 Welcome to Hope Today. We have great things in store for you because God has great things in store for you. So we're so glad you joined us. I'm Tom Hollis, I'm here with Anna Fry. Anna, we have a great subject and a great guest today. Yes, it is a subject that I am passionate about and it is all about our wellness, our health that God made us body, mind and spirit. And health is so much more about diet and exercise. It is an all-encompassing, just interrelated factors in it. And so our guest that's with us today, her name is Catherine Paceauer. Well, she's gonna be helping us talk through all the different aspects and how we can get started and how we can persevere and how we can still enjoy that bag of chips sometimes. I know, that's all I wanna know is how many bags of chips can I eat or my infamous Jolly Beans. But no, it's gonna be a great conversation and it's gonna be something that we all need to pay attention and listen to. But I also wanna make available to you our prayer line. If you have a need that you need prayer for, we have prayer partners always standing by to pray for you. You can pray now, you can call anytime 24 seven and get someone to pray with you. But Anna, I happen to notice something. You posted some pictures that look like you having your time with the Lord. What are these pictures that we are seeing here? Oh my gosh, this brings me so much joy that Tom wanted me to share this. All right, so this is my daughter, my 16 year old daughter. Oh my gosh, look at that. She looks just like me. She's 16 and she decided she needed to do an impression of what I look like first thing in the morning. So we were sitting at dinner and she disappeared into the house, came out wearing my robe, my bifocals, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie and she got my Bible and my Bible study book and she just went into this whole like impression of. She was praising the Lord there. She was taking notes on her Bible. Now do you do this every, is that your regular morning routine then? It is and it was so funny because the next morning she like secret, she was like the paparazzi and she was walking through the kitchen and she videoed me sitting at my kitchen table doing my Bible study just to prove like her impression was spot on and while we laughed and laughed at it, it also as a mom brings me so much joy to know that this is my daughter. Like she has watched me since she, as long as she could remember seeing me at the kitchen table first thing in the morning. That's what I love about it. I love that your daughter, your 16 year old daughter again, she's imitating you reading the words, studying the word, writing your notes. I know you're a very studious person, writing the notes and praising Lord, I don't want to make you cry here. But I mean, that, I mean, what a fantastic way for our kids to see us. I mean, I know that none of us are perfect, but if there's a way we want them to remember the good things, you know, and that's a great thing. You know what's funny is she was jotting down a note, you know, studying the Bible, jotting something. I said, I can't wait to see what she wrote on that little post-it note and she held it up later and it just says, Rebecca, Jesus loves you. That's great. That's really good. She makes me a proud mom for sure. So we want to talk about wellness, which of course includes studying God's word. And in fact, that is the foundation of our wholeness and our wellness and our guest today, Catherine Paceauer, has a passion for helping people live a healthier lifestyle by honoring God in multiple ways. We'll talk about not just healthy eating practices, but about how stress, anxiety, community, friendships, and rest all play a part in your wellness journey. Catherine's new nine-week Bible study is called honoring God with my body. So Catherine, welcome to Hope Today. Good morning. It's so good to be here. And Tom, and thank you for sharing that story about your daughter. What a wonderful role model you are. That's what we should be as Christians. I just loved hearing that. Thank you. Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. So Catherine, we want to hear a little bit about you, who you are, your background, and your journey to wellness and wholeness. Well, I'm a farm girl from North Carolina, and my mother used to cook a healthy meal for us every evening, even after working as a school teacher all day long. And we had a garden, we raised our own beef and chickens, and we were just healthy, and I was active. But when I was a teenager, I discovered sugar and fast food, and I just packed on the pounds. And I did not realize then at the time how important it was to make healthy and wise choices. I just knew that I liked eating brownies and hotfoot sundaes and cookies. And I learned how to cook about that time too. And so really it took me a while to realize that I was not treating my body in a good way. I wasn't honoring this gift that God had given me in the human body. So I began to study, and I majored in physical education, but I still struggled with the eating part. And I saw that my students and my family and people around me were also struggling. So I wanted to learn as much as possible as I could to be encouraging and to provide information that was accurate and help people to make decisions about healthy eating and to be physically active because those two things go hand in hand. And as you mentioned earlier, it's a holistic view that we have of wellness and health. It's not just whether or not I could eat five, servings of fruits and vegetables every day or as Tom mentioned, if I avoid eating three bags of chips every day, it's not just that. It's the fact that it's a balance and we have to look at things holistically and make decisions