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1. Eat to Live
2. Supplement Your Diet with Whole-Food Nutritionals, Living Nutrients & Superfoods
3. Practice Advanced Hygiene
4. Condition Your Body with Exercise and Body Therapies
5. Reduce Toxins in Your Environment
6. Avoid Deadly Emotions
7. Live a Life of Prayer and Purpose |
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VITALITY
What the Great Physician Says About Your Health
By Laura J. Bagby
CBN.com Sr. Producer
CBN.com –
Imagine: You are a young, active college student serving God when inexplicably you contract a life-threatening digestive illness. After visiting 70 medical practitioners, both in conventional and alternative medicine, you are left no more than skin and bones with little hope for renewed health and a very real possibility of death. What do you do? Where is your hope when you are deemed “incurable”?
This was the news that Florida State University student Jordan S. Rubin faced—at 19.
But his “fate” wouldn’t be the final answer. There was hope. That hope was in God and in His written Word.
 “I believed in the Word of God. I believed what God’s Word said,” said Rubin in a recent phone interview. “I just didn’t realize that He said things that had to do with health. Once I started looking into God’s Word as the Owner’s Manual for our bodies, much like a car has an owner’s manual, I realized that this was my answer. It all made sense. This is why I had been sick for so long, why I had been so sick.”
In a miraculous 40 days, which Rubin attributes to the life-giving Lord he serves, this same teenager returned to health. He decided to dedicate his career to helping others discover the same biblical keys to vigor he had experienced.
“I knew God had a plan for my life,” Rubin said, “and I knew that He wanted to use what I was going through to help other people. Once I realized I was ill and I wasn’t necessarily going to be well the next day, I said, ‘If I could just help one person overcome a disease, if I could just help one person avoid sickness, or better yet, help people who aren’t sick to stay well, then it would have all been worth it.’ ”
Now 30 and still enjoying vitality, Jordan S. Rubin has been true to his word, having authored the New York Times’ bestseller The Maker’s Diet and most recently penned The Great Physician’s RX for Health & Wellness.
So, how exactly did a robust youth suddenly become seriously sick?
Born to a father who was a naturopathic doctor and a chiropractor, Rubin grew up in a family where the diet, as he explained, “may have been healthier than most, but it certainly wasn’t a healing diet.”
Never immunized as a child because his father didn’t believe in vaccinations, Rubin at age 15 was required by his school to get vaccinated against a measles outbreak. Rubin believes that could have been a contributing factor.
“Years later, we have seen at least three papers that that vaccine, through one way or another, can contribute to digestive and behavioral problems,” Rubin told me.
In college, Rubin admits to overextending himself with too many extracurricular activities: participating in campus ministry, traveling with a praise team, being chaplain of his fraternity, playing in three intramural athletics, and cheering for three sports—oh, yes, and attending class. Not only was Rubin under tremendous stress from his crazy schedule, but as an athlete, he had bought into the low-fat and fat-free diet craze: Carbohydrates and sugar were in; fat was out.
Now, it could have been easy for this overachiever to blame God for his ill health, but Rubin said, “I don’t believe that God has people get sick. I know God allows illnesses. I don’t think that God needed me to be sick to have me achieve my purpose. I think I got sick for a combination of reasons, and I think that most people do today as well.”
 With so many people suffering from severe illnesses, I was curious to find out more about the diet Rubin was touting in his latest book. When I asked him what made his diet distinctive from other popular diets like Atkins, South Beach, or the Zone, Rubin told me, “I don’t know any other plan where at the beginning of the day, the recommendation is to start your morning with prayer. And my prayer is quoting Scripture. I believe that if someone doesn’t know how to pray, God’s Word never returns void.”
In his diet, Rubin doesn’t tell participants what percentage of certain foods to eat, but he does organize foods into three categories easily remembered by the acronym E.A.T.: Extraordinary foods, Average foods, and Trouble foods. Foods to always avoid are termed the ‘dirty dozen,’ and those include pork and shellfish, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, and trans-fatty acids.
The Great Physician’s Prescription is a 49-day program and it covers seven key areas of wellness. These seven areas span everything from, as Rubin said, “prayer to forgiveness to sunlight to sleep to rest to fasting to eating to consuming the right amount of water to exercise to not allowing stress and other deadly emotions to harm you” [see sidebar for more information]. Participants are introduced to one new key per week until all principles have been incorporated by day 49.
But how did Rubin come up with the number 49? Why not stick with the very biblical 40, as he had done with his Maker’s Diet?
Rubin explained, “I think scripturally we look at 40 as a period when changes happen. But what we don’t realize is that 40-day periods are for breaking down. They are not for building. We try to transform for the better by building, but the 40-day principle is really a tearing down. It is a stripping down. You become vulnerable to the point that you can receive from God, but also you are at your greatest temptation.”
In contrast, the Great Physician’s Prescription comes from a biblical principle in Leviticus 23 called the counting of the omer. The Israelites would count the number of days between Passover and Shavu’ot, or the Festival of Weeks, in anticipation of the 50th day. The 50-day mark was significant for two reasons: first, because it was the day that God wrote the Word on the tablets, and second, because it was the day that thousands of people died because they were worshipping false gods. Later, God gave his Holy Spirit, and, Rubin further explained, that many people were saved. “I really think that it is similar to the principle where you count in anticipation that 50th day, and you are a new person by that time,” he said. “Day 50 we call the day of jubilee, and that is the first day of the rest of their health.”
Rubin is particularly concerned with the health of the Body of Christ, since many believers lack knowledge on how to maintain wellness.
“My vision is to see the health of God’s people transformed one life at a time,” he said. “I am not one of those people who have been called to reach the world and bring them to church; I am called to reach the church to bring that to the world.”
And one very clear way that Rubin is doing that is through launching what he calls Seven Weeks of Wellness in January 2006 as a massive church small group campaign, with the ultimate goal of getting seven million people to go on seven weeks of wellness in the next seven years. He believes it will be a wonderful way to reach out to both Christians and non-Christians alike who value staying fit.
With such a momentous wellness project ahead and the chance to publish some 35 books in the next five years, Rubin clearly doesn’t let these successes go to his head.
“The bottom line is, to be used by God, you don’t have to be famous or rich, you don’t have to be credentialed, you don’t have to have great ability. You just have to be willing and available,” said Rubin. “Sometimes God makes you available and willing by allowing you to go through bad circumstances. What the world sees as failure—as I always say when people look at my before picture—God sees as opportunity.”
At 19, a very sick Jordan S. Rubin was suffering from what doctors termed an "incurable" digestive disease. When conventional and alternative medical therapies failed to treat his serious condition, Rubin looked to the Bible for answers. Studying and applying Scripture was the key to Rubin's renewed health and vigor and the impetus for his revolutionary dietary plan, The Great Physician's RX for Health & Wellness. Rubin has earned a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine from Peoples University of the Americas School of Natural Medicine, and a Ph.D. in Nutrition and Natural Therapies from the Academy of Natural Therapies. He is also a certified nutritional consultant, a certified personal fitness instructor, a certified nutrition specialist, and a member of the National Academy of Sports Medicine.
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