Part 1: Does the Bible support dieting for weight loss?

There is no shortage of Christian dieting and weight loss books, but what does that Bible actually have to say about it? Does the Bible really support dieting for weight loss and improved health?

Does the Bible support the act of dieting for greater purity or health (through weight loss) and encourage a culture of dieting?

No. I don’t think it does. Christian Diet Culture, of course, disagrees with me. And so it’s Christian Diet Culture (CDC) that I address here. 

I do that by spelling out the implicit and explicit messages that I think make up the CDC worldview then breaking it down and explaining why I disagree.

Here’s how I understand the CDC vision of the world. It goes something like this:

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As Christians, we are called to be Witnesses (Acts 1:8). The World will know us by our fruit (Matt 7:16-20). 

Our fruit - our behavior, our obedience, our devotion to God - stems directly from our moral character. The morally upright choose to obey. So our behavior is an outward sign of our inward life and goodness.

What else is clearly an outward sign of our inward character? Our secret hidden behaviors and our devotion to God? The shape and size of our bodies.

After all, our body is God’s Temple (1 Cor 6:19). We need to make God’s Temple beautiful (aka thin). How can we then mar the image of God’s Temple by bringing sin (aka fat) into our bodies?

Why would we choose to bring sin (aka fat) into our bodies in the first place? Because, while the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak (Matt 26:41) and The Flesh and the Spirit are at odds with each other (Gal 5:17). 

“The Flesh” in the Bible is referring to the human body and its desires. The desires of the human body are our enemy and must be dominating. The way to defeat The Flesh is then to be as self-controlled with our food and exercise as possible. That’s why righteous people are both thin and more holy and fat bodies are clearly lazy, selfish and lack self-control. 

So it’s up to each individual to avoid the temptation of evil (fattening foods). We must withstand the allure of a gluttonous moment of pleasure and satisfaction. 

Righteous Christians will rise above the trivial pleasures of this world and practice the most godly trait of self-control. 

Denying ourselves any more than we strictly need and relying instead on God to sustain us - mind, body and soul.

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I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s scary. Scary, and I think, very wrong. Note, the pieces of Scripture tucked away in there. Just like with secular Diet Culture, there are tiny little kernels of truth sprinkled in here and there while drawing major weight-biased conclusions from thin air.

This toxic mixing of Healthism, Diet Culture and Christianity concludes that fat bodies are more unhealthy and therefore less holy than thin bodies. 

In this case, it’s trying to take all this spiritual warfare and pathways to righteousness (aside from Jesus) and forcing them to fit into a weight-stigmatizing narrative. 

That is straight up discrimination. That doesn’t honor the Imago Dei of every person or the dignity befitting all bodies.

On top of all that, this CDC interpretation disregards how God actually made our bodies to work. That’s something that I dive into in Part 2. Along with how the everyday realities of dieting and Diet Culture competes for resources with the bigger purpose of the Church. 

So, for the rest of this post here, I’m going to focus on the misuses of Scripture and Biblical truths that CDC takes out of context and tries to squeeze into that diet-friendly Christian worldview.

So here we go. 

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After all, our body is God’s Temple (1 Cor 6:19). We need to make God’s Temple beautiful (aka thin).

I don’t think God is talking about our looks here. From what I can tell, He seems way more concerned with the heart than the outward appearance (1 Sam 16:7, Prov 4:23, Matt 15:18). Jesus asks the Pharisees “why do you wash the outside of the cup when the inside is all grody and mildewed?” (Matt 23:25-26, my paraphrase). Apparently Jesus wasn’t much of a looker (Isaiah 53:2-3) and He’s God. 

I don’t think the way to make God’s dwelling place really shine is to do whatever it takes to make it conform to the Thin Ideal. I definitely don’t think spending our lives waging war on our bodies to shrink them or living stressed out about eating the wrong thing makes God, or His Temple, look good.

I’d also like to point out just how individualistic this understanding is. The idea that God’s Temple is my body. Your body. While Christians do have Holy Spirit living in our bodies, I think Paul’s clarification in Corinthians gives us some much needed perspective. 

The Apostles Paul (1 Cor 3:16) and Peter (1 Pet 2:4-10) explain that we are not each individual temples. We are living stones. Individually indwelt. But being built into something greater. It’s in our coming together that we really make up the Temple of God. Our collective community where Holy Spirit dwells. 

And if that’s the case, then the shape, size, ability, or age of our individual bodies isn’t really what makes God’s Temple shine. It’s how we treat each other. What do we do when we come together? How do we respect and honor each other? 

Are we directing people to look at God’s beauty? Are we looking outwards and inviting people to become “stones” like us and join this beautiful (messy and imperfect) Family? Are we coming together to “set the captive free” and fight oppression (Luke 4:18) and do justice (Micah 6)? 

What else is clearly an outward sign of our inward character and secret hidden behaviors? The shape and size of our bodies.

There is a huge underlying assumption here that we’ve been trained to just gloss over. It’s the assumption that our shape and size are determined primarily (or entirely) by our individual food and exercise choices. That just isn’t true.

I do a lot of work debunking this myth and always recommend Ragen Chastain’s and Christy Harrison’s work to learn just how untrue this is. 

How can we then mar the image of God’s Temple by bringing sin (aka fat) into our bodies? 

Here’s another underlying assumption. God only makes thin bodies. Being, or becoming, fat is therefore an aberration. That however is neither true of God’s design for human bodies nor reflective of God’s love for fat bodies. What we’re seeing in this statement is Diet Culture’s Thin Ideal.

