Expanding Bodies,Expanding God: Feminist Theology in Search of a ‘Fatter’ Future

Introduction

It is not surprising that fat is feared within western culture. In the United States and United Kingdom, health officials warn of the damaging impact of fat on life expectancy and the economy, and talk of a growing obesity ‘epidemic’. ¹ Fat, we are told, will play a large part in the future of our world, while also posing a serious threat to the future of our bodies. How then is feminist theology to engage with such discourses on fat, and what is the place of the fat body in its own theological future? These are pertinent questions given that accompanying the ‘moral panic’ surrounding fat seems to be an unchallenged acceptance of the ‘epidemic’ of female body dissatisfaction and dieting across cultures. Studies of weight loss practices in the US show that up to 80 percent of ten-year-old girls have dieted and three-quarters of healthy weight adult women believe they are too fat. ² That this ‘gospel’ of thinness is spreading to a growingly diverse range of geographic, ethnic and socio-economic contexts is disturbing. ³ Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia are growing and becoming increasingly documented in non-western, industrialized contexts. Despite this, however, it is perhaps the compulsive drive for thinness expressed through many women’s routine commitment to ‘watch their weight’ which is especially concerning. As Michelle Lelwica warns, ‘the real epidemic is among those with seemingly “normal” eating habits, who regularly police their appetites with the aim of getting or staying noticeably slim’. ⁴

If the drive to diet stands to compromise the lives of many women then theology must serve as sustenance in this troubled setting. This is especially important given that theological systems often resource and support, rather than challenge, the culture of dieting. By drawing on ethnographic research conducted inside a well-known UK diet group, this article exposes how this apparently ‘secular’ weight loss group is resourced by patriarchal theological ideas. Emphasis is placed on how dieters in this group adopt and adapt the language of sin (‘syn’) ⁵ and construct their own quasi-religious salvation narrative.

Inside a UK Commercial Diet Group

Between June 2009 and September 2010 I undertook ethnographic research inside a well-known UK diet group. During my fieldwork, I attended weekly meetings as a fully participating and paying member and was candid about my role as a researcher. The group belongs to a very profitable diet organization and makes up one of 6,000 groups which meet across the UK every week. I observed the group’s goings on and conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 members. The diet group varied in size from week to week, averaging around 15 members per meeting. Dieters differed in age but the group was mostly female with only two male members, neither of whom attended regularly. The group was mostly white, relatively middle class and the female leader reflected this demographic. Meetings took place in a church hall and usually lasted for 90 minutes. They followed a similar structure each week: members would sign in, pay, get weighed, and then socialize. The leader would then welcome new members, present awards to those who had reached significant ‘targets’ and would invite each individual to give an account of their weight gain, loss or maintenance. The meeting would usually end with a raffle. ⁶

The Adoption of Christian Discourses of Sin: The Serious Side of Syn

‘Syn’ is a term used by this diet organization and is a reworking of the original spelling – ‘sin’ – formerly used by this diet organization. ‘Syn’ stands for ‘synergy’ and depicts the view that restricting the amount of treats members enjoy – chocolate, crisps, cakes, alcohol – work alongside other elements of the diet to optimize weight loss. Although it is common for commercial diet groups to employ the moral categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to refer to food or eating behaviour, this organization also adopts the rhetoric of ‘syn’ in its official weight loss plans. By adopting this Christian symbolism, links are established between food, danger and the need for self-control. The organization, for example, stresses that syns are distinct from ‘free foods’ – which the leader refers to as ‘safe’ foods – thus communicating that food incurs some form of cost or threat. The leader advises members that it is the syns we don’t see which stand to get us into the most trouble – the syns lurking in salad dressings, in the bits at the bottom of cereal packets. A lax attitude to syn, she tells us, places the dieter in a ‘danger zone’.

Members also associate synful food with danger and temptation. Sarah, for example, speaks about how the tastiness of crisps threatens to thwart her good intentions. In her interview she says that when eating a sandwich she has ‘this thing where I want to eat crisps’. She knows this means consuming extra syns and if she did not have the crisps she would be better off, but finds them hard to resist nevertheless. Ruth similarly speaks to me about the dangers of unregulated eating. She notes how she perceives a danger with her own eating habits which make it ‘very easy to just slide back into your wicked ways … and eat all these things which are responsible for how you got where you are in the first place’. One wonders how far this is from St. Paul’s discussion of sin in Romans where he laments, ‘I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Romans 7: 19). Eating the wrong food, it would seem, sends the dieter backwards into the ‘wicked’ behaviour which is to blame for fat in the first place.

