Gospel of Good Bodies: Listening for the Religious Language in Dieting, Wellness and Fashion

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Speaker 1: Life Audio. Hey, friend, Heather Creek Moore, Here, when's the last time you said you were being bad because you ate a piece of cake? We throw that word around constantly. We're bad, we're guilty, we're sinning, we're tempted. We use all these words around food. But does anyone ever stop and ask why are we using the vocabulary of confession and scripture to describe eating sweets? Hey, we are starting a new series. It's called The Gospel of Good Bodies, listening for the religious language indicting wellness and even in fashion. In today's episode, I don't know it's gonna call it sinners in the hands of an angry salad. But today we're talking about the sacred language we use around food and guilt. Friend, your eyes are going to be open to things maybe you've never seen or wanted to see before. I'm so glad you're here for it. Let's dig it, okay there, So if you hang out with women enough, here are some of the things you are going to hear. I was so bad this weekend. Oh don't tent me with those cookies. I totally send and ate the rest of the ice cream. This is my guilty pleasure. Or maybe it's I need to be good today. You don't know what I did last weekend. I mean, you don't even have to say that out loud. You can read them on our foods, like the can of La Croix I'm holding says it's guilt free. Listen just for a second to this list of expressions and hear how they all borrow from moral or religious language. Why because it makes eating feel virtuous or naughty, clean, or redemptive. But think about how often you hear our food choices framed with words like sin, guilt, pure, indulgence, temptation, even words like salvation or worthy. So here's just a few. Okay, there's the sin and temptation language. Maybe you've heard this sinfully delicious. Oh it's so good. It's sinful devil's food cake right, Well, that sounds like it's straight from the pit of hell, but delicious, right Those warm brownies are tempting. Or maybe you're having a forbidden fruit dessert or smoothie. Maybe you've heard chocolate called heavenly. I think that's what those chocolate little rappers say. Our food is decadent, indulgent, or maybe wicked good. If you're in the northeast. And then think about the guilt and shame language we used too. Like I said, my Lacroix says, it's guilt free. You see that labeled everywhere, or you see the words zero gilt stamped on a package of high protein, low carb whatever. Or you can eat this with quote unquote no regrets, or maybe it's the opposite. You deserve this, you deserve to have it your way at burger King, or think about this. The whole cheat meal or cheat day concept sounds like you're committing adultery on your regular diet. Right that sounds pretty bad, pretty sinful. Or maybe you've heard something marketed as a better for you indulgence, giving it moral superiority. So here's the question. If an alien landed and only had our food language to work from, what religion would they construct? What would they believe the most important values and principles of our culture are? You See, the thing is, diet culture is not just like a religion. It literally operates like one, complete with sin and temptation and confession and atonement and a promise of salvation. If you can just get all the food and exercise rules right and the place this is most visible is in the ordinary words we use every single day. Now, let me be clear, I am not recording this to shame anyone who's on a diet or has been on a diet. I've been on many. This is really just about examining the cultural system that's quietly colonized our spiritual vocabulary. And it's so so subtle we don't even notice it. But as Christians, I think it's time we stop and recognize the difference. Cheating on my food plan is not the same as the sin of adultery or even idolatry, where I'm cheating on God. And yet it's really easy to confuse the two, And candidly, my real concern is it's so easy for us to confuse that we become so distracted trying to get the religion of food and body right that we back burner true faith. We back burner what God actually asks of us to do. And this hurts a little to say, but we aren't as well worried about the ways we're actually sinning against God as we are perhaps about the ways we are sinning in the religion of food and body. And I think, friends, that's the enemy. That's the enemy confusing us into believing that my biggest sins are really related to cookies and cake instead of pride, unforgiveness, selfish, ambition, being unloving towards others. Yikes. Okay, So this whole series, and we're gonna do three episodes in this series has inspired by one of the days of my book, the forty Day Body Image Workbook. And in that book, I actually I take a few days and talk about just food and kind of what we've bought into culturally, and like, what does scripture actually say? I mean, do you know that there's a good chance your food rules are in the Bible, and yet maybe you've heard them taught at church? Like seriously, my friend, that's why it's so confusing. I would have almost been sure that they were there, but they're not. And so through the series, we're gonna examine this irony. The actual Bible, the