Skinny People Still Have Heart Attacks: It’s What’s On The Inside That Matters Most


There’s always a lot of emphasis at the beginning of the year on our physical bodies. Diets begin, folks head back to the gym, it’s a new year and time for a new you. Truth be told, for most people it’s all about outward appearance. We want to look better on the outside, and we believe losing weight and toning up will accomplish this. The thing is you can be thin and still be thoroughly unhealthy. 

I recall a conversation I had with a health professional back in the 90s when the Adkins diet was all the rage. Folks were eating a pound of bacon for breakfast each morning and still losing weight. When I mentioned this he replied to me with the rhetorical question, “Skinny people don’t have heart attacks?”

Quite obviously they do. We all know obesity is a real health risk, but you’re not healthy just because your weight is in check. Health is on the inside. Our real goal should be to get healthy.

That’s more true spiritually than it is physically. There are people who look fine on the outside physically, but aren’t actually healthy inside. The world puts so much pressure on us to look a certain way we focus on the outward appearance instead of what really matters. Even more dangerous is when we do this spiritually. Church can make us feel so pressure to look a certain way we can become fixated on our outward appearance. As a result we look great...on the outside.

If we aren’t careful we can fall victim to the same trap with our spiritual beings we fall victim to with our spiritual ones. We look the part, but we aren’t really healthy. You look great on the outside, but inside we’re dying. We don’t want to eat pound slabs of bacon 🥓 and lose weight only to clog up our arteries. Likewise, we don’t want to look the part in public worship when, in reality, we’re not really maintaining a relationship with Christ.

Let’s not forget God’s words through the prophet Samuel when he came to anoint a king and thought he had found his man.

“Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." I Samuel 16:7

Let’s be sure our focus is more on getting ourselves healthy in this new year than it is on what we look like outwardly.

You’ve got this.

Following the Son,

James A Williams

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