<< back     After Being Diagnosed with the Worst Case of Burn-out Doctors Ever Saw, Dr. Stan Harris Regains His Health When He Switches to the Hallelujah Diet By Chet Day On July 13, 1997, Stan Harris collapsed. An evangelist and sixth degree black belt in karate, Stan had been traveling 320 days a year for four and a half straight years. During those days, sometimes he preached and performed martial arts demonstrations six times in a single 24-hour period. “The doctors ran all kinds of different tests,” Stan said of his collapse before they diagnosed him as having the worst case of burnout they’d ever seen. According to the doctors there are three different types of burn out – mental, physical and emotional. “I had all three at the same time,” Stan said at the September Health Minister training session in Kingsport, TN. “So, for four days I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t feed myself, couldn’t do anything my brain was disoriented. It was terrible. I wasn’t even the same person. There’s a thing called a burnout inventory. They tested me out and said I was two points higher on the burnout scale than anybody they’d ever tested.” The doctors told Stan he would need between four and six months off to recover. From running full steam ahead to coming to a dead stop was a difficult experience for this well-known evangelist. He said, “I’ve preached to crowds of ten and fifteen thousand, but if I got around five or six people I would get very afraid. I didn’t know if I was losing my mind. I didn’t know what was going on.” But hope lived just around the corner, and Stan received a flyer in the mail saying that Dr. George Malkmus was speaking not far from where he lived. At this point, Stan tells us, “I guess I’d been about seven and a half weeks in that condition. Just barely up, just barely able to get around. Just couldn’t do anything, which was very difficult for me. So I told my wife, ‘I have to go hear this guy. I think this is it.’” Like many others, Stan had vowed years ago about eating right and taking proper care of himself, but, as he reveals, he didn’t do it because “The faster I went, the more I slowed up on my eating. I even tapered off on exercise to get my work done, averaging about probably four hours sleep a night.” Stan made it to hear Dr. Malkmus, but he said, “My head was pulsating and I had to sit in the back I was in so much pain. But as he spoke something just snapped in my mind, and I said, ‘This is what I need.’” Stan started with Barleygreen that evening and had an almost immediate sensation of intense energy. He said, “I have a very sensitive system. I’ve never drank or smoked or done drugs or anything like that. Never even had a cup of coffee. I couldn’t get to sleep that night. And I’d been sleeping up to ten or twelve hours a day up to that point. I had no desire to even exercise, and my wife kept trying to get me to just try to walk. I was depressed and suicidal. I told her, ‘I want the Lord to come and if He doesn’t come, if I had a gun, I’d kill myself.’ I was very disoriented.” The next morning Stan’s wife and daughter made him some carrot juice, they made him a salad that evening, and he took Barleygreen again that night. He said, “I felt a lot better that day. The next day I felt even better. I hadn’t preached in almost two months by this time. That Sunday in church would have been the third day after I heard Dr. Malkmus speak. I was sitting there, and I told my wife, ‘I’m back to myself again! I’m me!’” The pastor, who’s Stan’s brother-in-law asked him, “Do you feel like preaching?” Stan said, “Sure.” And he then proceeded to preach again for the fist time in months. But Stan knew he needed more information about the Hallelujah Diet so he decided to attend Health Ministry classes. At the training session, he said, “I’m back to myself, back working out again, and I feel like this time I can get back on the road in a month and a half. The doctor said I could probably do one service here and one service there, but since being on he Hallelujah Diet, I’m just really feeling rejuvenated.” Stan said his problem had given him a new perspective on many things. He revealed, “I’d always been a super upbeat type of person and quite frankly I thought people with depression problems were kind of like unspiritual. I didn’t verbalize that feeling out loud, but that’s what I thought. It becomes a different story when it happens to you.” Stan shared how his illness affected him: “Everything was thrown off. I wasn’t my own self. Several people tried to call, but the few people I would talk to - they didn’t even recognize my voice. My spirit, everything was messed up. Some people who called four days after I started on the Barleygreen said, ‘Hey, you’re you again. What are you doing? What’s going on?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m about to go down to this place to learn a whole lot more about it and when I come back I’ll tell you.’” When asked for more details on his past, Stan said, “Years ago I’d heard Preacher Lestor Roloff. I heard him several times in person he talked about eating properly and so forth and that’s when I bought my juicer and started drinking carrot juice and getting colonics and so on. Then, slowly but surely, being ridiculed and considered weird almost, you know…people associate you with the New Age movement and different things, especially being an independent Baptist like I am, I didn’t want to be associated with anything like that. So that kind of sent me off the other way. Then of course my own personal desires, my own flesh, wanted that old food. All those things combined - because we had taken all the white flour and sugar out of our house years ago - then slowly but surely, I