actual Word of God, is the source text for all of this language, and yet scripture has a completely different tone, maybe a surprisingly relaxed and even celebratory tone and relationship with food and body. But diet culture has taken this church language, this Bible language, and ignored God's actual words and commands and given us this alternate religion that we kind of feel obliged to follow because most of the people we know are following it, and y'all, it's just confusing. So we're going to try to just set the record straight. If you're interested in the forty Day Body Image workbook, it's available wherever books are sold, and we also walk women through this book. It's six weeks of zoom calls super affordable, less than ten bucks a week. And we're going to start the next forty Day Journey on Wednesday, June third. It's going to be a daytime event, so our friends in the other half of the world can join us if the time works out for you. It's going to be Wednesdays at twelve thirty Eastern eleven thirty am Central. If you'd like to join us on the forty Day Journey, you can go to improve body Image dot com and look for the forty Day Journey tab. So let's start this adventure by looking at a couple words. We're going to look at the word guilty and the word temptation because we know that they're both Bible words, but what do they really mean? So guilt is a legal and moral term. It implies transgression against a law, a judge, or a standard right. And so that's why one one goes to court. They're either rendered guilty or innocent. But when we say guilty pleasure, we're implicitly saying that there is some law I have broken. I knew better than to break that law, So perhaps I am guilty. Now the question is, though, who is the judge, Like, really, who is the judge that set that standard, that law, that rule. And sometimes the judge is really easy to identify. It's a diet plan, right, like, this is the program I signed up to follow. I'm paying for this, these are its rules, and if I break its rules, I am guilty. That follows logically, right. But then sometimes this is like vague cultural norm, maybe even something a doctor said. Sometimes it's our own internalized quote unquote best self, Like I'm the woman who doesn't eat these things. I'm the woman who knows how to eat clean or eat well, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit later in this episode. And so I am breaking the laws of being my best self, and I'm guilty of that. The word temptation is even richer in Christian theology, temptation is a solicitation toward sin. Right, the enemy tempts you towards sin against God, something that seems good, maybe even something just from the world. Right, doesn't always have to be the enemy. There's the flesh, the enemy, and the world. Something good could pull you away from the righteous path, the path of following God. And so when you say, don't tut me with that delicious cheeseplate, you're making cheese like it's the enemy of your soul. Like cheese becomes the serpent in the garden trying to tempt Eve. Not tempt Eve to eat a piece of fruit. That's not what it's about. It's about tempting Eve to disobey God. Because Eve, of course, was specifically told not to eat of the fruit of that specific tree. And so the sin was not in the eating. The sin was in the disobedience. And so here's a scriptural irony. If we're gonna borrow the language of sin and temptation from the Bible, it's worth asking what does the Bible actually say about food? Because the answer may surprise you. The answer isn't what diet culture tells us. It is go to Ecclesiastes ninety seven ever, reads like this, go eat your food with gladness and drink your wine with a joyful heart. For God has already a proved what you do. Nowt's say with that phrase, God has already approved. Not God will approve if you choose the right macros in each meal, or if you only eat clean, or if you avoid preservatives. Not God approves in moderation. The approval is prior given. It's unconditional. Ecclesias, he Solomon is telling his readers that eating with gladness, enjoying what you eat is not a guilty pleasure, but it's a received one. The guilt, according to Solomon, is not in the eating or what you are eating. The guilt would actually be in being joyless about it. So there's an episcopal priest named Robert for our capone and y'all. After I wrote my chapter about the religion of diet culture, kind of exposing some of this language, I stumbled upon this book. I don't even know how, but my book was already published, and I was just blown away that this book from the early seventies. I believe it is called Health, Money, and Love, Like he outlined all of the same points. I was like, WHOA, I wish I had had this book to quote from. But Capone was an episcopal priest, and actually I think he had a fall from grace. But he was passionate about cooking. I think he even had a segment on a morning show at some point. But his argument is that the pleasure of food is itself theological, like delight in eating is for us to be a participant in God's good creation, and this is the spirit of that verse and Ecclesiastes right. His argument is that if we reduce food to its nutritional utility or its moral danger to us, it strips it of its proper meaning. For Capone to frame food as like guilty or