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

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

However APT this indignation and however fruitful its alternative perspectives, these critiques do not seem to reflect a thorough scrutiny of the literature being censured. Christian diet books, brochures for Bible-based weight-loss programs, and evangelical women's stories about their bodies do not articulate a uniform message. In fact, these sources present strikingly varied interpretations of the role that food and weight-watching play, or ought to play, in the Christian life. Whereas Shedd presumed that excess weight was the result of gluttony, pure and simple, recent writers have given a distinctly therapeutic spin to the varied reasons why people eat more than their bodies require.

The most commonly voiced predicament now is addiction rather than greed: one confesses no longer to being a penitent sinner but rather to being an acute "foodaholic," one whose compulsive eating is triggered by forces that were previously beyond one's knowledge or control (whether chemical, demonic or a combination of the two). As Frances Hunter put it as early as 1975: "I want to tell you that I am a 'foodaholic' and I have always been and I will always be, but with God's help, this foodaholic is going to let Jesus control her appetite from now on!" While this classic model of addiction may, like the therapeutic sensibility underlying it, be of limited value, it has significantly nuanced, if not displaced, the fat-sin equation so often debunked by critics of evangelical diet literature.

One of the truisms of religious weight-loss books, consonant with the wider American diet industry, is that so called "head hunger" (the desire to consume when there is no physiological urge for food) is in fact hunger of an expressly spiritual kind. As Shamblin puts it in The Weigh Down Diet, the purpose of a Christ-centered diet program is to "learn how to replace head hunger with the will of God so that you transfer this urge for a pan of brownies to that of hungering and thirsting after righteousness." Cavanaugh's More of Jesus, Less of Me makes a similar point: "Those of us who hunger for more than we need, for more than is good for us, have another hunger: we have emotional problems that we have not exposed to the healing of our Lord Jesus.... But there is good news: the Holy Spirit can heal these unnamed hungers." Taking this idea to its ultimate therapeutic conclusion, another author maintains, "Jesus went to the cross so that His people no longer need be the victims of compulsive acts."

The recognition of gluttony has not dropped out of the picture altogether, but a perceptible, if subtle, shift has taken place in its articulation. Authors increasingly stress not the carnal sign ("fat") but the concrete act or practice of excessive overeating. Writers today do not declare, with Shedd, "We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sin." Instead they assert with the author of Health Begins in Him ( 1995), "If people who do not know Christ can walk in discipline and self-control, surely we as Christians can walk free from bondage to food." Or, as the author of What tile Bible Says About Healthy Living (1996) puts it, "Don't let any food or drink become your God."