SOUL FOOD:

Stop adding sugar to your tea, my doctor told me, and you’ll lose 10 pounds in a year. I was an adolescent, miserably overweight, and he was right.

I’d been struggling to stay on restrictive diets of any and every sort, but the scale never seemed to budge. Losing 10 pounds with such a simple effort made me believe I could lose more by making other small but permanent changes in my diet.

Nevertheless, I’ve scuffled with my weight for a lifetime. Travel and living abroad brought challenges, as have changes in metabolism with age.

Through change and stress, I’m still tempted to eat. More than once I’ve been part of the numbers published in Sunday’s “Los Angeles Times Magazine.”

Of Americans, 66% of adults are overweight. At the New Year, 53% of all Americans resolve to eat better or lose weight.

Come February, though, the resolve of 30% has flagged. Given five more months, 80% have thrown in the towel.

Those numbers were gleaned from the National Center for Health Statistics, eDiets.com and Wall Street Online/Harris Interactive statistics, the most current available but two to three years old.

Resolutions, it seems, are easy to make and hard to keep, especially when it comes to losing weight by eating better and getting more exercise (which a Harris poll shows a quarter of American adults also resolve to do). Which, no doubt, has something to do with why our collective weight is about to bust the scale.

In the ’80s, Neil Postman warned us in a book by the same title that with the help of television we are in danger of “amusing ourselves to death.” The threat as he saw it was the decline of our public discourse, not the sedentary hours spent in front of a TV.

Now those hours have combined with those spent at a computer and in our cars. Together with our eating habits — too fatty, too salty, too sweet, too much — they deliver our health a one-two punch.

A study completed last year by a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that, based on body mass index, in 2003 and 2004, 66% of adults and 16% of children and adolescents in the United States were overweight or obese. The team predicted that, if Americans continue to gain weight at the current rate, by 2015 as many as 75% of adults could be overweight and 41% could be obese.

One’s body mass index is calculated by dividing one’s body weight in kilograms by the square of one’s height in meters. In adults, it has a sound correlation to total body fat.

Overweight is defined as a body mass index between 25 and 29.9. A person with a body mass index of 30 or greater is considered obese.

Youfa Wang, the physician who led the Johns Hopkins study, concluded that obesity is now a public health crisis. After the study, team member May Beydoun told Reuters, “Obesity is likely to continue to increase, and if nothing is done, it will soon become the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.”

If we avoid amusing ourselves to death, we may eat ourselves to early deaths instead. But not if Carol Showalter and Maggie Davis, authors of “Your Whole Life: The 3D Plan for Eating Right, Living Well and Loving God,” have anything to do with it.

Showalter first developed the 3D plan in 1972, as she writes, out of her “own personal need.” Davis is a dietitian, nutritionist and founder of Live Nutrition ( www.livenutrition.com) who has helped Showalter with her own dietary goals.

In December, I received their book from Paraclete Press. Its approach reminded me of that small change presented to me by my family physician 40-some years ago.

The book is a major reworking of an earlier book that sold more than half a million copies. The 3D Plan is not merely, or even mostly, about dieting.

The book is aimed at helping those who want to make gradual but lifelong changes not only in their eating habits but in their life habits as well.

These words from the plan’s website ( www.3dyourwholelife.com) sum it up: “Don’t think thin, think whole.”

Showalter describes 3D as a Christ-centered health program. The title itself was taken from a story in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus tells a woman, “Your faith has made you whole.”

The book and the website are replete with biblical Scripture. The book provides daily readings and reflections based on Scriptural passages.

All the same, for non-Christians, these could with some work be replaced with meditations based on other sacred texts. If you don’t believe in God and do not care to, this book, however, may not be for you at all.

From the introductions (one from Showalter and one from Davis) to its last page, which presents the “3D Prayer,” thoughts of God and our relationship to him are woven throughout the book’s wisdom and inspiration.

The 3Ds are diet (eating right), discipline (living well) and — last on the list but “the most necessary component of a whole life,” according to Showalter — discipleship (loving God).

The 3D Plan can be used alone or in a support group. The book and its companion website provide guidelines for forming a group.

Each week of the plan sets forth information, tips and exercises for each of the 3Ds. It is laced with encouragement.

In spite of its focus on discipline — and discipline is central to this 12-week plan — the 3D Plan is not a rigid regimen. It offers a set of tools to help you define and then fashion a more rewarding life.

Showalter likens it to a pilgrimage, as much a journey as a destination.

So, if next year you would prefer not to be counted among the overweight American adult statistics, or if you would simply like to restore some order and satisfaction to your life, between now and then you might want to give “Your Whole Life: The 3D Plan” a shot.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.