tempting wasn't ingratitude. It was a failure to receive the good gift of food that God gives us. And then there's this whole word pleasure, right, Poy. We're uncomfortable with that word, and yet God delights in giving his children good gifts. There's a lot of pleasure that God delights in us partaking of. And yet somewhere along the line, I don't know, maybe it was the Puritans or something, we adopted this ascticism, This like, if we're serving God, we should not enjoy pleasure kind of theology, which actually isn't in the Bible. Right. There are times when we should fast, not if you've had an eating disorder, but that's a different episode. There are times when you should stain from sex inside of marriage. But there's all kinds of things like I created our body to experience pleasure. We got a lot of taste buds, so we can enjoy taste. And yet how many of us have felt guilt or shame for taking pleasure and eating, for enjoying the taste of something. Why did we decide that enjoying food was sinful or needed to be earned, or perhaps even something we need to confess and repent of and apologize for now. I think it's worth noting that women may have a bigger struggle with this than men. Right. The guilty pleasures, the marketing around that is more applied to women and things that women enjoy. It's also more applied to like cheap comfort foods rather than expensive and refined foods. A man eating a steak would rarely say he's being bad, but a woman eating a cupcake almost always is those are the diet culture rules. Okay, So let's stick in a little bit more to this whole being good versus being bad thing, and our core concept here is moral identity has not happen through what we consume through our mouth. Okay. So somewhere along the way, I was good today became synonymous with I didn't eat very much or I ate clean, right, Like, think about that. If someone says I was good today, you rarely think, oh, you must have been loving to all your neighbors and patient and kind and filled with the fruit of the spirit. No, you know, she's talking about food. And this is a stunning collapse because moral virtue is no longer as important as caloric restraint. Like again, you weren't confused as to what the woman who said she was good today was talking about. That should scares us a little bit. Now. Of course, this isn't brand new, right like you talked about, like the Puritan traditions have been suspect of bodily pleasure. But here's the problem. This secular version of what virtue is like strips away God, Jesus, the Gospel, like true faith theology, like the richness of the Word of God, and it just reduces it down to whether or not you ate sugar today. Friend, that's not the gospel. David Zaal incredible author. He wrote this book called Seculosity, and it's really fascinating and in it this was another one of those books that I discovered after I wrote my book. But he's making some of the same points that I made in the Forty Day Bodymage Work book. He's arguing that modern secular people haven't abandoned a need for righteousness right, Like, we all internally know there's something not right with us and we need to do something to make ourselves right. It's a thirst for righteousness. But instead of going to God and finding our righteousness through Jesus, we've just relocated our search for righteousness. The anxiety that used to be am I right with God? Now sounds like am I doing enough? Am I enough? And food and body are one of the primary areas where we see this play out. We seek righteous eating as a path to listen to this to self justification. Right. So, Jesus's death on the cross has reus direction. What he sacrificed for us is what justifies us, renders us not guilty before God, and now we seek to be not guilty before the God of our current diet food exercise plan by eating in a righteous way. We seek righteous eating as a path to self justification. Do you hear the difference? So Zaul talks about how seculosity. Basically, seculosity is his way of looking at the all the different religions we've made, not just food and body, but he talks about like the religion of work and in several areas, but he talks about how seculosity, these religions thrive where you can measure them, where there's measurability. Y'all, we love to measure things, and in the dieting religion, you can count calories, you can track macros, you can log miles, and we love measurability because then we know whether or not we are righteous. And it creates this illusion that you can work for your own righteousness, that your own righteousness, your own self justification, is attainable and achievable through your efforts. Have you ever said I'm staying on track, friend, Think about what a deeply moral phrase that is. You are staying on a path. But what is that path? Is that the narrow path that Scripture talks about avoiding sin, following Jesus like his slave to your Lord Jesus with abandonment, or are you staying on track, meaning you are following the God of your diet plan and staying true to that God's rules. Friends, this is tough stuff. Here's another one. Have you ever had someone say, oh, I totally fell off the wagon this weekend? Well, what does fell off the wagon really mean? Again? That wagon is the righteous path. Falling off of it would be a moral failure. And so when