Dieting

I am very excited to have my very first guess writer on The Best Life Lived. Cassandra is a great women of faith, a wife and a mother of two. We used to go to the same church while her family lived in the Chicago area. Cassandra has been my mentor in REAL FOOD eating and I have learned so much from her. I truly come away blessed every time I read one of her emails to me.

This post is something that I truly believe all christian women need to hear and take to heart.


The issue of dieting is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and I’ve decided to share a few of those thoughts here.

The following sentiments are heard often, even from church women, and even (until recently) from my own mouth:

“You’re so good for ordering salad!”

“I’m so bad for bringing this chocolate.”

“That dessert is sinfully delicious.”

“I’ll be good and eat something less fattening.”

There is a general consensus that our goodness or badness is closely connected to calories consumed and dress size. (Yes, of course the Bible speaks against gluttony, but that is not what I’m thinking of here. When we congratulate a girl for eating salad we are usually not thinking about her fighting the sin of gluttony.)

This kind of thinking has two main problems:

1. For one thing, it is not even true that eating fat will make us fat. These are lies created by an industry that wants to sell us more refined foods, sugar, artificial sweeteners, vegetable oils, diet pills, and ab-crunching machines.

For example, I used to think that skim milk was healthy (equating health with no fat of course). However I have since learned that farmers actually feed pigs skim milk or whey in order to fatten them up, not cream! The dairy industry wants us to drink skim milk because we will pay money for a waste product and then we will pay even more money for the ice-cream that is made from the fat of the milk. The greater tragedy is the new trend to feed our babies and young children skim or 1% milk in a misguided attempt to protect them from obesity when they need the fat and cholesterol to grow their brains.

We are a nation known for it’s love/hate relationship with food and I can’t help but wonder if this hasn’t been intentionally created by advertisers. The more dissatisfied we are with ourselves the more we are susceptible to running toward false saviors (products on a shelf or diet programs) to rescue us.

Another quick point about calorie restriction: Weight Watchers, and probably any other health article you might come across, routinely recommend eating less than 2,000 calories. I was surprised to learn that the prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp were given that much for their rations.

I could probably go on ten other rabbit trails here, but I want to keep this short and remind us all that our great grandmothers ate bacon and cream and butter and lard and they were healthier for it and probably happier.

2. My second problem with this line of thinking has to do with the gospel. Is this at all right thinking for Christians? What does it say to an unbeliever who hears us define our goodness by the fact that we brought salad to the church potluck? Or for us to always be fussing about our weight as if that defines our value? Our value is found is Christ alone. He died a brutal death for us while we were yet sinners because we are so loved. How crazy for us to be distracted by numbers on a scale to determine our worth.

This kind of thinking also destroys our ability to be truly thankful for the food He has created and provided for us. What did Abraham serve his heavenly visitors in Genesis 18? Alfafa sprouts and Slimfast? No, he served them bread, butter, milk, and meat. Many women today would sit in front of a meal like that and feel guilty instead of thankful and nourished.

By worrying about calories and buns-of-steel we may actually be in danger of worshiping a false god that can never deliver. In fact, sacrificing to the god of skinnyness will only further rob us of our health as extreme dieting will further destroy our metabolism and deplete our bodies of nutrients. And this false god, who demands this kind of devotion will not give us what we truly crave– recognition of our beauty and value—because in the end it is only Christ that can give us that.