The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but in our time many yearn to break free of a prison of flat secular materialism.

Wait, wrong podcast.

But if you aren't already listening to Lord of Spirits, you definitely should be.

The modern health paradigm is just as beholden though to materialism.

We're constantly bombarded with Wellness trends, diet fads, and self optimization strategies, but very few consider health through the lens of Orthodox Christianity.

This podcast, Here to Change that, will dive into topics like fasting, prayer, stress, nutrition, and even physical training, and while staying rooted in the timeless wisdom of the church.

Each episode will break down key health topics from an Orthodox perspective, bringing in guests, whether they're priests, health professionals, or experts in traditional wisdom, to help us navigate the practical and spiritual aspects of true well-being.

Welcome to Orthodox Health, the podcast.

We explore the intersection of Orthodox Christianity, physical health, mental well-being and spiritual growth.

I'm Doctor Michael Christian, joined by my Co host John, and we're excited to take this journey with you.

So grab a cup of coffee, lots of clean coconut for fasting and let's get started.

Blessed.

Is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked?

For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Welcome back to the Orthodox Health Podcast.

I'm your host, Doctor Michael Christian.

And I'm John, your Co host, probably the guy who's currently holding a plate of delicious leftovers from that feast while you're listening to this episode.

And if you have your leftovers, too, you are among friends.

Today we are talking about the 12 days, which is that strange little stretch after Christmas where the fast is over and the feast has begun.

Yet real life kind of goes off the rails a little bit.

Sleep is weird, food is everywhere and the calendar is a mess, and our bodies and souls are somewhere underneath all of that, waving a little white flag.

Right.

And it's that stretch of time when you're not totally sure what day it is, but you are sure you've eaten more cheese than you could fathom 3 times before noon.

Right, and here's the pattern that allowed us fall into We either barely engage in the fast at all, Lord forbid, but then we hit like a freight train.

The 12 days then turn to a blur of parties, processed junk, alcohol, late nights, and 0 rhythm.

And finally we try to fix everything with a harsh New Year's resolution that has more to do with punishment than with repentance.

More on the next week, but that is the cycle.

Struggle to uphold the fast, abuse the feast and then punish yourself in January.

Right.

Spiritually, it's like doing Donuts in the parking lot and then wondering why the tires are bold.

Right.

What the Church is giving us is something very different, however.

It's a fast that trains our desires, A feast that reveals what we really love, and then a return to the ordinary time that's supposed to look more like communion than a crash diet.

So when we talk about feasting without falling apart, we're not saying tone it down, you're being too joyful.

We are saying, however, that what if your joy had structure?

What if your celebration was actually forming you for the Kingdom instead of just frying your nervous system?

Absolutely.

And we'll throw that one out to our Roman Catholic friends.

We mentioned ordinary time.

I know one of my favorite things I heard coming into the Orthodox Church was that there's no such thing as ordinary time in the Orthodox Church.

But for our Roman Catholic friends, you do have that ordinary time on your calendar.

So moving forward, the answer to I went hard on Christmas is not well.

Now I must suffer on the treadmill for at least three weeks while drinking protein sludge and reading a lot of self help books.

Clean your groom, bucko.

Right, So gluttony isn't just I ate too much dessert.

Gluttony is when food becomes a way to ignore God, to ignore your neighbor, and to ignore your own body.

We were talking about that last week.

Dieting, however, is a sort of angry self denial that has nothing to do with Christ.

It's just the mirror image of that.

The opposite of gluttony is the Eucharist.

It's Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving needs guardrails.

Gratitude, says this food, this time, this warmth, this wine, these are all gifts.

And those guardrails say I'm going to receive them in a way that keeps my body and heart capable of love.

And so the question stops being am I allowed to enjoy this and becomes is this helping me love God and my neighbor or just making me numb?

Absolutely.

And we keep coming back to that because this is an area where the 12 days are actually quite brilliant if we pay attention to what's happening liturgically from Nativity through to theophany.

The Church is saying stay with the mystery, stay with Incarnation.

Don't just hit Christmas and then Sprint back into the mall or into self improvement mode.

Right in the middle of that we're given the circumcision of Christ, his first shedding of blood, the public giving of his name, and the memory of Saint Basil the Great, who spoke very plainly about gluttony, luxury, and what we owe the poor.

And that's not by accident.

That is the church planting a flag in the middle of your buffet table saying this is holy ground.

What you do with your food and feasting matters.

Absolutely.

And it hits right when the world is screaming fireworks resolutions, New year, new you, you've heard it.

The church is over here talking about the first blood of Christ and one of our great ascetic Saints.

That's kind of a quite different vibe.

You could say, so it's absolutely a different vibe.

But here's where Orthodox health intersects with us really beautifully.

The same rhythms that protect your soul, prayer, temperance bombs, giving also help to protect your biology.

When you destroy your sleep and live in ultra processed foods, when you drink more than your system can handle and never really let your nervous system downshift, you are making it harder to pray, harder to be patient with your kids, harder to be attentive and layergy.

So what we want to do in this episode is give you some very concrete ways to put those guardrails in place without killing the joy of the feast.

And so this is not the kill the party episode.

Absolutely not.

This is the Keep the Party from killing you episode.

At least in the short term.

So here's where we're heading.

First, we'll ground the whole thing in what the 12 days actually are and why the church unofficially gives us this particular stretch of time.

Then we'll dig a little bit deeper into gluttony versus dieting and why both of these missed the mark, as we talked about a number of times before, to the two sides of the coin of the Gnostic path, salvation, either through hedonism or asceticism.

And conversely, what Christian temperance actually looks like without falling into a temperance movement.

And then we'll get really practical with what I like to call gratitude with guard rails, how to handle sleep and late nights, how to think about light and screens, how to time your protein and your sugar so you're not riding on the blood sugar roller coaster.

What to do about alcohol and how to navigate the social side, parties, family dynamics and your church services without your body or your spiritual life getting completely bulldozed.

And towards the end, we'll walk through a simple year end examination, a way of reviewing the year when that's honest and repentant but not self hating, and use that to point us to our next episode on habits which were tentatively calling from willpower to worship.

Building habits that heal.

And so if you're already feeling a little frayed around the edges or you're looking at the next week and thinking there is no way my body gets through this sanely, just hang with us.

We're going to give you permission to enjoy the feast and some structures so your future self doesn't have to dig out of a crater.

That's right.

And let's be clear, we are not just giving you permission to enjoy the feast, we are commanding it.

That's an order.