someone says this, they're actually like structuring a confession to you, like I have sinned and I need repentance, restoration, reconciliation. Maybe another way to say that is absolution. And you respond, well, that's okay, you can start again on Monday. Monday is a day of renewal. Monday is the secular sabbath rest Monday you get grace for your fresh start. Who do you get that grace from? Well, not from God, right, His grace is new every morning. But in this case, you're looking for grace from the diet and exercise gods to restore you back to the plan, back to the path of righteousness. Friend, you see how insidious this is? Let's go back to that phrase, cheat day. You can only cheat if there are rules, and rules imply that there's a rule giver who gave you those rules? Was it God? Well, let's look. Let's look at what scripture says. Let's look at Romans fourteen two through four. It speaks directly to judging others around their food choices. And here's what Paul says. One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another whose faith is weak only eats vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not. And the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does. For God has accepted them. And Paul is writing to an actual community that's divided over their food rules, and his answer is striking. He says, judging other people's eating is not your job. God has accepted them. The dinner table is not a courtroom. You are not the judge. And yet die culture has made the dinner table into exactly that. It's a place of constant, mutual and self judgment. Right. You might not be saying it out loud to anyone else, but are you saying it in your head? Are you really gonna eat that. You shouldn't eat that. Did you really eat that much? Why are you eating that? Oh? What are you doing? Oh you're so bad for eating that. Shame on you. And that's what Paul's forbidding here. We're gonna look at some other scriptures around this in just a second, especially as we talk about our next topic, which is clean and unclean eating. You see, we think we've disguised purity purity of food as nutrition, clean eating, how goodness? Friends? Like that is the most theologically loaded phrase in all of die culture, because clean and unclean is this really ancient concept, right, Like we had this in our Bible in Leviticus, but like the Hindu purity traditions exists, Like every religious system has its purity rules, and to eat clean is to be ritually pure. But clean in diet culture is almost never consistently defined, which makes it confusing. But a lot of times these rules around purity codes are about identity and belonging. They're not actually about hygiene or what's good for one. Unclean food would ruin a clean meal, it was I think they call that the contamination logic. But like this is magical thinking inside a religious structure. Anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that purity rules are always about ordering the world into categories clean versus unclean, and she called dirt matter out of place. But this is where scripture man. It has to be what we live by because the Bible makes explicit, direct like really a remarkable statement about clean and unclean foods, and it cuts directly against the logic of clean eating is the biblical way to eat. This is the way to be most acceptable as a Christian is eating clean Matthew fifteen eleven. Jesus speaking to the Pharisees here who've criticized his disciples because they're not following the ritual hand washing laws. And here's what he says. He says, what goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth that is what defiles them. And this is a radical statement for the time in its original context, because Jesus is directly challenging their purity code around food, saying that moral contamination is not a matter of what you eat, but of what you say, your intentions, what you actually do. And the logic of clean eating is that there are certain foods that are morally contaminating that eating these foods makes you somehow less pure or less good, and that is exactly the logic that Jesus is pushing back against. Romans fourteen twenty drives home the point even more. Paul says, do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, All food is clean. This is not nuanced. Paul is not saying most food is fine in moderation. He's making a categorical claim that the clean and unclean distinction as applied to food has been abolished. Those rules from the Old Testament are no more. And yet diet culture has resurrected that framework, but the New Testament explicitly dismantles it from the irony here is almost too rich. Clean eating has borrowed its central metaphor cleanliness, from a religious tradition that even in our own scriptures there's argument that food cannot make you clean or unclean. The moral logic that kale salad is superior like predates the New Testament. The New test has moved on. It's not living by those rules anymore. But instead of leaning on Jesus in God's word and scripture, we have a new priest class, nutrition ess wellness influencers, the diet gurus, any influencer you see on Instagram which tells you how to eat and what's clean and what's unclean like, they function as priests who interpret our purity code, tell us our religion and offer us guidance on how