Consecration In A Processed World: Choosing What Truly Nourishes

What if “your body is a temple” became more than a slogan and actually shaped your next meal, your movement, and the peace of your home? We explore the temple thread that runs from Leviticus to 1 Corinthians and bring it down to ground level: kitchens, grocery carts, sleep, and the everyday choices that either welcome or resist the presence we were made to carry.

A temple isn’t just a pretty place; it’s a consecrated space designed for sacred work and constant care. That’s why Leviticus is so detailed about materials, cleaning, and maintenance. It’s not about nitpicking; it’s about protecting life and making presence sustainable in a messy world. Paul echoes that vision when he calls both the church and our individual bodies the temple of the Holy Spirit. From there, we ask a simple question: if the Levites stewarded the temple with intention, how do we steward ours?

The conversation moves into food design, satiety, and the rise of ultra-processed products engineered to bypass our fullness signals. No shame here - just perspective and small shifts that compound. Beyond food, we make room for movement as care rather than punishment, and for environmental choices within our control: cleaner air at home, fewer synthetic fragrances, and thoughtful contact with plastics.

Throughout, we come back to community. The temple is personal and collective, so we lean on each other to build habits that last. We share stories of setbacks and slow wins, and we keep the focus on health, not just weight. If you’re ready to treat your body as a place of sanctity and refuge - peaceful, resilient, and useful - this conversation offers a clear path and a gentle push.

Subscribe, share with a friend who needs encouragement, and tell us: what’s one intentional shift you’ll make to care for your temple this week?

 We’re so glad you’re here. 

In this quick pause, Melissa shares why Heart & Soul Elevation exists, how Stephanie's and Melissa's coaching work together beautifully, and what you can expect along the way. 

From time to time, we’ll pop in to invite you into things we’re creating - always as an invitation, never a sales pitch. 

Thanks for listening. You belong here. 

Transcript

Framing The Temple Theme

Melissa 0:02

In Leviticus chapters 1 through 9, God hands down to the Levites the instructions for how to use the temple that they built.

Stephanie 0:14

Yes. And in fact, why do we say it that way? Well, because in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 16, you know, it is talking about uh the body of Christ as the temple of the Holy Spirit, uh, a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. But also in 1 Corinthians 6, 19, it talks about our physical bodies also individually being the temple of the Holy Spirit. What does it mean to be a temple, to be set apart, to be consecrated? And these are all the things we're diving into today.

Melissa 0:44

Yeah, so let's talk about the temple. Welcome to the Heart and Soul Elevation Podcast, where faith meets wellness and women learn to live aligned, spirit, mind, and body. We're your hosts, Melissa Holman and Stephanie Pasniukis.

Stephanie 1:00

Two Jesus-loving women passionate about helping you steward your health without losing sight of the one who gave it to you. Around here, healing happens in community. Scripture leads the way, and science simply confirms what God designed.

Body And Church As God’s Temple

Melissa 1:16

Let's elevate your heart and soul together.

Stephanie 1:20

Something my pastor hadn't realized until I brought it up to him was that our body as a temple and the body as a temple was brought up twice in Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, and different and slightly different nuances, which I love because it really fits in with a lot of what we talk about with healing happens in uh community and connection. And but also that um we've got 1 Corinthians 6, 19, which is talking about how we honor God with our physical bodies, you know, how we treat our bodies as the temple of God. And um, and that connects back to our favorite book of the Bible, Leviticus, because who doesn't love Leviticus? I I happen to adore it. Most people hate it uh and find it boring, but I find it absolutely fascinating. Um, and then we've got uh 1 Corinthians 3, 16, which is talking about that we are all God's temple together, um, both uh individually and corporately as the church are the sacred sacred dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Um so that's something that I would like to talk about, um, and how we care for it. And also what you've said frequently is that God has a perfect design, and then humans come in and human in it and we we muck it up. We just we're like, oh, I get it, I get it, I get it, I got this, I got this. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, hold up.