That's right, no crash diet penance required.

So let's start by slowing down and asking what did the church actually intend these 12 days to be?

Because once we see that, the way we eat, drink and rest in the season starts coming to focus.

Now when I say that, let's be very clear about this upfront because some of you already typed in the comment.

Strictly speaking, in Orthodoxy, we don't have a dogmatically defined capital T 12 days of Christmas tradition in the same way that a post schism papal W talks about.

The whole 12 day framing gets formalized in the Western Regional Council, the Council of Tourism in 567, which as Orthodox we don't receive as ecumenical and isn't particularly binding.

So when John and I talk about 12 days, we're not secretly trying to import a new fee season into the Tipicon.

Right, we're not adding from the first Partridge unto the 12th drummer drumming as an extra service here by any means.

Exactly.

No troparion for the Partridge in a pear tree.

What we are doing, however, is naming the lived window that pretty much every Orthodox Christian in a Western calendar world experiences from Nativity on December 25th, Gregorian calendar to Theophany on January 6th.

And in that stretch, the Church does give us a dense cluster of services and commemorations, starting with the Feast of the Nativity itself.

And then we have the the Synopsis of the Theotokos, Saint Stephen's Day, the 4th Feast of Theophany.

Concurrently, then we have the Circumcision of Christ and the Feast of Saint Faisel the Great, and finally Theophany and it's after feast.

So while we're not saying there is an official Christmas tide dogma of the 12 days, what we are saying is that there is a very real festal rhythm here.

And your body and soul or living in it, whether you name it as such or not.

And then on top of that, you've got school schedules, your work holidays, travel, office parties, family stuff too.

It all piles onto that same window.

So even if you've never heard of the Council of Tours, you feel those 12 days in your calendar nonetheless.

Right, because for most of us, the window becomes this blurry thing we might just call the holidays.

And here's where the disconnect actually happens.

So technically, the Church is saying, stay with the mystery of the incarnation.

Stay near The Cave, near the Child, near the Mother of God, and prepare for the Jordan and the revelation of the Trinity.

Practically, our lives often say stay up too late, eat everything insight, skip prayer and hope.

January fixes all of that.

So when we use the phrase The 12 Days of Christmas on this podcast, I want you to hear it as a pastoral shorthand for that whole Nativity to theophany stretch, not as us pretending the Council of Tours is now binding dogmatically on the Orthodox world.

Right.

And so this is more what do we do with the time we've actually been handed?

You and I both live in a world where December 25th to January 1st is a completely different animal than, say, February 10th to the 18th.

Even if the Typicon doesn't come with a user manual for the office cookie platter.

Exactly.

So let's be really honest for a minute about how most of us experience that time, because if we don't name the problem, the guardrails we'll talk about later won't actually land.

So for most people, it looks like this.

You come into nativity already tired because the fast got swallowed, followed up by shopping by work deadlines, school programs and travel.

As we were talking about with Father Jonathan.

You then hit Christmas with a kind of emotional whiplash, beautiful services and a lot of family complexity.

And then the days after nativity become this unstructured blur.

Bedtimes creep up later every night, wake up times start to drift, meals become endless grazing on leftovers, junk food and alcohol shows up at odd hours and prayer gets squeezed into the edges.

Or sadly often times disappears completely.

You're technically feasting but in reality you're mostly just over stimulated and under rested.

Yeah, it's like living in an airport terminal made of cheese, sugar and notifications on your phone that just don't stop coming.

It's actually a pretty good description.

You feel what that does to your nervous system.

You become more irritable, you're quicker to snap your kids or your spouse, and you're more tempted to check out on your phone.

You start to become more foggy and distractible at liturgy.

And then the accuser comes along and says, see, you failed.

You blew the fast and the feast.

The only solution now is to go to war with your body in January.

Which if you think about it, is just another form of gluttony.

Only now the object isn't quite food, but it is control.

And just as Doctor Mike had said earlier, this is another example of that double sided coin.

So we're not seeing the gluttony manifest in the form of abuse of food, but we're abusing our own body.

We're taking advantage and we're running ourselves into the ground.

It's that the body is elevated or the body is denigrated, but an orthodoxy.

We don't believe either of those things.

Exactly, we have that royal path and that is the sickness underneath this whole pattern.

Before Christmas we're gluttonous with our time, with our stress and with our screens.

During the so-called 12 days we're gluttonous with our food, drink and comfort.

And then after that we become gluttonous for control and self reinvention.

As you said before that new year, new me.

None of that though, is repentance.

None of that is actual worship.

It's just the same old self trying on all three outfits.

So when people hear you say the opposite of gluttony isn't dieting, its gratitude with guardrails, this is what you're talking about, breaking that whole three act play.

Right.

Gratitude says Christ is born.

My life, this table, these people, this rest, these are all gifts that I've not earned.

And because they're gifts, I'm not going to consume them in a way that destroys the very heart that's supposed to give thanks.

And that is the shift we're trying to make.

We're not asking how to avoid gaining 3 lbs before Christmas and New Year, although we will try to do that too.

What we are asking, however, is how do I move through this festival window in a way that leaves me more capable of prayer, more available to my neighbor, and more present to my family and that?

Also explains why it matters that we're talking about this in the context of nativity to theopathy, not just quote UN quote the holidays in a generic sense, because the storyline the church is giving us is God takes flesh, he's named and blood is shed at the circumcision and then he steps into the Jordan and sanctifies the waters.

And that's a very different script than I survived fourth quarter and now I deserve to anesthetize myself.

For a week, right in the span of those days, the Church is walking us through the humility of The Cave, the hidden obedience of the circumcision with Christ fulfilling the law quietly before the world ever even sees the cross, And the generosity and asceticism of Saint Basil, who looked at wealth and gluttony and said this is robbery of the poor.

And then the revelation of the Trinity in the waters of theophany.

For this is the Father's beloved Son and whom he is well pleased.

And that is an atmosphere into which we are bringing our food, our parties, our late nights, our exhaustion.

And I think if we're honest, a lot of us have never really asked, how does my Physiology, my sleep, my blood sugar, my stress levels really fit into that story?

We tend to separate them.

Spiritual stuff over here, health stuff over here, and holiday chaos somewhere in the middle of all of it.

And meanwhile, your nervous system is part of the stuff Christ assumed when he became man.

Your fatigue, your appetite, your stress response, all of that is in the scope of His incarnation.

Absolutely.

So we are here really just naming the gap on one side a rich liturgical and theological reality that runs from Nativity through theophany, and on the other side are actual lived experience of that window, unstructured time, erratic sleep, endless food, and very little intentionality.