to navigate it well so that we can find righteousness, so that we can justify ourselves. Friend, I'm not saying that any influencer online that tells you how to eat is trying to deceive you or lead you astray. I'm not saying that eating foods that make your body feel good is a bad thing. Don't be black and white thinkers with me around this. I just want you to hear the link which I just want you to be clear in what God asks of us versus what this alternate religion asks of us, so you don't confuse the two. Robert Capone, the former episcopal priests I quoted a minute ago, says this Christianity is not a religion, but rather the proclamation that God has gone ahead on his own and ended religion by accomplishing in Jesus free of charge, whatever our religions were trying to do. Capone says he has closed the religion shop for good. And what we have to see is that a culture that's really only maybe one hundred hundred and fifty years old, a culture of dieting and wellness, has reopened the religion shop and given us, like David Zahl said, an opportunity to find righteousness, to track our morality, to be good enough through an alternate religion for a god that's not the god of the universe. Capone also says this. He says, the table is a place of grace, abundance, pleasure, community, and the moment you turn it into a moral battlefield, you've lost something profound about what eating together means. And isn't that what Jesus exemplified for us and the way he lived and how he wasn't afraid to eat listeners, he was accused of being a glutton, and we know he wasn't interesting, right, But here's what I wanted to notice. Language shapes our experience. When we habitually describe eating as something moral, we are creating real psychological suffering for ourselves and for others like friends, your kids are hearing this. We create guilt, we create shame, we create anxiety around a basic human need that could and should also give us pleasure. And this isn't just semantics. Studies on the psychology of forbidden foods show that the guilt and restraint cycle get this actually increases consumption. You eat more of it if you feel guilty about it, and it decreases satisfaction because you feel so much shame that you're eating the good thing that you told yourself you weren't going to eat. Friend, like, we do this to ourselves in our heads, and it's just completely not necessary according to what God asks from us. The religious framing here makes the problem so much worse. In fact, I talk to women every week who are sure God is mad at them because they ate dessert, and they are sure that those condemning, shaming voices that they're hearing in their head, I can't believe you ate that. Why did you eat that you didn't need to eat that? They're sure that's God, and friend, that's not him. That is the God, little g God of the religion of diety. The great irony of die culture is that it has stolen the vocabulary of sin and purity from religious tradition, while ignoring what our religious tradition actually says and teaches about food. Friend. The Bible says, eat with gladness. God has already proved. The Bible says all foods are clean. The Bible says, stop judging each other's eating. The Bible says, what you put in your mouth does not defile you, but die. Culture has taken a form of religious seriousness around food, the guilt, the rules, the judgments, the purity codes, while discarding the actual content of scripture, which is largely free nereid them pleasure and non judgment. It has kept the law and thrown away the grace. Back to David Zaouls seculosity, Zaul says, the tragedy of seculosity is that it takes real human needs, needs for meaning, for belonging, for goodness, and it attaches them to things that cannot ultimately deliver. Food cannot make you righteous. A good body, a better body, A thin body cannot save you. The law of the diet is, like all law, better at producing guilt than it is at producing transformation. As we close up today, I want to read to you just a little snippet from this Health, Money, and Love and Why we Don't Enjoy Them book, by Robert Capone. I said it was from the seventies, and I'm wrong. It was copyright Night ninety. The seventies book is a book called Never Satisfied by Hillel Schwartz, which is a cultural history of diets, fantasies, and fat which has a lot of interesting things about where these food rules, diet rules conceptions came from just culturally. But let me read to you from Capone's book, because I think it's going to shock you so again. This was written by a episcopal priests in the late eighties, came out nineteen ninety, which brings us, naturally enough to the supremely silly religions of food that are now more popular than almost any others, not that they haven't always enjoyed. Greade Vogue. One of the oldest beliefs of the human race, despite the plain hard fact that people need food to live and can in reasonable health digest almost anything that grows, walks, flies, or swims is that food will kill you unless it is carefully religionized. Cucumbers, it was once believed, had to have their baleful qualities exorcised off by slicing a heel and rubbing the cut ends together until they foamed. Eggplants had to be soaked in brine to remove their poison, while vegetables were bad for you and raw meat was certain