was traveling so fast it was inconvenient for me to live right, and besides I was offending people so I kind of gave up on healthful living.” Stan said he knew his illness had a higher purpose. He revealed, “So this is something God was using to call me back to healthful living. When people heard I was down physically, they couldn’t believe it. And my spirit was so dragged down. When your physical body’s dragged down, your spirit goes down. They all go together. “I was so weak I couldn’t even read my Bible. I mean, I couldn’t even pick it up. I couldn’t even feed myself. But now I’m understanding about my body and feeding it proper things because once I started getting off that junk food and eating good wholesome fruits and vegetables and juicing, then I really started feeling a great difference.” Stan also gave credit to his wife and children for his recovery, and he added, “Obviously, one of the things that helped me was I had the Bible cassette playing day and night, just letting it soak into my mind. That helped rejuvenate my health as well…to get me to the spiritual place where I could get down and hear George. When Dr. Malkmus spoke, the spirit of God just connected and said, ‘Hey, there it is!’” When asked if he planned to share what he’s learned about God’s way to health, Stan answered, “I’ve had several pastor friends already who’ve said, ‘Hey, as soon as you get back give us this information and help us out with this.’ So I’m just real excited about the potential because when this thing happened to me, preachers said, “when you make it through this thing, you’ll be better.’” He continued, “Obviously prayer is a very important key, depending upon the Lord, but also He gives us some natural laws that you just can’t break. Somehow I think some preachers think ‘I’m doing God's work God’s way to He’ll take care of me physically.’ So there are some things that perhaps we can reinforce to help people see that, yes, the Lord’s a divine healer and He’ll take care of you, but there are also some laws for your physical body that you need to adhere to. “When you know these things, you need to put them into practice. The Bible says if you know these things, you’re happier if you do them. So let’s relay some things that can help us and when we incorporate these things they’ll help us be a lot better. Before, I couldn’t even see a tunnel. Now I see a big giant floodlight at the end of the tunnel.” Brimming with optimism about the future, Stan said, “I’m really looking forward to what the Lord’s going to do and how I’ll be able to help other people. Every church I go to there’s always somebody sick, somebody dying of cancer, somebody that’s hurting and sometimes I think people are enduring pain that they don’t have to endure. We think ‘this must be the will of God for my life’ but sometimes those things aren’t the will of God. Obviously people come into contact with diseases and some things, but a lot of us just aren’t eating properly or exercising properly. And it’s easy for us to say ‘Well, it’s the will of God.’ The Lord has a purpose with illness and I think His purpose is to call us back to taking care of our bodies.” Stan said he especially appreciated Dr. Malkmus’ reading of Romans 12:1-2. He said “Romans 12:1-2 talks about being not conformed to this world. I’d always seen that every other way. But when George said we don’t think about that when it’s the world’s diet versus God’s diet, like, ‘Ah, that was a big one!’” Making a comparison between taking care of yourself and taking care of your vehicle, Stan said, “I drive a motor home when I’m traveling. And when I notice a ping, I put in a better grade of gasoline or get a tune-up. The body starts pinging, doesn’t it? Two years ago I got pneumonia. Last year I got it again and it was a little worse. But I just kept pushing harder. I thought, ‘I’ll push through this thing.’ But sometimes you have to stop, sit back, evaluate and see what’s happening.” Asked about arenas for preaching the health gospel, Stan forecast, “I’m really excited. I think a lot of times in Sunday school classes that maybe I can do a session on health. I do a lot of question and answer type services. I think I’ll eventually do seminars on health. I think that will open people’s eyes.” Stan’s abundant enthusiasm burned even brighter when he shared that “I started getting calls from preachers who said they’d been through something like what I had but that it wasn’t so severe. I said ‘I’ve heard you preach, and how come you haven’t mentioned it?’ Burnout is like something embarrassing that you have to keep tucked away or else people will label you and call you different things, so they kind of kept it secret, you know. But I told them ‘Hey, if I make it through this thing, even if I’d be like Samson and going down for my last time I want to take a bunch of Philistines with me and tell people before it’s too late.’” Looking to the future, Stan said, “I see paths. I think the Lord’s giving me more opportunities now that I can go out and say these things to people without going down. I’m still up and anticipating getting better. But, again, I think the Hallelujah Diet will be a great vehicle for a lot of people. “Every church I go to somebody’s sick. I have several friends who are very sick and in most cases it doesn’t have to be.” Reflecting on the world’s way versus God’s way, Stan concluded, “We have this health inside of us. We just have to eat properly so our God-given immune systems can fight off diseases and bad health. You can’t negate the fact that day-to-day maintaining of this body temple which is beautifully, fearfully and wonderfully made is our responsibility!”     << back

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