Re fat people not being “able” to get married, does this mean I have to break up with both my partners or just the legal hubby?

Fat people won’t go to heaven, eh? What about thin people who never lift a finger to help their fellow man? Hmmph.

let me rephase that.

Heaven forbid that someone might actually have something
different to say that wouldn’t support the existence of their
empty, meaningless, consumer-driven lives that spends
more time picking on fat people than anything else. Like
ending starvation in third-world countries.

JUST TELL THEM TO SHUT UP AND GO EAT A SANDWICH!

I find this and the whole concept of religion-based diets to be very ironic, considering many pro-ana sites elevate anorexia next to godliness – starvation is considered holy, coveted, and ideal. The first documented cases of anorexia, in fact, were bound in religious asceticism. In the twelfth century, an anorexic girl of today would have been seen as holy and touched by god.

RE: Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down diet, spacedcowgirl wrote:

and I was sort of convinced that God really would look favorably on me “getting control of” my weight.

Herein lies the problem with religion-based diets. If you lose weight, god must be smiling down upon you. If you don’t lose weight, you not only lack discipline, you lack obedience to god. And should you gain the weight back, as most dieters are prone to do, religion-based diets encourage people to see this as reflection of a lack in faith.

Shamblin maintains that salvation isn’t achieved through god’s grace, but through effort and repentance. Fat people, she has said, cannot be saved and won’t go to heaven until they “suffer” and lose weight. “Grace does not go down into the pigpen,” she has said.

Said Higgs: “I looked everywhere in Scripture to find an example where fleshiness itself was a problem. Certainly we never hear about anyone’s dress size. What size did Ruth wear? Her very name means ‘beauty,’ but her size and shape are not mentioned. Her character, on the other hand, is discussed at length.”

That is SO awesome.

These days we have the Weigh Down Diet (which is at least based on eating when hungry and stopping when full, though it is quite legalistic as I recall) and I remember reading another one in high school called “Free to be Thin” from the ’70s or something. At the very least, the fact that these “Biblical diets” keep coming up once every 10-20 years should give people some pause. If you lose weight and gain it back, that’s one thing, but if you truly believe you have found the one true answer because Jesus is guiding your weight loss, and you still gain it back, that has got to be somewhat disconcerting.

I briefly considered trying to do Weigh Down a while back because it seemed sort of similar to Geneen Roth’s ideas, and I was sort of convinced that God really would look favorably on me “getting control of” my weight. Then later I decided that if he had an opinion on it at all, he would probably much rather I was out doing some good than spending all my mental energy weighing and measuring food or “sculpting” myself in the gym. Talk about self-centeredness.

(Fasting came in a lot later, with the body-hating influence of some Greek schools of thought on early Christianity. I love what Julia Cameron said about fasting – it gets God’s attention because, in Her Jewish mother aspect, She worries that you’re not eating!)

I’m recalling a book here, I think it was by Shelley Bovey way back in the 80s, which illustrated the Biblical quote “Thy clouds drop fatness…” with a picture of lots of fat nude angels falling out of the sky. Cute.

I really think if Christians are going to re-emphasize gluttony as a deadly sin, they should redefine it as ANY kind of excessive consumption – energy, resources, anything. (I often think this is a reason behind the rising level of attacks on fat: people are painfully aware of how much of the earth’s resources we’re over-consuming as a society, so it’s “Let’s assuage our guilt by blaming the people who – we think – LOOK as if they’ve been over-consuming”. I mean, c’mon, we’re more or less being blamed for global warming as it is…)