I got my "Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family" by Ellyn Satter in the mail yesterday, and found an interesting quote right in the beginning:
(Image of "Allegory of Abundance" from the website that's watermarked, there.)
Instead, cooking and eating today are too often about applying the rules; about consternation and avoidance; about struggling with conflict, shame, and deprivation; and about trying to forego pleasure in the name of health."
Sounds quite a bit like the difference between Grace and Law doesn't it? God has directed my personal Bible reading to Galatians lately--and this is His doing, because I read a "One Year Bible" and the readings just happened to fall on this date--and it jibes amazingly well with what we've been saying:
Giving up control of things you can't control in the first place produces not chaos, but freedom.
I don't think it's any accident that all the images I found when Googling "abundance" and "plenty" were zaftig women and big piles of food. God doesn't make mistakes, and when He uses metaphor in Scripture it's the perfect metaphor. So we have Him mentioning food all the time, and always in an overwhelming, abundant, positive way. He invites us, for instance, to "taste and see that the LORD is good". He does not invite us to "examine and see that the LORD is nutritionally complete and fat-free". He reserved the fat in the Levitical sacrifices for Himself, promises fat as a good thing to the obedient, and set up feasts along with fasts in the spiritual year He asked Israel to follow.
He even used food to set up the Lord's Supper--Communion--which should tell you something about how He regards the whole question.
Food is supposed to be an overwhelming experience of grace. You plant a little seed of corn, and God in His amazing love makes it into a hundred seeds. He gives us food, and not just adequate bowls of goo with no taste like on The Matrix, but all the wonderful complexities of flavor and texture and spice. Food is a demonstration that we can trust God to provide for us, and an opportunity to reflect back the proper creaturely response of thankfulness, three or more times per day. (I guess we need a lot of reminding.)
Because food and eating is so poweful, of course it's a target for deception. It was even a food that was involved in the Fall.
Because God is about grace, the lie is about rules. It's about distrusting any kind of pleasure you get from food and renouncing it--like renouncing coffee at the same time you renounce butter for your diet, although coffee contains no calories. (If it feels good, it must be bad for you!) It's about regarding with suspicion any way of eating that doesn't come with a list of rules to follow. It's about setting up rigid and impossible guidelines, talking cruelly about the people who can't keep them (call them things like "drains on society" or "lardo" or even "morbidly obese") and then applying all that cruel, hateful talk to yourself when you (as you must, because law by its definition is unattainable) fail, and find yourself eating four chocolate Easter bunnies.
It's about proving your own righteousness, instead of revelling in the grace of God.
In contrast, giving up control is trusting His provision in more ways than one. God is the one who will see that I have enough to eat; He can also be trusted to see that I don't eat too much. He can protect me from eating too many Easter bunnies in the same way that He can give me the permission to enjoy an appropriate amount of Easter bunnies. He gave me this great mechanism for that--it's called "hunger and fullness". He can be trusted to give me the type of body I'm supposed to have, and it may not look like the body that Dr. Oz, Vogue, and the neighbors think I'm supposed to have.
But even if it doesn't sound much more desirable to let God control your eating and your size, frankly you should be coming around to the decision from sheer realism. The fact is, even if weight loss and universal thinness were desirable, we have no idea how to attain and maintain it.
Let me repeat that: We. Have. No. Idea.
It's just not possible for us, and trying is an exercise in futility. It's law. It's hopeless.
God doesn't want you to feel hopeless. He doesn't want you to be running on a treadmill of law and rules and doing. He wants you to understand how much He loves you. He wants you to surrender, not so that He can condemn you to a life of despair, not so that He can beat you up and make you follow new rules, but so you can finally be free.
See, when we do everything--even eating and drinking--to the glory of God, everything starts to be about love, because He is the definition of love.
Do I love food more than God? No, I love God for giving me food.
How about this question, one that never gets asked in those "Christian" weight loss programs: Do I love being thin more than I love God? Do I love being "healthy" more than I love God?
Will I trust Him?
Cheers,
Breanna
P.S.
I realize that for some of you this has more credibility coming from a relatively thin person and for some of you it has less. I understand that I don't have any understanding of what it's like to live in a fat body--I can't even come close, even though I feel pressure to be thin too. I started out to write a post about it today, and maybe I'll write that post on "thin privilege" tomorrow, but this post was the one that came out instead. Even if you don't quite trust my reasoning, please, please trust in the love of God, and I'll try to address concerns about thin privilege tomorrow.
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