So the rest of this episode is basically us asking, how do we bring those two closer together?

How do we let the Church's time, not the Council of Tours, not Hallmark, and not the gym industry, set the tone for how we feast?

And practically, that's going to mean we talked about things that maybe sound unspiritual at first bedtime, light exposure, protein and dessert.

But we're talking about them because they're all connected to whether you can stay awake in prayer.

Stay patient with your kids and actually show up for your liturgy and for your neighbor.

Exactly.

So we've named the problem a festal window that's real even if it isn't dogmatized, a culture that's turned into chaos, and a body and soul that often come out on the other side limping.

So next we're going to start pressing into those guard rails, and we're going to begin with two of the quietest but most powerful ones, sleep and light.

Because if those are wrecked, everything else, your appetite, your mood, your prayer is going to feel 10 times harder.

All right, And so this is the part of the episode where people are probably going to be like, no, no, no, no, tell me exactly how many cookies I'm allowed to have.

And then you come back with cool, when did you go to bed last night?

Let's make sure that's right first.

23 The answer is 23, but yes, exactly.

Here's the basic reality in plain language.

Your body runs on a clock.

That clock is set mostly by light and timing.

When you sleep, when you wake, and when you eat.

When that clock is even loosely stable, your nervous system is calmer, your appetite is saner, your hormones respond better, and your mood is steadier.

However, when that clock gets wrecked, when you're going to

bed at 1:00 AM one night, 10:00 PM the next, strolling your phone in bed with the blue light shining on you, sleeping in late, eating at weird times, then your body starts to shift into survival mode.

And in that survival mode, you are more anxious, more impulsive, more junk food, hungry and way less patient.

And all the things that make feasting beautiful, the conversation, the prayer, the presents, they all become much harder.

Right.

And so if I walk into liturgy on December 29th with half the sleep, I should have got half hungover and lit by my phone until midnight.

I shouldn't be shocked that my mind will not stay on to focus on the prayers.

Exactly.

And I'm not saying that to guilt anybody.

I'm saying that because a lot of us assume our spiritual life is failing when half the time our nervous system is just so exhausted.

And this time, now those go together.

There are ways that you can power through, but that shouldn't be your default setting.

So in the season, I want you to think of sleep and light as two of your primary aesthetic tools, just as real as your prayer rule or your giving, even if it's lower on the true hierarchy of priorities.

Now, of course, these are not going to be held in a rigid monastic way, but they are going to be guardrails to help us to protect that feast.

So we're going to name the patterns because everyone knows it.

You're up late at night on Christmas Eve, particularly if you have young kids.

You then stay up late again on Christmas Day, out with your family or friends or whoever it might be.

Then you may have one more night relative on the 26th.

Maybe there's a game night, a movie marathon, parish event.

But before you know it, you've stacked four or five nights in a row where your bedtime has drifted an hour or two later each time.

Then you start sleeping in.

Or you can't sleep in because like we said before, you still have kids.

So you're just accumulating a stress debt.

And that is the point where the wheels start to fall off.

You start craving more.

Your body needs more sugar and caffeine just to be able to compensate for that excess stress, to help to regulate the system.

And that's just to feel halfway normal.

But you're more reactive, more emotional, and your fuse gets short.

Absolutely.

And so from the outside, it looks like holiday cheer, but inside it's more like chronic jet lag with a whole boatload of cookies.

Yep, social jet lag with frosting.

So here's the first guardrail I suggest for this whole Nativity to Theophany window.

Number one, Pick your late nights on purpose.

So look ahead and ask which one or two nights are worth being up really late.

Maybe it's Christmas Eve, or maybe it's a particular family gathering.

Whatever it is, consciously choose them.

Then, on the other nights, you deliberately pull back closer to your normal bedtime.

You treat those nights as recovery nights.

That way, instead of 12 nights of chaos, you have one or two big nights and several quieter ones where your nervous system can actually reset.

And so instead of it's the holidays so all bets are off, it becomes I have two big feast nights and the others are for rest and recover.

Exactly, and that alone can change how your body feels by January 2nd.

Now the second piece is light, which most of us just don't think about it at all, even though it has become so much more popular these days with little blocker glasses and red light therapy.

But your brain uses light as one of the main signals for is it time to be alert or is it time to wind down?

In the winter you get less natural light already.

To add to that, you are indoors more with more screens that are on and you got bright LED Christmas lights and ATV and phone screens, a computer and they are blasting your eyes at night.

This mixture tells your brain be awake even though it's late.

So you end up not just going to bed late, but going to bed biologically wired, and that wrecks the quality, not just quantity.

Right.

And so even if I technically have gotten 7 hours, but the last thing I did was stare at my phone in a dark room for an hour, I'm still going to wake up feeling like I got hit by a bus.

Pretty much.

So here are two simple light related guardrails.

We want morning light as early as you can get it.

Even in the winter.

I want you to get outside unless it is too cold to be feasible, in which case at least get to a bright window for 5-10 minutes in the first hour that you're awake.

You can be holding your coffee, holding your kid, or you can be walking the dog.

Don't really care.

What I do care about is just that you are getting light into your eyes.

That helps to anchor your internal clock.

It tells your body this is morning and that helps your cortisol peak earlier and relatedly your melatonin to rise earlier at night, which in turn makes it easier to fall asleep and easier to have a stable appetite.

For our third guardrail, we're going to have a tech and light curfew before bed on most nights in the season.

Again, not all, but most.

Try to give yourself at least 30 to 60 minutes with no phone and no oh TV right before sleep.

Lamps, candles, maybe some soft Christmas lights.

Those will be fine.

Stop the doom scrolling.

Just don't doom scroll in general anyway.

Did the whole episode on that too.

But when you have that blue and white screen in front of you in a dark room, it's going to be causing chaos.

Absolutely, Mike.

And to be clear, you're not saying never watch a Christmas movie again.

You're saying maybe don't watch three of them back-to-back and then end the last one right in

bed on your phone at 1:30 in the morning?

Right.

And the 12 days are not about perfection, they are about direction because I'm not going to sit here and say I haven't done that because obviously I have.

The key, though, is taking those steps in the right direction.

So can you give your brain enough morning light to know what time it is, and enough darkness before bed to actually wind down?

If you can do those two things, even if your food's a little bit messier, you will feel dramatically more stable, which will then lead us into one more piece, which is where the sleep and light connections directly affect your spiritual life.

