Body by Jesus

Why Christians should declare a truce in the war on fat

Asked by Cat before bedtime: why didn’t seeing you doing workout for the past weeks…?”...many excuses given by myself, struggle to wake up earlier; busy in work, lethargic, sluggish …anyways, the outcome is putting on weight + health deteriorate + ….

Read the below articles from the http://www.purposedriven.com/ by Lisa Ann Cockrel

this morning, which truly sound an alert to me, telling me is time to come around and work out….

*************************************************************************************************

By :
Lisa Ann Cockrel
From:
PurposeDriven.com
Monday, 1 June 2009 6:20 PM EDT

It’s 11:15 on a Saturday morning at the CenturyTel Center in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Women of Faith conference is in town and last night this place was rocking with music and laughter and spiritual pep talks. But right now the women sit silent, some with tears in their eyes, as Mandisa stands on stage and talks about her addiction to food.

“My struggle with weight has been the biggest struggle of my life, and it began as a very young girl,” she tells the women. “But, one day at a time, God is tearing down the strongholds that encourage me to turn to food for comfort, instead of to God.” Heads across the audience nod knowingly.

A devoted Christian with a powerful voice, Mandisa was cobbling together a living leading worship at Beth Moore conferences and doing session work in Nashville recording studios when she shot to fame during the fifth season of American Idol. Now 32, Mandisa was the oldest contestant on the show and also, as judge Simon Cowell pointed out right after her first performance, its fattest.

A few days before the Shreveport conference, Mandisa sat in Houston and discussed the 80 pounds she’s lost since American Idol and her new message of freedom from overeating. It’s a message she delivers not just at Women of Faith events, but also on her recently released CD, titled simply Freedom. “So many women struggle with food, they identify with my story. And if their issue isn’t food, women can still relate to feeling bound by a destructive habit,” she said.

Clearly, it’s not just women who struggle with food. One could argue that America’s most destructive habit is its diet of large quantities of processed foods. And attempts to resist the omnipresence of processed options take on their own manic hue. Our culture is obsessed with food—eating it, not eating it, preparing it quickly, preparing it slowly, spending as little as possible on it, investing in organic ingredients in it. We are eating food and the food is returning the favor—our food is eating us.

The Weight of Gluttony

While the explosive growth in obesity rates over the last three decades has leveled off in the last few years, the rates remain high—34 percent of US adults aged 20 and over have BMIs above 30 (20 to 24.9 is considered healthy, though it should be noted that use of the BMI in predicting actual health has come into question in recent years). Alarm over these numbers and rising rates of obesity among children has led to a series of public policy decisions that are often referred to as the “war on fat.”

But the war on fat is nothing new for Christians. The church has a long history of battling the bulge, dating at least back to 590 AD when Pope Gregory I gave his list of the Seven Deadly Sins. (Gluttony sits at number two.) And in her book Born Again Bodies, Princeton scholar R. Marie Griffith suggests that Christianity and its attitude towards fat is intricately involved in America’s modern-day obsession with thinness, diet, and fitness.

Starting in the late 50s, Christian books like Pray Your Weight Away by Charlie Shedd popularized the notion that fat was a mark of disobedience and distance from God, while weight reduction signified the restoration of holiness. “We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sin,” wrote Shedd. Fifty years and countless diet books later, most Americans live in an area where they can avail themselves of a panoply of groups—First Place, Weigh Down Workshop, Thin Within, etc.—that offer support and guidance to Christians looking to slim down.

And yet, studies suggest conservative Christians are more likely to be overweight or obese (even when controlled for other factors including poverty, race, etc.) than the general population. And anecdotal evidence reinforces the idea that potluck-loving Christians struggle with their weight. In a light-hearted memoir of his open-heart surgery and subsequent weight loss, Fox News reporter Todd Starnes issues this call to his fellow Christians: “Put down the fried chicken leg, step away from the buffet, and wipe the chocolate sauce from your lips. The body of Christ, my friends, is a bit too big!”