Melissa 2:47

Well, this is where I love to go to like definitions. I mean, I don't consider myself a scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but I think words have meaning. And we think we know what words mean, and we have no we have no clue what words mean. The first time I really came up came up against this, we were my boys were probably fifth, sixth grade, and we were studying the book of Jonah, and it said, and there was a tempest, and then and then it just continued on. And I was like, Well, what is a tempest? And we looked it up. I mean, I thought I knew what a tempest was, right? A big storm, right? But it's like a storm with every single weather pattern thrown in snowing, icing, wind, everything, and uh it it's just it's just weather chaos. It shed a whole new light on the book of Jonah. So, since that time, I mean, this is a couple decades ago, but since that time, it's like I think I know what a word means, and I stop and I look it up, and I'm like, holy cow! Temple doesn't mean what I think temple means, right? Temple is a structure, yeah. I got that. Often considered a house of the deity, right? A house of God, specifically set apart for sacred, religious, and ceremonial purposes. Um, my body is a temple, it is specifically set apart for sacred, religious, and ceremonial purposes. I wouldn't have thought of that when I heard the word temple. And my uh my body is a temple. What? Unlike general places of worship, I'm just reading the definition here.

Leviticus, Care, And Stewardship

Stephanie 4:34

Temples are considered consecrated holy spaces, and and that is that is what happened when we accept Jesus as our savior, right? And we are then it then we are able to have the Holy Spirit indwelling in us because we are consecrated and and it can now be there. The thing is, um, this is where I like to go back to Leviticus, and maybe you can find the the section while I chat about it, um, to give a little address for those who want to check it out, because Leviticus is fascinating. But when the rules are given for how one is supposed to care for the temple and what is supposed to be inlaid, so gold over this, and brought this is bronze, this is gold, this is that, you know, and the amount of care that the Levites had to put in, I mean, washing it constantly, wiping it down, incense, um, all of this stuff. Well, what was done in the temple area? Like what was done? There were sacrifices, there was, you know, it wasn't always um, it was a little bit messy, right? I mean, can you imagine uh slaughtering an animal in your kitchen and just leaving the blood everywhere to get stinky and flies and everything else?

Melissa 5:52

We're a hunting family, so yes, I actually can imagine that. Our dining room table was where we butchered deer and pig for decades. Decades.

unknown 6:01

Right.

Melissa 6:02

And if what would happen if you just left that all there? If I didn't well, even the even the process of butchering stinks. I mean, even even without leaving it to rot, the the meat itself has an odor. And and you you have to get past that to even butcher the animal. And all the glands and all the the scent, you know, all just all these different scents. But if I didn't clean it, yeah, oh, the smell.