So I want to encourage you to build in what I'd like to call it, a wind down prayer rule for the season.

Something like 10 minutes before you want to be asleep, put your phone down, you dim the lights, you light a candle, you make the sign of the cross, and you read a short prayer, ideally from your prayer book, maybe a Psalm, maybe the prayers before sleep, definitely the Jesus prayer.

And then you take a few short breaths.

Now, obviously not your spiritual father for the specific guidance on what you should be doing, talk to him.

But those are just some ideas of what you could do.

That is a tiny ritual that does three things at once.

One, it signals your nervous system that we are done, we are safe, it's time to rest.

Two, it trains your brain that the last voice I want to hear today is God, not the algorithm.

And three, it honors the feast because you are receiving rest as a gift and not just collapsing from exhaustion.

Absolutely, Mike.

And so even if the day itself was chaos with family drama, way too much sugar and too many people in and out, those last 10 minutes can still be ordered and God facing.

Absolutely, and I want to stress and not stress you out, but to stress this point that this does not have to be an hour long vigil in the middle of the 12 days.

If all you can manage is close the phone, turn off the lights and say one prayer slowly and attentively, that is already a massive step towards feasting without falling apart.

Because now your nervous system is a little bit calmer, your sleep will be a little bit deeper, and you're not starting tomorrow already in a deficit.

Absolutely.

And so let me play back what I'm hearing a little bit and you tell me if this is roughly the prescription we're aiming at during the Nativity to Theophany window.

Choose your really late nights instead of letting every night become one.

Get morning light into your eyes most days and even if it's just for a few minutes then give yourself a screen free landing strip before bed, a little prayer focused low light window instead of doom scroll till you drop.

And this is not asceticism for its own sake.

It's a way of saying thank you Lord for this season.

I'm going to enjoy it without destroying myself.

Absolutely.

And that is the gratitude with guardrails applied to your nervous system.

You're not saying I refuse to enjoy the feast, You're saying I'm going to enjoy it within the boundaries that keep me able to pray, to repent, and to love.

And once sleep and light have eaten a little bit of structure, now we can actually begin to talk about food, about protein, about junk food, and about alcohol in a way that becomes not just another crash diet conversation.

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Absolutely, because if sleep and light chaos, food is almost always going to follow that chaos.

If sleep and light have some rhythm to them, it's way easier to make sane choices at the table.

That's right, that rhythm is going to get you.

So now that we've talked about sleep and light as quiet guardrails, let's move into the thing that feels a little bit more obvious during the 12 days.

Food and drink, because this is where most of us feel the tension.

Christ is born, the fast is over, the table is full.

So now how do I not turn this into a metabolic train wreck?

Right, this is the is it a feast or a 10 day junk food Bender question.

Exactly.

But again, starting point, the Church is not asking you to treat the Nativity feast like a macro counting contest.

The question is not what's the lowest calorie version of Christmas that I can survive.

The question is how do I receive the food of the season as a gift and still step into January with a body that can pray, think and serve.

And that is the frame of that gradual guardrails.

So for the first big guardrail, we are going to feast at meals, but not all day.

Most of the damage doesn't come from a beautiful Christmas dinner, it comes from all day grazing.

A cookie here, handful of candy there, couple sips of soda chips while you're cooking, plus whatever you actually eat at the meals.

Your blood sugar never really lands, your gut never really rests, and your brain never gets a clear signal of we are done eating.

Because, let's be real, you probably aren't.

Absolutely, Mike.

It sounds like a living at a perpetual coffee hour table that follows you from room to room and then in the car and to wherever you're going.

And in that room, it just keeps going and going.

Exactly.

So a very simple shift is this, have real meals, sit down, pray, eat what you're going to eat.

Then between the meals, take a clear off switch.

Either you're actually fasting from calories between meals or you're limiting to 1 plant snack, not constantly wandering through the kitchen.

You can still have rich food, you should enjoy it.

You can definitely still enjoy your dessert, have your pie, have your ice cream.

It's a good time.

Christ is born, glorify him.

Enjoy your time at the wedding feast.

But the key is we're not going to be asking our pancreas to be on a 12 hour emergency shift every day of the feast.

Absolutely.

And so if someone listening does nothing else but say OK, I'm going to eat my feast food at meals and stop just orbiting the cookie tray all day, that alone is a huge win for the body.

And the soul?

Absolutely.

It's huge because that one change drops people's fatigue and irritability way down, even if the actual content of the meals is still pretty festive.

As far as second guardrail, we're going to put protein before sugar and seed oils because most of the wreckage from holiday food is not I had a slice of pie, it's I had pie instead of a real meal.

Your body's able to handle that junk food much better when you slept reasonably, when you're not stressed to the ceiling, and when you've had protein and real Food First.

So concretely, at breakfast, instead of coffee and whatever pastry is lying around, or some eggs, some leftover meat or a full fat grass fat yogurt, plus something sweet.

Then at lunch or dinner, eat your protein and savory dishes first.

Your roast, your fish, your beans.

I don't know why you'd be doing that in a fast free week, but but some potatoes, maybe some vegetables cooked in bacon grease, of course.

And then have a dessert as a second course, not the entire event.

And so the rule of thumb is put something real in your stomach before you give it the.

Fireworks, all right, You are using that protein and real food as a kind of buffer.

It helps to slow down how fast sugar hits your bloodstream, it reduces the crazy spike crash cycle, and it stabilizes your mood so that you're not turning into a grumpy 8 year old an hour later.

Now theologically, you could also say you are honoring food as nourishment first, pleasure second.

Dessert is the crown and not just the foundation of it.

Now relatedly, we're going to try to keep our biggest sugar hits earlier in the day.

Your body will usually tolerate better when you are more active, more insulin sensitive and further from bedtime.

That does come with a caveat that you if you are overstressed.

Using that sugar therapeutically is a good idea, but it shouldn't be the thing that we are reaching for because usually that sugar doesn't come in isolation.

It's coming along with those seed oils and ultra processed grains.

So if there is a dessert that you really love, grandma's cake, a special pastry, whatever it is, you're going to handle it much better after you've eaten earlier in the day than at 10:00 PM right before bed.

And so maybe have that second slice of pie after Christmas lunch and not as a moonlight raid at midnight in front of the fridge.

Now, I am not saying that you can never have late dessert during the 12 days.

What I am saying, however, is that you make the routine choice to put the bulk of your sweets earlier.

And honestly, if you do that, you're probably going to be less stressed throughout the course of the day such that you are not super craving it.