both for ourselves and being good role model. I was a teacher, so I needed to be a good role model for my students. And it's wonderful to see you letting your daughters see how you're practicing your spirituality and taking time to commune with God every morning. That's just great. So we do need to look at our health from a holistic view, not just one aspect. So talk to us a bit about God's word and the relationship with Jesus and how that is the foundation to wellness. Well, he created us. We're fearfully and wonderfully made. We're told that in Psalm 139. And it's really amazing. And then throughout scripture, we're giving all this encouragement as to how we can maintain our spiritual relationship with Him, but how to take care of ourselves and each other and be aware of how we influence other people with our encouragement. And it's just so important to be kind to one another. I know we're here talking, we're thinking that we're gonna be talking about what to eat and how to be active, but it's so important to be kind and loving in relations, the fruit of the spirit, we're told to be loving and kind and practice those traits. And that's just important that we take time to love one another and our social relationships. If the pandemic showed us anything, it was that we really need social interaction with one another and good, strong, emotional relationships too. And our most important relationship is with our Father. Because He is there to guide us every step of the way. And if we need to make changes for our health or to encourage our family, to make changes to have better health and a better quality of life, then God is with us on that journey. We're not alone. Catherine, with a lot of teaching out there now, a lot of instruction about health, we still see a populace that, some estimates have 40% of the population as overweight, even obese. So what do you attribute that and what's this say for the future of healthcare? Oh my. Well, part of the problem is our busy lifestyles and food has become so easy to gather quickly. Fast food or already processed and pre-cooked food that all we have to do is pop it in our microwave and they design those products to taste good. And they do, but primarily because there's a lot of fat in fast food or deli meats or processed food and a lot of sugar, because the producers want people to buy it so they make it taste good. And it's convenient. And our busy lifestyles, it's so much more complicated to prepare a good healthy meal at home and then sit down around the table and enjoy it with our family because even our children are so busy with all kinds of extracurricular activities. So part of it is a lack of awareness of the quality of the food that we put into our bodies. Fast food is convenient. And so we use it to save time, but it's contributing greatly to obesity. And it's perpetuated by a sedentary lifestyle because so many of us sit down in front of a computer, I worked at a university and I sat down in front of a computer most of the day working on paperwork and grading papers and all sorts of things. So I had to take time to plan to exercise whereas our ancestors had to work hard just to grow their food and they had a busy active lifestyle. So as we become more sedentary, it's become more necessary to actively seek exercise activities. And then lack of physical activity and the foods that we're eating contribute to the development of chronic disease. And obesity is one of those, heart disease, diabetes and our lifestyle can contribute to the development of those diseases, but it can also, if we make changes in our lifestyle then we can help prevent or manage those diseases. But our healthcare costs are just skyrocketing because of our decline in overall health for our country, for our population. So Catherine, like you said, acknowledge the reality that family lifestyles are so different today than they were decades ago. But in that reality, it's not unrealistic to still be able to start somewhere with changing those food habits. So where is a good place to start? Oh, that's absolutely right, wonderful question there. Yes, we can make changes. The good thing about our lifestyle is we can choose in most cases, in most cases we can choose what we eat, we can choose how active that we are being. So to make choices and make changes gradually so that we can manage them, one example would be just to add more fresh fruits and vegetables to our daily intake of food. And this would mean when we go to the grocery store to look for our whole foods, things that haven't already been prepared or processed or had salt and sugar and fat added to them. Takes a little more time for preparation but even frozen foods can be healthy for us and can be fairly quick. If we read the labels, pay attention to how much fat and how much sodium are in those pre-prepared foods. And then there are places that we can go to order food but we can make healthier choices. We can decide we're gonna avoid fried foods or we're going to cut back on our sodas or we're going to drink more water. So we can gradually make changes, starting small and making changes along the way to have some healthier choices and then do things as a family together, take a walk or go on a hike or pick some activities where you can be active rather than sitting in front of the computer or the TV or the gamer or whatever our leisure times are or make some of those leisure time activities active. Katherine, you spoke earlier about the things that are in our hearts and how it's so important to be loving and kind and have that fruit of the spirit develop. So let's talk a little bit more about the things in the heart. You mentioned stress and anxiety. How do, can you talk a little bit about those, how we begin to conquer