Catholics and the Hanging Gut

Posted on May 19, 2004 in Morals & Ethics Sugar and Fat

“Clearly the fifth commandment [‘Thou shalt not kill’] insists we have a moral responsibility to care for our own health.”

–  Mercy Sr. Patricia Talone

But it’s not so clear to everyone in the Catholic Church. The same National Catholic Reporter article where Talone’s remark comes from quotes theologian Eileen Flynn as saying:

Gluttony is too simplistic a concept to graft onto modern people. I think the issue in Western Europe and North America is a lack of activity — the sedentary lifestyle, not burning off calories. I don’t think people are seduced by food. Food is a problem for most people. Food is something they have to eat, it’s not their friend, it’s making them heavy.

Am I alone in seeing the doubletalk? Junk food gets into your life because it masks as something nutritious. But it’s not: it’s filled with fats. The portions you buy exceed what you really need to be eating at that meal. Yet when it is put before you on your plate, you keep eating until every last crumb of deep friend potato and saturated meat goes down your gut. You buy it for the brand recognition — which is materialism — or for the joy of eating it — which is gluttony.

Flynn may have a point here, however: it’s time to stop thinking of everything that is harmful as a sin. Until recently, the Catholic Church saw suicide as a sin. Now, though it discourages it, suicides can be buried in consecrated ground because it is seen as an outgrowth of mental illness. Likewise the sloth mentioned among the seven deadly sins of medieval Catholicism is now called depression. It, too, is considered a medical problem in these enlightened days.

The sin model tends to be self-replicating: when you find yourself eating too much, you may be inclined to punish yourself, either by bulemic binges or by plunging deeper into the sin so that you feel its full effects. Medical models focusing on prevention work more effectively than guilt: tell people how to eat better.

Flynn, however, indulges in a kind of Catholic post-modernism, where she focuses the blame on supposed societal pressures to look good. Why not just feel good about the way we look? Religion causes us to realize that Jesus loves us regardless of how we look, the logic goes. Bulky is beautiful.

This thinking kills many people, runs up medical costs, makes the drug companies rich from the sale of anti-diabetes drugs. Obesity is a disease best treated like tooth decay: by practicing prevention. This isn’t like changing the color of one’s hair as Flynn noticed that John Kerry did recently. The anorexic-is-beautiful mystique doesn’t drive Americans as much as the eat-everything-that’s-put-on-your-plate. When a German researcher came to America to show how harmful the cult of emaciated beauty was on Americans, he found himself disabused of the notion that anorexia was driving us to self-imposed starvation:

His operative notion was since fashion magazines and movies had so glorified thinness — and denigrated fatness — that fat people would be less likely to present themselves as fat in public. Such was his thesis.

But stepping off the plane and into the nation’s shopping malls, Hebebrand was “floored” — what he was seeing was exactly the opposite. “I mean, here were all of these women, wearing this kind of tight black stretch thing!” Hebebrand recalls. “They were huge — their bellies and their derriers were almost comic-book sized! I was shocked because in Germany people who are that fat just don’t go out. They don’t go out because of the shame. But it wasn’t the case here in the U.S.” [Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, pp. 59-60]

Again, with good intentions, post-modernism coupled with religion has brought us to a bad place. It’s not OK to be fat. What should you should learn to love is your body as shaped by a proper diet and exercise. If after years of dance training and careful calorie intake, you still have a big butt, then learn to love that big butt. But don’t treat it like a cow being fattened up for the slaughter house: butt and belly both need to be managed to achieve a healthful balance. What is called for here is Buddhism’s Middle Path: eat enough and no more.