Because as we said multiple times throughout the course of the show, a lot of times those sugar cravings are because your stress is heightened.

Your body's trying to regulate.

It's not just that that Oh no, I want to be bad.

We need to regulate our nervous system right now and deal with this cortisol spike.

If we have them earlier in the day with real foods, we're probably going to have a much better time in terms of regulating our stress response.

Having said all of that, by combining that what we just talked about on sleep and light and you are going to wake up in January feeling much more like a human person and much less like a rung out of dish rag.

So to that point, we also have to talk about alcohol because for a lot of people that is baked into the holidays.

Now as we you also address repeatedly, the church does not treat alcohol as evil.

Wine is a gift is present in scripture.

It's at the wedding in Cana Christ very first miracle was turning water into wine.

It's in the chalice, right?

We do not drink Welch's grape juice, the blood of Christ.

It is wine.

It is a real tangible thing.

However, the line between wine, a celebration and worship versus alcohol, a self medication, gets really blurry this time of year.

Right.

Especially when you're tired, you're overstimulated and maybe dreading certain conversations or company.

A glass to take the edge off can quietly become three or five.

We have to be careful.

All right, so here are some simple alcohol guardrails that respect both body and soul.

Drink with your meals, not as anesthesia.

If you are going to have wine or another drink, keep it with your food, not on an empty stomach and definitely not as a solo coping strategy late at night.

As we've also talked about with black coffee, you generally don't want to have food or drinks to have neurochemical effects to be taken in isolation because in that case they have a much stronger effect.

Now you need to be intentional and decide before the evening.

Tonight I'm going to have one glass, or maybe I have two small glasses with dinner and that's it.

You can even tell your spouse or a trusted friend if that helps keep you accountable.

From there, the next guardrail is to have alternative festive drinks that aren't alcohol.

Sparkling waters, herbal teas, a special juice drink, maybe some eggnog, one glass with rum, one glass without.

Something that helps you to still participate in these toasts without actually eating alcohol every time.

And I understand these sound ridiculously simple, but they help to make a massive difference in your sleep quality, in your mood the next day and how present you are during services.

Absolutely.

And it also forces you to ask, what am I using this for?

Am I using it to give thanks and rejoice in the feast?

Or am I using it to numb myself and avoid the hard parts of the feast, like the hard conversations?

Perhaps awkward family dynamics or my own loneliness.

Lord forbid.

And that's exactly it.

That is where this helps to overlap with St.

Basil and the other Fathers regarding things like gluttony not being about a specific number.

It's about why you're eating, why you're drinking, and what it does to your heart.

If why makes you warmer, more grateful, more able to give thanks in moderation, that is one thing, right?

Why makes glad the heart of man?

But if it makes you dulled, less prayerful, more irritable, or more likely to succumb to the passions and to sin, that is something else completely.

And so let's put this all on one page for people who are listening while stirring a pot of something hopefully delicious during nativity to theopathy's stretch gratitude with guardrails for food and drink Looks something like this.

Real meals, not all day.

Grazing protein and actual Food First and then dessert second.

Big sweets earlier in the day and not as midnight missions to the fridge.

Then we have alcohol with our meals, not as a solo numbing tool and with a clear limit going into it.

And lastly, a couple of non alcoholic festive options so you're not defaulting to wine or other strong drinks every time you want to feel included.

Right.

And that's it.

None of that requires calorie counting.

None of that requires a diet app, an aura ring, a Fitbit, whatever it is you'd be using otherwise, it is simply saying, God, thank you for these gifts.

I'm going to receive that in ordered way so that by the time I walk into liturgy or into the new year, my body has not become my enemy.

And again, you can overlay this on what we already said about sleep and light.

And you've already changed your trajectory for the whole 12 days without a single new Year, New You slogan.

And the nice thing is, this is all adjustable if you do end up blowing it one night.

Too much dessert?

Maybe Too much wine, went to bed too late.

You don't have to declare that the 12 days have been a failure.

You could just say tomorrow is going to be the guardrail day and I'm going to stick to it.

Exactly because we've said that numerous times before is that it's not legalism, it is medicinal.

It is about healing.

We are not chasing perfection.

We are chasing repentance with our bodies.

So use that sleep and light as your quiet guardrails.

Use the food, in particular junk foods and alcohol, as your more obvious guardrails.

And next we're going to add one more layer that St.

Basil really pushes us toward, which is what does all this have to do with my neighbor?

Because if I buy Feast in a way that forgets the poor or forgets that lonely person in my parish, or forgets the person at my own table who's struggling, then whatever is happening, it's not Christian feasting.

Yet we are still in danger of making this a very sophisticated, Orthodox flavored self-care plan.

And the Fathers will not let us do that.

As we mentioned, St.

Basil in particular, who is standing right there in the middle of this season on January 1st.

If I didn't believe in Providence, I would say there was something spooky about that.

Absolutely.

And so, yes, St.

Basil is like that friend who shows up at your holiday table, looks at the spread, and then quietly asks, so who else is eating because of all this?

Exactly.

St.

Basil talks about gluttony and wealth in a way that makes most of us pretty uncomfortable.

I mean, one of his most important works was on social justice, and a lot of people hear that phrase today and they go, and let's be clear, he does not mean the same thing that it means today.

But for him, those two are inextricably LinkedIn.

The mind of Saint Basil the Great Gluttony and being stingy and holding that back from the poor are absolutely the same sin.

He basically says the extra bread in your house, it belongs to the hungry.

The extra clothes in your closet belong to the naked, and the extra shoes on your rack belong to the barefooted.

In other words, your surplus is not neutral.

And that is not him being dramatic, that is him taking the Gospel hatefully seriously.

So to that point, when most of us think about gluttony, we usually think I ate too much, whereas the Father's think more like you've consumed more than you needed while someone else near you lacked what was necessary.

So gluttony is not just a quantity issue, it is a justice issue.

It is about who gets left out of your feast.

Absolutely.

I think it's about time we make social justice great again.

I think St.

Basil's version is based, so let's not pretend that social justice is just a a left wing thing or something like that.

Well, and that's really it though, is we've taken this and made it into an economic policy that no, the government needs to come in and enforces on people.

Whereas you need to be able to look in the mirror and look in your own heart and say, am I living up to Christ's ideal?

There's absolutely nothing wrong.

With what's going on in the heart of the person who is advocating for social justice today, where it usually falls apart is in the implementation that I'm going to force somebody else.

It's the same way that usually that same minded person gets real upset if we try to force or enforce normative family relations, right?