From Sacrifice To Daily Habits

Stephanie 6:31

Yeah. Oh, the and the smell, and and think about what you know, the wood that they were using then, and it's not like they had lacquer, right? They had gold, they had they had metal, you know, plating. They they which makes it, and of course, um, gold is inner, it's not reactive, it's not gonna rest, right? Um, so they're able to clean it. Um, and those sorts of things. There's all there's so you look at all these rules for how the temple is to be built, and just thinking it's a whole bunch of rules, and that, you know, well, we have to collect all of the jewels from everybody to melt down to do all of this work. And there was a reason for it. So, number one, there's always a reason. There's always a reason, and it's not an accident that in First Corinthians chapters three and six that um the that the body of Christ, as in the multiple people who make up the body of Christ, and our individual bodies are referred to as a temple, as a temple and as a temple of the Holy Spirit. And we are supposed to care for the temple as Levites. We are supposed to be good stewards. So, what does it mean to be a good steward of our body? And we are living in an age where humans have inadvertently, probably most of the time, because we're humans and broken and we think we know more than we know. Um, and we are very smart, so it's easy to to deceive ourselves into thinking we know all of the things because we know some really cool stuff. Um that we've corrupted our health in so many ways, right? So obviously the easy one to talk about is, you know, if we go back to January's dietary guidelines or talking about ultra-processed foods, and they're really pointing a finger at them for the first time in a long time because they didn't want to do it before. Why? Well, because of being afraid of alienating people who they felt were dependent on them. Well, why don't we just make real food available to people who were, you know, I don't it's weird, but that's what we were thinking. But also the money part of it. Like you don't want to alienate the people who are funding a lot of the things in in government, and there that's a whole other thing. I don't like to get into it, but I mean, from a uh, you know, a perspective that has been written about in many uh, you know, documentaries and and books on health and things like that, those always come up and you can always read them for yourself. But um there's there what we did was we created food that we felt was better than God's food. We felt like we we could we could do it better. We could take apart a wheat kernel, you know, that has a germ and bran and endosperm, take it all apart. You can now go to the store and buy a bottle of wheat germ, you can buy a bottle of wheat bran, and you can buy white refined flour. Everybody wants the white refined flour, which is what's killing, which which is dangerous for your body in excessive quantities without the bran and the germ, which is where the fiber and the protein come on from, which is what has been now um prioritized more than ever in the new dietary guidelines, fiber and protein. And then we and then when we took out all of the vitamins and minerals from that wheat germ and made the white flour, we had to then enrich it with all of the vitamins that we took out of it, but we used synthetic versions of those vitamins that don't work for a lot of people, right? Folic acid is a synthetic version of a methylated folate that 40% of the population can't really process.

Processed Food And Design Drift

Melissa 10:12

Right, right. And then we wonder why everybody has massive gastric issues.

Stephanie 10:17

Right. And so that's the other thing, because now we're adding preservatives to keep the long shelf life. If if bacteria, the cleanup crew of nature, which will pretty much eat anything, there's probably a bacteria for almost anything, or fungus, or some sort of uh decay uh-oriented microorganism that is meant to break things down and put the the base new the base you know constructs of of life back into the soil or wherever, if they don't want to eat it, what's gonna happen in your body? Your body doesn't know how to break it down either. So we're gonna sequester it. I mean, we can we can break it down to a certain extent, but there's a whole bunch of particles in our body. What's happening in our microbiome that is full of bacteria and and other microorganisms when all of these things come into it, right? And I mean, we can go further and further, but and I'm not saying we cannot have any kind of convenience food or anything like that, right? But the question becomes am I relying on something that is not healthy that that is not treating my body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, right? There were certain kinds of foods and certain kinds of uh of of things that were suitable for a sacrifice in the temple, right? Right. Um, I mean, we can go back to again a little bit sort of Deuteronomy and look at the the kosher eating, and there was a reason for all that. And I'm not saying that every single person has to eat that way, but we should at least think why did God say this? What was the purpose behind it? Because it wasn't all just spiritual, he knows our bodies exactly.

Fiber, Protein, And Enrichment Gaps

Melissa 12:08

He he designed them, he knows exactly how our bodies function, what our bodies will process and what they will not process. I was watching a show on Netflix. Um, if you like crime dramas, let me know and I will let you know the name of the show. Um, but it was set in the 70s, and um housewife came out and put food on the table, and there were flies. The flies were coming toward the food. When is the last time you saw that? When is the last time you saw that? I mean, flies typically don't come at food that's not food. Ants don't come at food that's not food, they just don't. I mean, it's got to be real food that you put down. I remember a couple decades ago. Do you remember Super Size Me? Yes, the documentary. Well, this was back when we still had Blockbuster, and I went and got the DVD. And on the DVD, the movie itself was only a typical movie hour and a half. There were eight hours of extras on the DVD. I watched the eight hours of extras on the DVD. And he showed his whole experiment. He showed the food side by side, the real hamburger with the real homemade bun, the hamburger with the bun that never decomposed. Like it was like four months, and that burger was still there, looking exactly like a burger. Whereafter three days, the homemade one was soupy.