stress, lower stress and anxiety? Well, you know, we can't conquer it. It's there and we can't avoid it but we can learn how to manage it better or we can learn how to prevent stress from getting to a level where it begins to affect us physically, emotionally and mentally. But we have stress that helps us get up in the morning and go to work. We feel that responsibility and we know that what there are things that we have to do. You know, our children have to go to school. We have to do our best at our job. So we have those things that are in our lives that will cause stress and anxiety. We worry about our children. We worry about our parents. There's all sorts of things. If something comes up in our job, we get a lot of things dumped on us, extra projects and things that we don't really have time to do but we have to do them because it's part of our job. So we're going to have stress in our lives. And when the stress is negative, it's called distress and it does cause physical changes to our bodies. We do experience anxiety. It can contribute to heart issues. It can contribute to the development of some diseases even unmanaged stress. And then we have good stress, eustris, it's called. That would be somebody in our family getting married or going on a vacation or graduations. Those things are really exciting but they can cause stress. And so we do have to know how to manage those things. And of course, organization is one thing. You know, setting our priorities and deciding the things that we must do and then are there things that we can put off till later? Are there things that we can delegate to some other person? And then we can help manage our stress by being physically active, by eating healthy, getting enough sleep. One of the first things that we tend to do if we've got extra responsibilities is we stay up later to do it or get up earlier to do it. And it cuts into our sleep time. You all probably get up really, really early in the morning because it's part of your job but you've learned to manage that. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about something as I am rocketing past my mid-60s here. I noticed that intellectual health is something that I think anybody my age would be concerned about. How do we ensure intellectual health as we age? I know I'm not quite as sharp as I was maybe 20 years ago but hopefully things are still good but how do we ensure that intellectual health? We have some of the things, ways that we ensure our intellectual health are the same ways we ensure our physical health. By making healthier choices in what we eat as far as lots of fruits and vegetables and choosing leaner cuts of meat and being aware of how much fat and sugar we intake cause sugar is one of our major causes of inflammation. So if we can try to keep our sugar intake fairly low then that's going to keep our arteries more wide open, pump that blood through and our brain needs blood. So we do need good circulation to get up there to our brain and poke out all those cobwebs but other ways that we keep our brain healthy are being physically active because that also increases our blood flow and sends all that blood pumping throughout the body where it gets the nutrients where it needs to be. But other things that we can do for our brain we can keep it active by learning new things, learning a foreign language. I tried to learn German when I was 50 years old and it was a lot harder than if I had done it when I was 18 but it was a challenge to my brain and it made my brain be active. And a lot of people will say that crossword puzzles or Sudoku or some of those other brand challenging games are good and I enjoyed those but I'm not good at them putting together puzzles but it also means I need to practice those things more but if you choose activities where it keeps you learning you stay abreast of current events, read articles and learn about new things or take a class either online or at your local community college or a college something that really makes your brain work harder than it's normally accustomed to and it does take us longer. I've noticed that I used to have a really good memory and I could just memorize pages of things but now I have to work a lot harder at it and it makes me not want to do it but when I do it or learning memorizing scripture that's a great way to challenge your memory and it helps you in your regular Bible study and your work with God too. Did that help? Catherine, we have about 45 seconds left. Can you just give a word of encouragement to somebody who feels discouraged or stuck in their wellness journey? Oh yes and I've been there and then that I struggled with being overweight and being sedentary and lazy and it's hard. I know it is hard and that's one thing we need to admit. It's not easy but if we want to make some lifestyle changes it's important to start, make a start. Just pick one thing, maybe drinking more water cutting back on your coffee or soda or something and drinking more water every day or adding a fresh fruit and vegetable to your lunch or dinner each night when normally you might not eat that and picking up your physical activity. It might be hard to get started but taking a walk or finding a partner and committing to each other to support each other as far as what we're gonna exercise today. We're gonna do more things but start slow. Don't overdo it and try to make 50 changes at once. Pick a couple of things and say I'm gonna start slow but I'm gonna keep on going. It's never too late to start a new healthy habit. Never too late. Amen. Well, Catherine, thank you so much for your sweet, hard and gentle way to be able to talk to us about wellness today. Again, your Bible study is called honoring God with my body, journey to wellness in a healthy lifestyle. It was so good to have you with us. It's so good to be here. Thank you and have a great day. You as well. Well, we hope that you enjoyed that conversation. We have to take a quick break but don't go anywhere because Tom and I are gonna talk a little bit more about this wellness thing. And you know Tom likes to talk about his potato chips and jelly beans and also we're gonna have just a wonderful scripture to share with you. