavier – an indulgence
for which a single day’s abstinence could hardly atone…
Just over a year ago, it seemed to be time to address my weight
problem. I discovered the Atkins diet, which promised me I could
eat as much as I wanted and would never be hungry (except, presumably,
on Yom Kippur). All I had to do was carefully watch my carbohydrate
intake, perhaps in keeping with the words of the prophet Ezekiel,
who said ‘They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety…(4.16)’
Nevertheless, it sounded like the perfect Jewish diet for a
tubby Rabbi. The small snag was, however, that I would have
to forego the carbohydrate-laden goodies which had made me the
(rather large) man I had become: So I declined the cakes at
Jewish events, did not partake of the weekly piece of challah
– the weekly Sabbath loaf – and the only part of
a bagel that was permitted was the hole in the middle.
A couple of months before I started the
diet, I was interviewed by and appointed to my current congregation
in Hertfordshire. By the time I took up the post ten months
later, they weren’t sure they’d got the same guy
– there was three stone less of me than there had been
at my interview! So now I have found new meaning for that
well known line in Deuteronomy – ‘man does not
live by bread alone’ (8:3) – or, in the case of
a man on the Atkins diet, at all!
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