Part of the problem is that our view of glutony is too narrow. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote that there are six ways in which one can be gluttonous: eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, or too wildly. If gluttony is any disordered approach to food, then it is a sin to which our time and place leaves us uniquely susceptible. We have easy, cheap access to far more calories than our car- and desk-bound bodies use in a typical day. And the panoply of entertainment options we have that revolve around food (Iron Chef, anyone?) inspired the Center for Science in the

Public Interest to coin a new term—food porn. As Aquinas might observe, regardless of our weight, we’re all gluttons now.

So where is the sin of gluttony actually located? In the adipose tissue that hangs on a person’s frame? In the consumption itself? In the particular food? In the desire to eat? And most importantly, what guidance can our faith offer as we think through these pressing questions?

The Elephant in the Room

“We got it wrong at the beginning,” says Carol Showalter. The first diet program to explicitly meld Christianity and weight loss was 3D, started by Showalter in 1974. “I was a minister’s wife and the emphasis on looking good and having everyone’s approval was very stressful. I didn’t have any health problems. But I wanted to lose weight to look good and to make my husband and the church look good. I thought the magical ingredient to weight loss had to be God. But it wasn’t that easy.

” Through the program’s emphasis on scripture study and a diet based on the food pyramid, Showalter was able to lose weight and keep it off for many years.
But she now chalks up that success to the ego-driven nature of her work with 3D. She wrote books and traveled around the country talking to Christians—mostly women—who were eager to learn her secret and lose weight, too. “I do think that often times, even unconsciously, Christian diet programs are about spiritualizing our pursuit of a secular vision of what it means to be desirable,” says Griffiths. She points out that religious dieting programs are nowhere more prevalent than in evangelical Christianity and Mormonism—two religions that can be very image conscious in light of the high value they put on evangelism, or “bearing witness” to the world.

But back in Houston, Mandisa convincingly contends that she’s not losing weight to fit into what society accepts as beautiful: “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can say that food was controlling me. And nothing needs to control me other than Jesus.” She faces the temptation to eat unhealthy food with scripture verses she’s written on notes cards that she pulls out of her purse and reads when driving by fast food. “First Corinthians 6:12 says everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. I know that I am permitted to eat a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, but I know that’s not good for me,” she laughs.

Mandisa admits to being uncomfortable that, for her, bearing witness has come to mean talking opening about her own struggle with her weight. The spotlight doesn’t always help efforts to lose weight. “It’s not just Oprah, but I look at Carnie Wilson and Kirstie Alley and so many celebrities who have been public about their struggles with weight and have failed in some ways,” she says. “But I feel like the

Lord is telling me to be transparent, to be open about this struggle. And I’m praying my story is different.”

Our Story of Food

What does the church have to say to the women who listen to Mandisa’s story with wet eyes? Moreover, what does the church have to say to the men and women inside and outside the church who find themselves consumed by their food—eating it too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, or too wildly?

After 35 years as the head of 3D, Showalter thinks we need to start by being more honest about our motivations when it comes to weight loss. “I think by now we in the Christian world ought to realize that someone can look very good and fall right on their faces. By now we should know that the outside does not tell the whole picture,” she says. “At the same time, when I see very obese women, I want to hug them and say ’Don’t give up on yourself.’”

Much like the church is starting to articulate a more nuanced vision of our responsibility to the environment, so now must the church also begin to articulate a holistic vision for healthy bodies. Setting aside blanket notions that obesity signifies selfishness or a lack of faith, the church needs to look closely at the social realities that shape our diets and its own attitudes towards appetites, beauty, and images of success conveyed by bodies. How to think about food is a practical concern about which the church needs to offer good guidance—neither ignoring the body as a kind of way station on the highway to heaven, nor capitulating to a secular obsession with the perfect body.

Body care is an aspect of creation care, and by attending to it we also bear witness to the restorative work of Christ in the world. And the church has unique resources with which to engage this timely topic. “Our whole story,” says Showalter, “from the beginning to the end, is about food—from the apple in the garden to the banquet table.” And so, perhaps a good place to start is with this once familiar dinnertime refrain, God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.

Lisa Ann Cockrel is an editor for Brazos Press. Her writing has appeared in publications including Sojourners, Christianity Today, and Outreach.