death. In our days, though, that list has grown beyond belief, or more correctly, beyond anything that could be accounted for except by belief. Salt, refined sugar, animal fats, red meat, all meat, hard liquor but not wine. Hard liquor and wine all have come under the interdict, along with a host of demons with names like calories, cholesterol, and nitro semens. People used to say grace before meals and dig in. Now they must sit down and recite the whole nutritional Catechism before nibbling at the unsalted, undercooked veggies that are the only doctrinally correct items on the table. And what is this secret that lurks behind all the flannel mouth religiosity? What is the mystery that these devotees of Orthodox eating are guarding? It is that there will be a new mystery along next week, and that the adepts of the cult of nutrition will mindlessly, but just as noisily, embrace it as the final article of faith. Olive oil was once as bad for you as bacon Greece because it was demon possessed by just as many calories. But then it was discovered to be harboring angels called mono unsaturated fats, and promptly granted admission into the nutritional pantheon. By and by some food. Theologian will probably prove that those angels have fallen and turned into demons again. But through all the revisions of the Catechism, the true believers will never once doubt the newest revelation, even if it tells them to eat today what would have killed them yesterday. And remember our friend he wrote this in nineteen ninety when everyone would have been fat free, and just twenty years later everyone was told to eat only fat. So it actually happened. I don't know if he lived long enough to see it, but it happened. The nutritional gods did declare fat from being demon possessed to being angelic. Ah, But let me continue reading because I think this is going to really drive it home for us today. But you say, isn't it true that the eating habits of most Americans are killing them again? This was nineteen ninety. My answer is, no, people die because the human race is mortal. What they eat may cause them to die sooner, much sooner if they eat strict geen, less soon perhaps bearing a plane crash, if they eat hollandaise sauce. But in any case, sometime before they reach the age of one hundred and twenty, they will die. And no religion of eating, however perfectly obeyed, will make the slightest difference in that. Therefore, the last secret of the cult of nutrition, the mystery to be guarded at all costs, is that the implicit promise of immortality, which is the principal selling point of the whole religion, is bunk, oh friend, oh heavy words that I hope you'll drink them in. You know. Capone's real theme is that food, pleasure, or the table are not moral tests that you pass or fail when you give in to temptation, or that you sin when you eat, but that food is a gift to be received and enjoyed. Eat with gladness, for God has already approved the gladness is the point. There is nothing for you to earn in terms of your actual salvation with how you eat. And so again, my point, friend, is not sit on the couch and eat cheetos, My point is, where have you put your real faith? Where are you really trying to find righteousness in the eyes of God? Is it through the way you eat or don't eat? Or is it through what scripture commands? Have you added rules to His word that just aren't there? And my question for you as we close is this, what would it feel like to eat dinner, eat lunch with co workers, eat breakfast without any of that vocabulary? What would it mean to just eat? Because food is just food. It's not a moral ball of yarn that we have to spend every day untangling and we have to ride this wild roller coaster of fat is good, fat is bad, carbs are good, carbs are bad. I mean, I'm telling you a friend, carps are back. We're calling it fiber now, but carbs are back, and I have a feeling fat's going to go out of style again. So eat your bacon now. What would it be like to just ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and direction around how to care for your body and just eat to not make it such a big deal. Friend, I'm so glad you're here. Hey, next time we're going to continue this series, We're actually going to look at religious language used in specific diet programs like Ugh Optavia, Gwen Chamblin's Way Down Workshop, which was in churches all over the world and had a huge impact in the religious architecture around like how we've woven dieting into scripture and Christianity and what we believe and the results are illuminating and very very troubling too. And then in episode three, in two weeks, we're gonna talk about why do we expect our clothes to forgive us? Maybe you've said it, I'm wearing this because it's very forgiving. Does that dress actually have the power to forgive you? Why do we phrase it like that? That's for going in this series. I hope you'll come back for more, and hey, go to improved budymansh dot com if you need more help. We've got great resources for you there. We want to help you untangle this. Thanks for listening today. I hope something today is help you stop comparing and start living. Bye bye. The Compared to You podcast is proud to be part of the Life Audio Podcast Network for more great Chustian podcasts. A lot of Life Audio dot Com