If you have anything that goes outside of male, female dynamics and you disagree with that, and it's weird how those two don't seem to intertwine.

The same types of people who in their heart of hearts would want to advocate for governmental intervention to enforce social justice tend to be very upset when it comes to upholding the natural order of things when it comes to sexual dynamics.

And without diving too deep down that rabbit hole and jumping on the grenade, we'll leave it there for now.

St.

Basil's idea of social justice is absolutely a Christian tenant to be applied in your own life, not a barrel of the gun.

And I swear I'm saying that without jumping back into my old bulbertarian days.

Absolutely.

Like me neither.

And to just bring it home, that essentially means that you can eat a pretty modest plate and still be gluttonous if your heart is closed off to your neighbor.

Absolutely, and you can also have a generally rich festival table and not be gluttonous because if the table's open, if it's paired with generosity and if it remembers the poor in reality, not just like I thought about them over there.

Then in that nativity to theophany stretch, we are celebrating Christ taking flesh and becoming poor for our sake.

His first shedding of blood at the Circumcision and St.

Basil, who literally organized whole systems of care for the sick and the hungry.

We've talked about how the hospital system, the basilicas at Caesarea, came out because of Saint Basil.

It wasn't science, Mike.

Science didn't create the basilicas.

Exactly.

But science, those hospitals, that hospitality, those words come in together because those basilicas were both for the sick, for the poor, for the traveler.

They were to take in those who were in need.

And that is the defining Christian impulse of love of neighbor, to love God, right?

And so all of that ties back together.

So to feast as Christians, we have to ask, where is my surplus going and who is included in my joy?

But more importantly, who's invisible to me?

Because Christ told us that, right?

I was hungry and you did not feed me.

I was naked and you did not clothe me.

I was thirsty and you did not give me a drink.

So we need to make sure that those who could be invisible do not remain so.

And just like we give you physical guardrails, I want to give a few neighbor guardrails for the season, ways to make sure that your beast is facing outward, not just inward toward my own belly.

So think of these as guardrails.

1011 and 12.

We're getting up to what I guess you could call the 12 guardrails of Christmas at this point.

Exactly, but we won't sing them though.

Maybe donate to buy me a coffee.

People think about it, but number 10/1 intentional act of alms giving during 12 days.

And this is not some vague well I should give more generously to someday.

I want you to pick something concrete in that window.

Give it to a specific person or family that you know is struggling.

Support your Paris's charity effort.

Or take a grocery cart or a meal to someone quietly that helps you to do something that cost you a little but connects your feast somebody else's survival or joy.

Gabrielle Levin Invite someone into your feasting who usually gets left out.

That could be the single person your parish who doesn't have any family nearby, the widow or the widower, the convert who's away from home, the older parishioner who doesn't drive at night and might come for a midday meal, or even just a family that you know is lonely and overwhelmed.

You don't have to host a gigantic thing.

Even inviting somebody over for soup and leftovers after liturgy one day can change the entire meaning of your feast, for them and for you.

Which then leads us into guardrail #12I in at least one rich meal to a specific thanks and a specific person.

Before or after you eat, take 30 seconds as a family to name one thing God has done this year and one person you want to remember to pray for or to bless.

Now, that's not to say that every prayer should be some prosperity gospel.

Will God do this for me today?

And that tells me how I'm blessed, but it's not actually being thankful, actually being grateful for the ways in which God has been there for you in your life.

And that one tiny act drags your feast out of the realm of this is just about me and my cravings and puts it back into the realm of actual communion.

And a Partridge in a pear tree.

Roasted in bacon grease.

Yes.

And so it's not just thank you for this food comment and then fork to face, it's thank you for this food and Please remember this person and maybe help us to see how to share what we've been given with them.

Amen.

And that's it.

Those three neighbor guardrails do something very important.

They help to keep your feast from becoming close circuited.

But I just want to point out this outward pacing piece isn't just extra credit on top of your health, it actually changes your Physiology too.

When you live the whole season as my comfort, my snacks, my escape, your body stays in a kind of cramped, guarded position.

Stress chemicals stay higher.

You're more reactive, more self focused and more in that fight or fight state.

But your nervous system responds tremendously to almsgiving.

Participating in almsgiving, it helps to train the heart away from scarcity and towards trust, which in turn lowers chronic vigilance and helps to soften anxiety driven reactivity.

Psychologically, it increases meaning gratitude and social connection.

And those three factors are consistently linked with greater resilience and lower depression risk.

And physiologically, those generous acts can actually help to downshift the stress response.

So we are less in that fight or flight and we are more in that parasympathetic regulation.

So we are able to support steady your heart rate, your blood pressure is more normalized and you're able to sleep better.

So it helps to reinforce yourself control.

In short, doing that together in loving your neighbor, you're actually still loving yourself and your body stress biology.

So it becomes a whole person practice that helps to reshape your attention, your emotion and your body's stress biology towards peace and stability.

So instead of all of this riches just circling inside you and your own bubble, but then having cleaned your own room and starting to move outwards to the poor, the lonely, and the person who feels forgotten.

And that very much stays in the spirit of Saint Basil, who, as we said, looked at wealth and said this belongs to the poor.

He was not impressed by rich tables with all the best fancy foods that we're unable to produce.

Mercy.

When you turn outward, when you give and when you invite, and when you bless, your nervous system gets a very different signal.

We are connected, we are not alone.

There is enough to share, and that is incredibly stabilizing.

It helps to move you into that parasympathetic state, and it lowers stress, softens that survival clutch, and makes your own cravings a lot less tyrannical.

That's amazing, Mike.

And so even biologically, we can say that Almsgiving essentially is an antidote to this scarcity Physiology.

Absolutely.

And every time you give your body learns.

We are not abandoned.

God provides.

There is enough to share.

It's that old Protestant style footprints in the sand that every time you saw two footprints walking down the sand, that was Jesus walking with you.

And when you saw the one footprint you think, oh man, Jesus left me.

And yet that is what he carried you.

And so in order to be like Christ, we need to carry our neighbor.

And that's exactly what you want your heart and your nervous system learning during the Nativity feast.

Beautiful.

And so it also seems to quietly change how you measure whether the season went well, so to speak.

The world will say, did I get everything I wanted?

Did I eat everything that I was craving?

Or did I check all the boxes of experiences I was hoping to have?

But this framing asks something different.

Did someone else's life get lighter because God let me feast?

Did my table heal anybody besides me?

Important questions to ask.

Exactly.