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Cornerstone television exists because of the faithful support of our partners. 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You know as we're talking about health, reading the ingredients on the back of our newsletter which you can get our newsletter, just call in to our prayer partners and just let them know that you'd like to have a newsletter. And there's a lot of great stuff in here but there's crock pot, minestrone soup on the back, diced onion, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, sounds good so far so. So delicious. But yeah, Katie Farrell, she does the newsletter. And so you need to get the newsletter. There's so much good in here. There's usually an article by Pastor Gary or myself. All our broadcast highlights in here and our complete schedule. Maybe you're new to Hope Today or Cornerstone Television. We just came on in Jacksonville, we're on in Atlanta in Alabama. So some of you may not notice that well. Why don't you get the Hope Today newsletter, call our number there or you can just write us the CTVN One Signal Hill Drive, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499 and get the great newsletter. Yeah, I'm so glad that you said about the dashing dish recipe because I love dashing dish. I hope that if you are not familiar with it, we produce Katie Farrell's dashing dish program here at Cornerstone Television. Well, we go on location to do it. But if you are wanting to get more serious about your wellness journey, I highly recommend that you check out the dashing dish program as well as the dashing dish website. Her recipes are created for the busy family, the young family, but people of all ages and no food is off limits for her. She very much has the holistic approach. And there's Crockpot, there's Instapot, there's five ingredients or less. There are so many good options. Dashing dish has really changed my life. I think I could make this, Jean. If you're watching, I think I could make this. Looks pretty good. There's so many good soup recipes out there as well. Well, you have a scripture for us, don't you? Yes, yes, so let's get to the scripture. It's from 1 Corinthians 619-20 and it says this, do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. So Tom, what does that verse mean to you? Well, it means a lot. I mean, there's a lot of different things and it's been used a lot of different ways. And I think it does speak to this issue of health, of wellness, of being healthy, but I think more so it speaks to sexual immorality and things that we should not engage in, that our bodies should be honored. And it should be, we realize that the Holy Spirit lives within us. We're just having a discussion with Gene about a comment that I had seen online about the sanctuary and honoring the sanctuary of God. Now for me, the church is just a building, okay? And I think that from my understanding of what our relationship to God is, we do not, God does not live in that building, but God does live in this building, okay? He lives inside of me, lives inside of you if you're following Christ, lives inside of each one of us. This is the sanctuary of God. And just like we'd like our churches to be nice and beautiful, we want our bodies to be holy and righteous before God, using the members of our body for righteous things. Yes, absolutely. God knows that sin is so destructive in our hearts. And so when we think about the temple, our body, having unforgiveness, bitterness, sexual immorality, like there's a whole span, right? Those God knows will destroy us. And so that's why it's important to get those out. But as the temple of God, if we need to know too that God values us, like our value comes because we are children of God. Our value does not come from the number on the scale or the dress size or that you over eight that day or it doesn't come from whether you're married or single or you have this job or that job, your value comes from the fact that you are that child of God and His Holy Spirit lives inside of you. And because of that, God has such incredible plans for you as you fix your eyes on Him as you get into His Word every day, as you come and sit with Him and develop your relationship with Him. And out of that, you will grow that abundant fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And all of these things work together to bring about that life that is so beautiful, so whole and so healthy, Tom. Well, it is true. And you know, I'm reminded of the scripture that says, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? Now that's talking about ignoring salvation, but you who have come to Christ, don't we sometimes neglect so great a salvation? Don't we sometimes not do what like Anna's daughter saw her doing of studying the word of praying and worshiping, we need to do those things, not as a religious exercise, but as a follower of Christ, getting to know Him, getting more of God's word inside of each one of us. On tomorrow's hope today, providing a refreshing and honest look at what it's like to struggle with temptation and shame. Bible teacher and author, Lena Abu-Jamrah, offers hope and encouragement for every believer who longs to be free from the bondage of sin. That's tomorrow on Hope Today. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.