Members also speak about their eating of synful foods as ‘naughty’ or ‘bad’; as going ‘off track’ or ‘falling off the wagon’. Uncontrolled and undisciplined eating is associated with moral downfall, weakness and shame. Suzanne, for example, communicates the humiliation she feels when she gains weight and the anxiety she experiences as a result when approaching Tuesday’s weigh in:

I feel ashamed or like I’ve let myself down in a way cos I think I’m like, Wednesday, Thursday … Friday and then it just like goes downhill from there and I think, oh God it’s Tuesday! I’m going tonight and there’s nothing I can do about it now.

Eating here marks an irrecoverable move ‘downhill’ towards a fateful gain.

Syn thus becomes a foundational hermeneutic for women in this group in their approach to food. Women forge associations between syn and temptation, moral weakness, lack of self-discipline, and control. As Stinson suggests, such associations reflect the dominant view that ‘[t]he overweight female body is especially threatening, as it represents a body that has run out of control, unable to restrain and limit its appetites’. ⁷ This, however, also reflects a common feature of inherited Christian discourse on sin and food. Connections of sin with danger, temptation, lack of moral integrity and control are not uncommon within classical theological accounts of sin, nor are associations between sin and uncontainable appetite. Ken Stone notes how for many early Christians, food matters played a significant role in their interpretation of the creation narratives in Genesis. He states that these stories often communicated that food was potentially dangerous for the Christian since it was Adam and Eve’s inability to resist the carnal desire for food which led them into sin in the first place.

It is to be expected then that early Christian thinkers came to align the introduction of sin into the world with an inability to control desire for food. Basil of Caesarea, for example, famously contended that ‘it was gluttony that betrayed Adam to death and brought wickedness upon the world, thanks to the lust of the belly’. ⁸ For him, mastery over one’s appetite led to a life in paradise whereas failure to achieve this constituted a sure route towards death. For Basil, fasting was considered an important antidote to the disease of sin; a way of overcoming Adam and Eve’s failure to master their appetites in Eden. ⁹ Similarly for Tertullian fasting was a way of expiating ‘the primordial sin’ ¹⁰ of Adam and Eve; namely, their disobedience of God’s commandment not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil which led to their exile from paradise. ¹¹

It was Eve, in particular, however, who often came to symbolize the dangers of appetite and desire. Her apparent error in thinking the tree of knowledge was, to quote Genesis, ‘good for food’, ‘a delight to the eyes’ and ‘to be desired to make one wise’ (Gen. 3.6) is not unlike the mistake many women in this diet group speak about in terms of being caught out by foods they assume to be harmless – the syns in salad dressing, manufactured soups and so on. The Church Fathers often presented the woman as the one who tempted man into sin and as the initiator of disobedience. Tertullian famously cast all women in the role of Eve asserting that women were ‘the devil’s gateway’ and ultimately responsible for causing the death of Christ. ¹² Augustine similarly argued that Eve represented women’s capacity to pull men away from God, their prime object of desire. For him, the serpent approached Eve first in Eden because she was less rational and more susceptible to deception. ¹³

Unfortunately, the dominant western Christian tradition bears the influence of this theology, displaying at best an ambivalent attitude towards the body and the female body in particular. Historically, the bulk of responsibility for sin has been placed with Eve and with her role as temptress. Deborah Sawyer notes the destructive ways in which the development of the doctrine of original sin through the theologies of Augustine and Ambrose served to secure the culpability of Eve. ¹⁴ This doctrine, she maintains, presented and continues to present Eve as seductress and as responsible for introducing sexual lust into the world by offering food to Adam. So pervasive is this association, she observes, that the image of Eve’s half bitten apple appears on every iPod across the globe. ¹⁵ It is my claim that such a theological alignment of sin with the trilogy of women, sex and food sets up a dynamic which is only too obvious in this diet group. My concern is that this gender-stereotyped Christian discourse about sin lies a little too close for comfort to the apparently ‘secular’ agenda of this weight loss group. The adoption of the Christian rhetoric of sin (syn) shows how fertile associations between women, appetite and moral weakness continue to be and how successful such links are at circumscribing the limits of female flesh. My fear is that Christian theology – through its doctrine of sin and related discourse of self-control – actually helps fuel and resource the secular weight loss agenda, and the way this diet group adopts the symbolic language of syn begins to expose how this is so.

