Dear God, Does this make me look fat?

First off, thanks to all my loyal readers who have stuck with the blog in the last few months. I am now back from my trip through Europe and settled into life in the States. In the meantime, however, I started up graduate school applications that consume a great deal of my time at the computer, so I have been very slow to get into a regular blog writing routine again. 

An online article I read the other day has propelled me back into the blog scene, though.   I couldn’t help but write up a comment or two about Dr. Christine Whelan’s Thanksgiving piece for her weekly column at BustedHalo.com.  It concerns one of the many religious topics that gets me riled up: Christian dieting programs. 

Based on my knowledge of this phenomenon as well as Whelan’s summary, these hip diet programs tend to sound something like this: God gave you that body, and God wants you to take care of it. Taking care of your body means not being overweight by contemporary American medical standards.  Therefore, eat less and exercise more because to love and obey God. 

I am a total advocate of seeking to integrate God into any and all aspects of one’s life, but there is something horribly frightening about this basic logic that I see in many “Christian” approaches to dietary health.  If you are pondering your pant size this holiday season, I invite you to consider a few of my critiques:  

1.  I realize that many of these programs are well-intentioned in trying to help people–especially women–overcome the self- consciousness and guilt they associate with food and body-image.  Yet, their attempts to integrate spirituality and body image seem to do the opposite by perpetuating and magnifying guilt.  I am left feeling bad about my love handles, not only because of the outrageous standards projected by our society, but also because GOD supposedly doesn’t like them and didn’t intend them for my body.  For those who take their faith seriously enough to turn to Christian dieting programs, the prospect of angering their Creator is likely a huge burden of guilt.  Despite the fact that these programs often affirm God’s love for the individual, their logic ultimately leaves people feeling worse about themselves rather than more loved.

2.  These diet programs have appropriated popular notions of health as God’s standards of health.  On one hand, this is understandable because the vast majority of Americans also take  the widespread medical industry message that “overweight = unhealthy” as unquestionable truth. On the other hand, this assumption overlooks the fact that medical science has the potential to be swayed by political and economic forces, such as the multi-million dollar diet industry.  The CDC’s health and dietary standards are not the unwavering Truth. 

Don’t get me wrong here: Medical science is vital and often trustworthy.  But after hearing a lecture by Dr. Linda Bacon, a physiologist and psychologist at UC Davis, concerning the scientific data that entirely disagrees with the “overweight = unhealthly” correlation, I began to question this assumption in a new way.  It undermines the diversity in body shape and size that naturally occurs–a diversity that I see as beautiful in light of my faith.  Bacon argues that the diet industry’s monetary interests are at the root of science’s focus on weight as a measure of health, rather than other more accurate health indicators, such as exercise levels. 

3. Frequently, these programs fail to deconstruct the real demon in health and dieting; its not fat, it is the (often sexist) pressure placed on people to live up to unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards. Instead of using spirituality to challenge these destructive cultural imperatives and live their lives beyond them, these programs often use spirituality to help men and women live into these damaging body-image expectations.  Jesus calls Christians to speak out against injustice, and in my mind society’s pressure to discipline our bodies into unnatural shapes and sizes is a form of injustice. 

If many of these popular Christian dieting programs are not a helpful and just way to help us consider the role of God in taking care of our bodies, then what is? I don’t think we need to throw out the baby with the bath water here–I think a Christian spirituality or theology of body care is possible and important. In order to reach an approach like this, however, Christians must first step back from what is trendy and profitable in the diet industry. 

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