So if you want a different New Year's metric, and we'll touch on that more next episode, but here it is.

When you hit January and you look back on this season, ask, did I remember the poor at least once in a concrete way?

Did my family's joy touch anyone outside of these four walls?

And did my body, my energy, my nervous system make it easier or harder to do that?

And that is a very different scoreboard than did I get my macros, bro, or did I avoid all sweets?

So now that we got a fuller picture of feasting without falling apart, how your sleep and your light are loosely anchored, your food and your alcohol have some same boundaries, and your table is facing outward towards the poor, towards the lonely and towards the neighbor.

That is already a massive shift away from the usual cycle of binge and regret.

And moving forward, we're going to take all of that and turn into a simple year end examination.

A way of looking back over the year and over this feast that is both honest but not self hating.

A way of naming where gluttony, fear or numbness have ruled and where grace has already been at work.

And then we'll use that to point forward into the new year.

Not as a willpower project, not as a way to white knuckle it, but as worship and a habit that can actually heal.

Right, so instead of the new year, new me, it becomes new year and a deeper communion.

I'm excited for that because most of us have never really been taught how to do a Christian version of a year end review that isn't just a self audit with a side of shame.

Especially for you former Roman Catholics.

Lord of Mercy, mea culpa, mea culpa.

Exactly, so I want to slow things down again and walk through something that you can actually do in these days between nativity and the new year and use them as that real simple year end examination, not a productivity review, how we doing Q4, all that kind of stuff.

Not as a self improvement audit.

We're not doing a self authoring program bucko and definitely not a here all the ways I failed.

Let me wallow in that despair because that in of itself is his own sin.

Now we are going to take a Christian way of looking back at the year and even at this feast that's honest but not harsh, repentant but not despondent.

That's right, because a lot of us only know 2 modes, 1 being ignore everything and keep scrolling or RIP myself to shreds and call it.

Being honest, neither of those is quite the orthodox approach.

Exactly.

So I want to give you something that you can literally sit down and do alone with your spouse, with your older kids who can actually understand it, or even with a small group.

I wanted to think for 15 to 30 minutes with the candle, maybe a notebook, maybe your prayer book, and we'll walk it into four movements.

One, gratitude.

Where did Christ meet me this year?

2 Gluttony and numbness.

Where did I hide from Him, especially with food screens or busyness?

3 With your neighbor.

Who did my table make room for and who did it forget and for desire?

What am I actually asking God to heal in the year ahead?

Think of this as a way to let the circumcision of Christ and St.

Basil read your year.

That gratitude piece.

Where did Christ meet me first?

Movement is gratitude and I deliberately want you to start here.

Not with what did I mess up, but find a quiet spot if you can.

I want you to stand before God, not just in your own thoughts.

And then ask very simply, Lord, where did you meet me this year?

Not what did I accomplish, not did I hit my goals, but where did I receive mercy that I didn't deserve?

Where did I see your provision in my health, in my family, and in my work?

And where did you carry me through something that I didn't think I could survive?

Let a few moments rise to the surface and just name them before God.

Write them down if you can.

And even if this year felt like a complete train wreck, there are always places where Christ will still quietly show up.

Absolutely, Mike.

And sometimes you only see those when you force yourself to slow down and ask that question specifically.

Otherwise, the year is just a blur of adrenaline and all too much emails.

Exactly.

This first movement is really about shifting your nervous system out of that threat mode and into Thanksgiving, spiritually and physiologically.

Gratitude is one of the quickest ways to tell your body that we're not abandoned, that God has actually acted, and more importantly, is acting right now actively, even if you don't notice it, even if you don't feel it.

And that's the ground we want to stand on before we look at anything that's painful or anything that we regret.

The second movement will be that gluttony and numbness about where did I hide?

So again, we're looking at this through the lens of a doctor and a priest, not as an accuser, or even worse, the accuser.

So we'd like to ask Christ very simply, Lord, where did I run from you this year?

Where do I use your gifts to hide from your face?

And be specific, maybe it was food, using constant snacking or nightly binge eating to stuck down anxiety and loneliness.

Alcohol, using that extra drink to avoid feeling grief or anger, screams, scrolling through your numbness instead of sitting in silence and prayer.

Or in busyness by filling up every minute so you never had actually had to feel your own weakness.

You don't want to turn this into self hatred, but simply notice.

Where did I feel the most out of control this year?

What would I reach you for to cope?

It's almost like you're letting Christ, the true physician, review your chart with you.

Not to humiliate you, of course, but to say here's where the infections are, so let's clean these out together.

Exactly.

And remember we said earlier, gluttony is not just too much food, it's using food or drink or distraction as a way to dodge God, to dodge your neighbor, and to dodge your own heart.

So in this movement, you might simply write down one or two patterns like I, I run to sugar, I run to my phone when I feel lonely at night.

I run to junk food when I'm overwhelmed with the kids, or I run to work and busyness when I feel inadequate.

And you don't have to fix them in this moment.

You're just bringing them to light and saying, Lord, this is how I've been trying to save myself.

Have mercy on them.

Thirdly, we have the neighbor, which is where St.

Basil really presses on us.

And you can ask, Lord, how did my life, my table, my time, my money touch my neighbor this year?

And who did I not want to say this isn't about counting up every donation you made is about the shape of your love.

God is not the IRS.

Yes, he did recruit Saint Matthew, but he also flipped over the money changing tables.

So it's not about the donations, it's about the shape of your love.

And so some questions here might sound like did any of my feasts create room for someone else, or were they always just for my inner circle?

Did I notice the lonely person at coffee hour and invite them to sit with me?

Did I remember the poor at all and how I spent my surplus if I had some?

Absolutely.

And this is something that Father John Wheeling actually addressed in the homily recently, and it's the blessing and the curse of the recent growth that we've been seeing everywhere in Orthodoxy.

A lot of times when you have a small mission or maybe you have already reached the parish state, but you have that family atmosphere as all these new people come in, you start to potentially lose sight of that and do not actively reach out to all of them.

So to that point, make sure whenever there's somebody who's there, whether you have an official greater team at your church or not, make sure that you are trying to take the time to get to know them.

Because not only is that your neighbor in general, that's someone who you are trying to help actually come home to Christ in the church.

So they are there to meet him.

You need to be that icon, that representative for the church as they're coming in.

So with this tremendous growth, glory be to God for that.

But that new person that caught the hour, you make sure that you talk to them.

But from there, you want to let the spirit bring faces to mind.

You want to think about someone you meant to invite and you never did.

