Religion And Weight Loss

Tough Talk And No Nonsense

Admit it. It crossed your mind to think that a mandatory burka would cover a multitude of figure flaws, didn’t it? Did you ever consider joining a convent just for the baggy robe, just as a way to give up on trying to look good?

Most of us laughed sadly at the thought that the Taliban would think our bodies so tempting that we should cover ourselves for fear of drawing men into sinful lust. But is religion really such a separate subject from our weight?

Leviticus 3:16. “All fat belongs to the Lord.”

That was the first verse quoted to me as having anything to do with dieting. I never quite knew how to apply it to my own situation. It referred to what to do with the meat that was taken from animal sacrifices, what could be eaten by the priests, what could be sold, and what could not. But what did it have to do, if anything, with the fat on my thighs?

As if figuring out our own best diet plan weren’t complicated enough, sooner or later we come to terms with the fact that our dieting and our weight have implications in our relationships with the other people in our world. And no sooner do we start uncovering those sorts of truths in our lives, than those of us for whom religious faith has been a part of our lives encounter an inescapable truth. Our weight has something to do with our relationship with our God. We’re not quite sure what, but we’re uncomfortably aware that there is something under the surface of our faith that has something to say about our weight and our diet.

Every major religion practices times of fasting. The Western Christian church has just entered Lent, a time when we Christians traditionally fast or abstain from certain foods. Ramadan and it’s ritual fasting from sunrise to sundown recently ended. The underlying message there is clear: Food is bad, God is good. Eating is a sinful indulgence; abstinence from food, or a category of food, is a worthy way in which to honor God.

Every major religion has times of feasting. The Passover Seder, the Lord’s supper. We are commanded to eat. Unleavened bread and wine, a low carb nightmare of a commandment if ever there was one. But the underlying message here is clear as well: Food is good, a gift from God. It is an expression of His love for us and our love for each other.

And all of that’s before we even start to think about what our body shape might have to do with our religious beliefs.

Even if we profess no faith of our own, it is hard to escape the centuries of religious thinking that have formed our culture. The Puritanical message is a clear thread running through the American psyche. Anything that we do to glorify our own bodies is bad. It’s not religious to want a sexy, buff body. Our minds should be on higher things, right? It’s selfish at best and immoral at worst to concentrate our energies upon our own sexual self-image. Self-mortification is the holy way, not self-beautification.

So just when we think it’s a clear message from God that we ought not expend time, money, or energy on dieting for the sake of self-beautification, that same Puritanical streak in our collective consciousness tells us that indulging in cake and ice cream is a sin. Gluttony. One of the really big sins, when you come right down to it. We begin to suspect that we may have made an idol out of food. What is that chocolate Easter bunny, if not a graven image that we worship?

There was a book out in the religious bookstores a few years ago that encouraged religious women to, in essence, pray themselves thin.

On the surface of it, as a religious woman, I had to agree with the main point. If I define sin as doing what I know to be wrong, then it is certainly a sin for me to eat brownies. I know it’s wrong for me to eat any such thing. It makes me sick and fat. What’s worse, I know I eat that sort of thing when I don’t want to think about what I’m thinking, or don’t want to feel what I’m feeling. And as a religious woman, I know that my unhappy and uncomfortable thoughts are much more effectively dealt with in prayer than they are in cones with sprinkles on top.

Pray more, eat less. On the surface, it seemed like sound theology in any religion.

Then I dug a little bit below the surface. Was my weight really an indication of my prayer time? Was being thin an indication that I was a woman of faith? My pastor was overweight. Exotic dancers and hookers are usually thin.

Obesity, in and of itself, is surely not a sin. It can be a product of a lifetime of food intolerances. It can be a product of metabolic and hormonal imbalances. And it can be a product of gluttony and sloth, both of which surely are sins.

I don’t have any hard and fast answers. There is no one clear, defining verse that tells us what to do. Christians are told to take no thought for what we should eat or drink, a clear anathema to the careful planning that long term adherence to a low carbohydrate way of eating takes. Christians are also told that their bodies are temples, and are to be honored as such.

In the midst of all this we all have to come to our own understanding.

We have to deal with the technicalities of specific religious practices, coming to terms with what to do about that communion bread, or the ritual foods on the sacred calendar. I asked, and got, my church to start providing rice flour wafers for those of us who should not have chunks of fresh bread every communion Sunday. A Catholic friend laughed and said he chose, for the first time in his life, to belief in transubstantiation, the literal transforming of the bread and wine into body and blood, because that after all would be low carb. We find recipes for low carbohydrate versions of the ritual foods, or we choose to take the tiniest bites allowable and still be able to say we observed the practice.

We have to deal with our underlying theological understanding of this weight loss endeavor as well. This may in fact be easier for those of us who are overtly religious. We are accustomed to thinking in such terms and may be quicker to recognize that our religious beliefs are affecting our approach to the diet, more so than those of us for whom these influences are subconscious.

For myself, I came to realize that I could not possibly be living in the way God intended me to by sitting around eating as I grew fatter, sicker, and, with each additional pound, more miserable. When I eat in accordance with what I know to be my best way of eating, I am clear headed and energetic, ready to live life to the fullest. The choice is then mine whether I do that in a self-indulgent manner, or in a self-sacrificing manner. Some days I choose one, other days, another.

But losing weight and keeping it off has made one article of my faith much easier to believe. I can now say with certainty, that yes, I believe in the resurrection of the body.

But regaining my health, and losing weight and keeping it off has made one article of my faith much easier to believe. I can now say with certainty, that yes, I believe in the resurrection of the body.