God has recently led me to see that one reason I’ve gained weight over the past few years is that I’ve turned to food when I should be turning to Him…Combining my prayer time and workout time works out my body, feeds my soul, and keeps me fixed on something higher than just stressing over my weight (as a formerly thin ballet student, seeing myself with excess poundage is VERY stressy). Today my goal is to hike up to our Adoration Chapel, spent an hour there, and hike back.
I’ve had this same problem…this is a very good suggestion!
CS Lewis in the Screwtape letters writes of another form of gluttony, which his devil-in-training was very successful in inducing in the mother in this story. She was very picky and manipulative when it came to food, using it as a means of controlling the people around her, under the pretence of “only wanting just a little, a very little underdone beef” but of course when it is brought in shrieks at the blood on the plate or that the serving is far too large, take it away. If only I could have just a lightly boiled egg, warm, with buttered toast, no margarine. And making a point of giving the lion’s share to her son always with a sigh, saying “nothing is too good for my boy.” Of course no servant could be found to prepare food exactly to her liking and she made sure everyone around her knew how much she suffered and sacrificed.
Yes…he called it “gluttony of delicacy”, as opposed to the “gluttony of excess”. His point was any time that the tempter could do to use the stomach to induce querulousness, pettiness, and so on, or to put the pleasures of the table before our duties to God and neighbor, it was a point gained in the favor of evil.
The devil also pointed out that having control over a human’s belly is very useful in thwarting the virtues. He contended that many people who cannot figure out why they have no power in the face of temptation would get a clue, if they just kept track of what they had eaten in the last 24 hours. The devil was quite pleased about the low popularity of fasting as a spiritual practice and the scarcity of talk about gluttony as a spirtual fault. There is a reason, after all, that it is one of the capital sins. Gluttony can be the foundation for many other failures.
Likewise, if we obsess over our looks, our body image, or our statistical likelihood of long life, and put that before our service to God and neighbor, the devil will be just as pleased.
The question is this: does food keep us from keeping the main thing the main thing?
If it does, though, we should not leap to the conclusion that we are just bad sinners who should be able to change by trying harder. Even when faults in our eating patterns are not really true eating disorders, we will usually not succeed in overcoming them by making lots of resolutions and beating ourselves up when we fail. Self-control is always a matter of giving the control over to God.
Also, some of us are heavy for our height because of other factors, such as the food choices to which we have access and the type of life schedule we are on…and yes, because of simple differences in metabolism. Some of us violate every rule of self-care and are still in a healthy weight range! You can’t tell by outward appearances, even when the “patient” is you.