Many factors go into determining our shape and size. Genetics, social determinants of health and more. We don’t know exactly how much genetics determines our size, but we do know it’s a lot. Most likely a major determining factor.

So what does that mean? That means that God decided our shape and size before we were even born. Not only are fat bodies a beautiful, intentional part of God’s design, He also designed us to maintain that shape and size. God designed our bodies to resist weight loss and maintain our weight for us without any interference or monitoring from us.

Another assumption inherent here is that it’s a sin to eat in a way that is perceived to make us fatter. 

It’s usually couched in spiritual terms that warn us against the sin of “gluttony” which is typically thought to be a lack of self-control with food. 

But, is eating more than we think we should eat actually a personal sin against God and our bodies? I used to think so. But I don’t anymore. I learned a lot from J. Nicole Morgan and I highly recommend everybody read her book “Fat and Faithful”. 

In it, she explains how gluttony is much more about how we treat each other than whether we’re eating in excess. She does an excellent job of laying out a Scriptural understanding of gluttony that aligns, I think, much more with the heart of God than our usual CDC interpretation.

Why would we choose to bring sin (aka fat) into our bodies in the first place? Because, while the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak (Matt 26:41). 

This one is so influenced by Diet Culture that I need to explain what the Diet Framework is. We can’t arrive at this belief without following the chain of thought firmly rooted in the Diet Framework.

I define The Diet Framework as, “The construct crafted by the diet industry and reinforced by Diet Culture that asserts our personal food and exercise choices are the primary means to control our weight, and therefore our health.”

And since CDC is just Diet Culture with a spiritually moralizing twist on it, this is how the logic flows:

Fat is unhealthy and therefore bad (aka evil).

Anything that leads to fat is therefore bad (aka evil).

If we choose anything that leads to fat, then we are bad (aka evil).

Thinness is an outward sign of inward goodness, purity and self-control.

The clear overall takeaway is that fat is bad (aka evil). This primes us to believe anything bad about fat and anything good about thinness. 

Once we’ve internalized those weight-stigma beliefs, BAM! The cat is in the bag and any peace with our food and bodies are out the door.

Because now restriction becomes godly. Self-denial of food is a virtue. Avoiding the temptation of food is equated with righteousness. Whether righteousness comes from avoiding bad foods, too much food, or even all foods. 

Look what CDC can do now. 

Any Scripture that talks about avoiding temptation, self-denial for the sake of righteousness, or denying our flesh in order to choose the spiritual, can be used to direct us away from fat promoting things. 

This “restriction is Godly” idea can pretty much sum up all of Christian Diet Culture. 

“The Flesh” in the Bible is referring to the human body and its desires. The desires of the human body are our enemy and must be dominating. The way to defeat The Flesh is then to be as self-controlled with our food and exercise as possible. That’s why righteous people are both thin and more holy and fat bodies are clearly lazy, selfish and lack self-control.

One of the biggest conclusion jumps here is equating The Flesh that we learn about in Scripture with our physical body. Yes, we can use our bodies to sin. That’s pretty much the only way we know how to sin. Thoughts, choices, actions - those all happen in and through our bodies. But that doesn’t mean that our bodies are sinful. 

Living in CDC, the idea of self-control gets primarily (maybe even exclusively) applied in a food context. Or at least, we’re trained to hear self-control and immediately think of food.

That’s why so many of us are convinced that we’re disappointing God Himself whenever we break one of our food rules. But is that really God’s big concern when He talks about self-control? Is our food the one place we need to most see self-control as the fruit of the Spirit?

I don’t think so. There are lots of bodily urges that we need to get a handle on in order to live fully and freely in God’s upside down Kingdom. Or really just to live in any healthy community. 

Urges like unforgiveness, explosive anger and violence, gossip, deceit, lusting after people who aren’t your person (if you have a person). This is what I’d call self-control. Not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. 

Put simply, I think The Flesh Jesus is referring to are the parts of us that put “me, myself and I” ahead of everybody else. The parts that rely on myself, my “wisdom”, my “strength” to take care of myself and the people I love. The parts that don’t mind exploiting this world and the people in it for my own gain. We’ve all got parts like this. 

I think this is the Flesh we put to death (Rom 8:13, Gal 5:24, Col 3:5), this is the life we lay down (Matt 16:24). This is how we’re “self-controlled”. Not by denying our body the calories and carbs it needs to survive. 

Denying ourselves any more than we strictly need and relying instead on God to sustain us - mind, body and soul.

This is one big problem of thinking Jesus is saying that our bodies are our enemies. We end up demonizing totally normal (and helpful) hunger and fullness cues. In particular, CDC frames hunger and food cravings as temptations to sin.

Hunger is something to be dominated. Mastered. And cravings are framed as an obvious temptation to be avoided. A clear sign that our body is trying to exploit our weakness and lead us into sin. 

Cravings don’t do any of that. Strong cravings are our body’s equivalent of a flashing neon sign screaming “Feed Me!”.

When we’re so afraid of eating too much, or eating the wrong thing, we’re likely not eating enough. Cravings mean that our body is getting desperate for immediate usable energy. It needs calories NOW. Preferably in the form of calorie dense, fast absorbing sugars. We need this immediate energy for our bodies to function. For us to stay alive.

Cravings are just Hunger’s bigger, louder cousin. If we don’t listen to hunger and continue to white-knuckle it and deprive our bodies of the life-sustaining energy that it needs, then Cravings show up. Loud. Intense. Doing everything they can to save our lives. Thank you Jesus.

In Part 2, I go more into the ways that God’s design (for our bodies and His Church) don’t jive with this CDC worldview.