Preservatives, Microbiome, And Satiety

Stephanie 14:28

Yes. And uh, I was telling my daughter, she was she's doing this uh this energy audit of our home for a class in her AP environmental science, they call it Apes. She's doing it in that class. And I was telling her about the attic. She's like, What's this other attic? And I'm like, Well, it's here, but it actually goes over your bedroom. It's that whole area. There's a small space. Um, I said, and you know, if you get up on your tippy toes or stand on something, you can see over. I said, the first time I ever looked in there, I saw a Ritz cracker. Now we've never bought them, so this is an old, old cracker. It had a couple of bites out of it, presumably from a mouse that brought it up there, but it was still there. Nothing wanted it. The mouse didn't even want the dang cracker. I'm like, yikes. Um and it's not to, you know, I probably shouldn't say brand names or whatever, but it's like, you know, the typical, but it's just yeah, a buttercracker. Yeah, buttercracker. It's not, um, and I I get that they taste so great because they are actually engineered and food tested with by children, by adults to say to here's cracker A, cracker B. It's like the eye test, you know, one or two, one or two, A or B, A or B. And they and they have these food tests, and and and every single time something makes it to the shelf, there are many, many, many ones that don't. And every single time they do, it's what got you to eat the most of them, what hit that bliss point, what bypasses the brain's natural satiety mechanisms, right? So what and this is not to shame anybody who has fallen into ill health from eating food that we would normally trust that our government or whomever would not allow food that wasn't helpful for us to be in the stores. Okay. So whatever, you know, but that's us sort of trying to point the finger somewhere else. We always have a choice. It I had to learn the choice because I grew up the other way and ended up very sick, my own personal self. And it wasn't until I really started thinking about health and my health and the fact that I was I was pre-diabetic with high blood pressure, I was severely overweight, I was, you know, stage one obesity, I was in a lot of pain, I wasn't sleeping well. Um, lots of things were going wrong. And so it has been a journey of many years to say, well, what does it mean to treat my body as a temple, as a temple? And it's not a judgment, it's not a failure, it's not a condemnation. It's just a different you know the word I'm gonna say. It starts with a P and ends in IVE. It's perspective.

Melissa 17:03

Yeah, it's just a different perspective, and making making that intentional shift, which is really uh, I mean, that's that's kind of what we we help people do, is just make that intentional shift, see it for what it right, get some clarity, see it for what it is, and then shift towards what it is you actually want it to be, that perspective, changing that, yeah, changing making that shift and changing that perspective. Just it's just huge.

Stephanie 17:31

Yeah, and it's I like honestly, it's not just food. No, no, our body, our body needs some level of movement.

Melissa 17:39

Our body, you know, um, the thing, the thing about food though, and I think I think the thing that makes the shift around food so so so hard, at least it was for me. I actually have to eat food. God designed it that way. I have to eat. Uh I have to eat to survive. So what do I eat? Uh what do I choose to eat? And I grew up very much the same way. We we were we we consumed junk food. But the junk food that we consumed back in the 70s was the beginning of this current experiment with processed foods.

Stephanie 18:19

Like the number of chemicals we have available for our foods what is over 10,000. Yeah. Compared to and and that's well beyond. Exactly.

Melissa 18:25

So, like the junk food that we ate in the 70s was completely different. You could take the same junk food from the 70s and put it side by side uh for today, and the list of ingredients is just insanely different. Uh so yeah, we had junk food back then, we had processed food, but it wasn't as processed as the food is now, which is just crazy to think of. It's just crazy to think of. It really is. And I've seen so much.

Stephanie 18:53

Well, you can trademark those band, those brands. You can trademark, you can there's things that you can do to protect, you know. So you there's not much you can do for just plain real food. There's not a lot of money in plain real food. Yeah. Well, I've seen so many margin in plain real food.

