The promised land of weight loss: law and gospel in Christian dieting

Christian Century, May 7, 1997 by R. Marie Griffith

The tone of Christian diet writers themselves is usually one part ebullience and two parts anxiety. Shored up by relief at having successfully reduced proportional body fat, they remain haunted by dread that the pounds, the scorn and the self-hating misery may surge back at any time. Neva Coyle reached her peak size at the age of 28 and recounts in grueling detail the immense shame and loneliness that accompanied her obesity. Joan Cavanaugh, author of More of Jesus, Less of Me ( 1976), grew up a fat child who was ridiculed mercilessly by other children and so made the cookie cupboard her "altar." "It was my heart that was hungry," she explains achingly, "but all I could think to do was feed my face."

Jim Tear, coauthor with Jan Houghton Lindsey of Fed Up with Fat (1978), crested at a perilous 425 pounds and remembers: "I didn't feel God's love. I felt like a joke to Him. My fat had become such a fortress around me that even God couldn't penetrate it with His love and help." This is not pollyannaish Shedd-talk, capitalizing on positive prayer as the latest cure-ail for those unsightly bulges around the aging midriff. These are stories of serious despair and alienation, and perhaps of grace as well.

These and scores of similar stories ought to make us cringe at the ease with which Bible-based diet books (and the writers of them) are fodder for highbrow derision, as when R. Laurence Moore in Selling God cattily dismisses them as "merchandise in questionable taste" and lumps them indifferently with "love-making manuals" and "the Christian equivalent of Harlequin romances." Or when Os Guinness, in Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, skewers Christian dieting as the anti-intellectual concern of the "slim, svelte, and tanned ... striking blond in her twenties" who is basically either too lazy or too dumb (in his view) to care about the life of the mind. Perhaps those who have never felt ashamed of their own bodies or feared that God saw them as a "joke" are disinclined to take such matters seriously. In any case, these poignant accounts merit compassion, not cheap shots. Even where the theology seems highly questionable in its trivialization of the gospel, drowning in bathos, the issues addressed deserve serious reflection. What does it mean to be embodied in a culture that celebrates both thinness and indulgence?

The mocking of these texts also highlights a persistent tendency, both within and out side of the church, to devalue what are viewed as "women's issues." Not that Bible-based diet literature is a purely feminine genre. From Charlie Shedd to Victor Kane, C. S. Lovett, Harold Hill, Jim Tear, Edward Dumke, Charles Salter and Nathan Ware, men have contributed significantly to it and have addressed a reading audience of men as well as women. But an unmistakable difference separates the writings of male and female authors: far more women than men identify their food habits as "compulsions" and testify to the depression, loneliness and shame that accompany obesity. Men (with a few exceptions) focus less on the emotional dimensions of being overweight than on its detriments to physical health, stamina and vigor. Perhaps the intensity of the women's testimonies, accounts of uncontrolled bingeing and self-hatred that terminate in divine surrender and ultimate triumph, prompts critics to judge them delusional and overwrought.