Someone who's helped to carry you and someone who you avoided because they your need felt like it was too much.

So don't let that collapse you into shame.

Let it help to sharpen your pendants to how Lord I have not loved as you love.

Teach me how to open my table, my time, my attention in this year to come.

And this is where that alms giving, the hospitality and the temperance all meet.

Because often the reason we don't open our table or our schedule is that our energy, our time and our money are already being devoured by our passions, by gluttony, by distraction and my overwork.

Which then leads us to the 4th 1.

I mentioned desire.

And this where we pivot from what happened to what am I actually asking from God?

So ask yourself in His presence, Lord, what is it that I truly desire to see healed or changed this coming year?

Not what would it look impressive on Instagram, Not what would make me feel in control.

But do I long for peace in my home?

Do I long for safe healing in some part of my body?

Do I long to be freed from a particular passion, food, screens, anger, despair?

Or do I long to be more faithful in prayer, confession, and my attention at liturgy?

Try to name one or two desires, not ten.

Save those 10 for confession.

He but explicitly placed them for Christ, the one who was circumcised, for he who shed his first blood for us and who stepped into the Jordan to heal our nature.

Amen.

And so instead of this year, I will become XYZ by my sheer willpower.

Of course it becomes this year.

Lord, I'm asking you to work in this specific place, and I'm willing to cooperate with you.

Exactly, and that is the difference between a resolution and a supplication.

A resolution says I will fix myself, whereas A supplication says Lord, I am sick, here's where it hurts.

Show me how to walk with you in healing.

What if the medicine of the future was ancient?

What if the practices that steady your nervous system, train appetite, and restore meaning weren't new hacks, but old paths?

We've forgotten fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and communion.

What if healing was less about novelty and more about returning to what heals the whole person?

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And once you have that one or two core desires named, now you're in a position where the next conversation, the one we're going to have next episode about habits, actually starts to make sense.

Because habits for the Christian are not just sculpting the best version of me.

They are about making room for grace, room for prayer, room for love of the neighbor, and room for your body to actually support your soul instead of dragging around exhausted.

The point of this exercise is not to have the perfect answers and the perfect grammatical structure and all of that, but rather to stand before Christ in truth with your body, your habits, your failures, and your desires, and ask for Marcy.

And honestly, even if someone did nothing else from this episode but took 20 minutes sometime between now and Theophany to actually walk those 4 movements, the gratitude, gluttony and numbness neighbor desire, that alone would change how they are to enter the new year.

Right, and that is where we really want to land this conversation and launch into the next one.

Because once you've seen where Christ has met you, where your passions have ruled you, how your feast has hasn't opened you to your neighbor and what you truly desire him to heal, then we can actually talk honestly about habits.

Not as willpower projects that you can just muscle your way through, but as small concrete ways of saying, Lord, I believe help my own belief.

So take this desire and give it shape in a way in my day-to-day life.

That's exactly where we're going to get into our next episode, which, again, as we said, we are tentatively titling from willpower to worship building habits that heal.

And so think of this episode as the examine and the guardrails, and the next one as OK, how do we turn this into an actual rhythm for January and beyond?

Exactly.

So let's try Lana's playing.

Like we said, we've covered a lot of ground today, but the heartbeat underneath all of it is actually pretty simple.

Feasting is part of your formation.

The way you move through this window from nativity to theophany, with your sleep, your light, your food and your drink, your neighbor and your prayer, is shaping what you love and how you show up before God.

Absolutely.

This is not just Christmas health hacks or something like that.

It is how does my body either support or sabotage the very joy and worship that the church is trying to hand me in this season?

Exactly.

So if you need that short version, here it is.

Pick your late nights on purpose instead of letting every night become one.

Get your morning light in your eyes and give yourself a small screen free landing strip before bed.

Please take your meals, not all day, real food and protein first, sweets to the crown, not as the foundation.

Keep the Big Sugar hits earlier in the day and keep alcohol with meals and within limits as celebration, not as anesthesia.

From there, turn your feast outward.

Make sure you have at least one intentional act of almsgiving, one invitation or gesture of hospitality, and at least one meal where you consciously remember somebody in prayer.

Wrap all that up with your simple year end examination, your gratitude, your honesty about your passions and your attention to your neighbor and a real request for healing and then you will have a very different 12 days of Christmas than the default one here that we are used to in the Western world.

Absolutely.

And different enough that when you hit January, you don't have to do the whole, OK, I blew it time to punish myself dance that we've been talking about instead.

You can say, all right, I am a Sinner, but I'm not starting from a crater.

I've already started turning toward Christ with my body and my habits.

Exactly.

And so while we're going to dive deeper into that next episode, in the meantime, here's my little encouragement.

Do not wait until January 1st to start living differently.

Pick one guardrail today, just one, and actually practice it during these 12 days.

Maybe it's that 10 minute wind down prayer before bed.

Maybe it's the no more grazing.

I'm going to sit and actually eat my food.

Maybe it's one concrete act of arms giving for theophany.

Whatever it is, let that be at least one of your yeses to Christ in the season.

And if someone comes to mind who's drowning in this time of year, maybe they're tired, overwhelmed, using food and even drink just to cope, send them this episode.

Share it with a friend.

Share it with your parish group chat.

Share it with that one person you know is trying to take their health and their faith seriously, but maybe feel stuck in the holiday chaos.

Absolutely.

And if you've got questions that came up while you listened about fasting and feasting, about sleeping hormones, about what this looks like with specific health issues, send those in.

We do read them.

They help to shape future episodes and Q&A's.

And if you think you really need that assistance, you can always work with me over on orthodoxhealth.com.

Having said that, we want you to remember, most importantly, Christ is born.

Glorify Him.

Absolutely, And may these days be full of real joy, real rest, repentance, and may your feast leave you more alive in Him, not less.

That's right.

So thank you all for listening guys.

Enjoy the feast and don't forget the guardrails.

Absolutely.

Until next time, God Bless is available on Spotify, Apple Music and all of your other favorite listening locations.

And you can also find us available on YouTube at Doctor Michael Christian Rumble at Orthodox Health and Sub SAC at Orthodox Health podcast.

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Connect with us on Instagram at Orthodox Health or in our Telegram group at Orthodox Health Podcast and join the conversation.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, answer your questions, and continue building this community together.

And finally, if you're enjoying the show, leave me a quick review on your favorite podcast platform goes a long way helping others discover Orthodox help.

Until then, stay strong in faith, take care of your temple, and keep Christ the center of your health journey.

God bless.

The.