Melissa 19:10

I've seen so many sh social posts about that recently, about what food was compared to what it is now. But it said, you know, back when our grandparents were our age, there was nothing called organic because everything was everything was organic, everything was organic, nothing was processed. When my grandparents were my age, nothing was processed. It was it was organic. Yeah.

Stephanie 19:38

Yeah. I mean, they had the they were starting to do the processed oils in the 19, early 1900s, you know, where the cotton seed oil was the first and and that sort of thing. And and um, and then they came out with eventually a Crisco. They're like, what can we do with this? We can eat it.

Real Food Signals And “Bliss Point”

Melissa 19:56

I don't know, I don't know. Um, but uh hey, I'm guilty of that. I mean, when my kids were little, Crisco was what we could afford. That same, you know, so biscuits with Crisco, that's the way that it was. I mean, yeah, I still made my biscuits, I just happened to make them with Crisco. I make them with butter now, different, but yeah, yeah, we do what we can do.

Stephanie 20:19

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, it's so I don't want to go on too too too long about it, but we in all of the things to be very intentional, like you said, about what it means and not shooting all over the thing, you know, not well, I should do this, I should do that because a doctor or somebody else, or because some everybody is, you know, talking about your weight. I I don't like to focus on weight. I really like to focus on health. I want to, your body was designed to be healthy. There we have everything we need in it to be healthy. It's got this innate intelligence that is absolutely from God. And um there's a lot of things we don't have control over. We don't have control over a lot of our air quality, um, what is what's in our air. Um, we do have control over whether we burn certain types of things in our house that decrease our air quality and fragrances thing. That's a whole other thing. And our clothes, there's a lot of places where we're exposed to what uh, you know, molecules that are foreign to our body that our body doesn't know what to do with. There's microplastics everywhere. There, but we can't we can't worry about the things outside of our sphere of control. But we we are responsible for doing what we can. And and that's like the Levites were told, here's what you are supposed to do. They weren't in control of whether or not everybody made their uh brought in their sacrifices and and did the thing their part, but they were responsible for to do the right thing with what what came in, right? What was put in front of them. Right. And um, so I would really love to hear how this lands. Uh, have you thought about your health in terms of your body being the temple of the Holy Spirit? And rather than guilting or any or what they say or anything, anything, what does it mean to you? Is it is it does that give you a different perspective? Have you thought of it that way before? What is your struggle? I'd love to hear your struggle. And and in what aspect? Because it doesn't have to be health or food related, but what what aspect of of your body and the body of Christ being the temple of the Holy Spirit and the dwelling place being consecrated and set apart? What are the other things that you're doing in your life that might impair that relationship or keep your body from being the temple it was meant to be?

Melissa 22:42

Well, and when I go back to what is a temple, um, one of the bullet points is it's a place of sanctity. They are designed to be places of peace and spiritual refuge.

Personal Health Wake-Up Call

Stephanie 22:54

So honestly, this could be a whole series in itself. Um, but it was something that I I wanted to bring up because I feel like in this I feel like our our bodies, our health, I mean, it's really literally everywhere. It's just being thrown at you everywhere. It's so prominent, it's so at the top of our minds. And and you know, at the beginning of every year, people are trying to fix it. And I think that for those who trust in the Lord, we have another tool in our toolbox to help us do that well. And we have a community where that healing and that that can take place. And and the body of all of those, all of you here in the community of Heart and Soul Elevation Podcast, we are a temple.

Melissa 23:50

So that's what I got. Cool. Thanks for joining us for today's conversation on heart and soul elevation. If this episode encouraged you, be sure to share it with a friend. Remember that healing happens in community. Be sure to subscribe for more faith first conversations. And if you're desiring more community, come join us over on YouTube where we grow together in real time. Until then, keep your eyes on Jesus, care for the body he gave you, and may his peace guard your heart and mind.