Syn, then, is a serious matter and surveillance is the primary way in which this message is reinforced. Typically, dieters are advised by the organization to consume between 5 and 15 syns a day. While some log their syns by placing coins in a jar or keeping a food diary, the majority of women interviewed count their syns mentally because they feel suitably knowledgeable to accurately calculate syn without the need for any additional aids. Syn, thus, for most women, becomes second nature or to use Tracey’s words, ‘ingrained in your head’. The use of games in weekly meetings helps check dieters’ specialized knowledge and ensures members are constantly encouraged to watch their syns.

The leader also polices dieters by asking them to give an account of their behaviour through a process of public confession. For many, this provides an important way of processing sin and dealing with it. Julie, for example, shares with me her thoughts about this aspect of the meeting:

I think just being there [in the meeting] makes you kind of think like you’ve reset everything so you’ve reset the balance and you kind of feel like, right that’s it. Back in control a bit now. You don’t feel like you’re hiding from it; you’re kind of … you’ve faced what happened and you’ve openly said this is what’s happened to me this week and that’s it and I’m drawing a line under it. And you can start a new week. But if you don’t do that I think you can still sort of hide away from it a little bit.

The overlaps with Christian conceptions of penance are striking. For Julie, like many in this group, attending the meeting and making a public confession enables her to face syn and start again – to ‘reset the balance’ and to look ahead with integrity. The leader thus performs the role of quasi-priest, hearing members’ confessions and adjudicating in matters of syn. Echoing sentiments within Catholic teaching, penance here brings about deliverance from sin and is followed by what the Council of Trent refers to as, ‘tranquillity and peace of conscience’. ¹⁶

The leader’s role in communicating the seriousness of syn by policing syn, however, extends beyond the confines of public confession. In my first meeting, for example, she proudly recalled an instance when she had handed out fake eye balls to the group to place in their lunch boxes as a reminder that she was watching them. Members also appear to internalize her ‘gaze’ as a regulatory mechanism, recurrently impersonating her in their interviews with me. Helen for example refers to ‘Louise’s [the leader’s] little voice in my head’ which asks of her ‘should you really have that? You did have a piece of cake before.’

Women also observe one another’s consumption of syns. Sarah, for example, tells me about the frustration she feels towards her Mum (who is also a member) and how this can sometimes cause arguments between them:

When she comes home and she’s like put on so much weight, I’ll like, have a big go at her because it’s like, well you know it’s because you‘ve done this or … I dunno what she’s told you? She’ll just have say a whisky in the evening or something, and I’m just like, you don’t need to have that. I dunno how she must feel, but she’s been doing it for so long. Like if she’d really stuck to it all this time she would’ve like lost so much weight … and it just annoys me … cos I do think she needs to lose loads.

The power of surveillance as a disciplining tool in this diet group is, therefore, hard to overestimate. As Foucault suggests, this serves to administer control without the need for coercion. Like his interpretation of Bentham’s ponopticon, dieters watch themselves and other dieters while aware they are being watched by others and by the leader. They participate in the operation of power through the act of self-policing – as Foucault notes, ‘[t]here is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze’ ¹⁷ and it is the power of the ‘male gaze’ in particular which serves so powerfully to regulate, embed and normalize the quasi-religious narrative of syn. Women learn to view themselves in terms of the male gaze and to see themselves in terms of their appearance. To quote Berger, they learn to ‘watch themselves being looked at’. ¹⁸

That this process of surveillance works so successfully to control the female body through repeated acts of recommitment to the pursuit of weight loss is not unexpected. Susan Bordo argues that restrictions on appetite are not simply about restricting food intake; instead this trains female bodies in the knowledge of their limits and possibilities. ‘Denying oneself food’, she says, ‘becomes the central micro-practice in the education of feminine self-restraint and containment of impulse’. ¹⁹ The language of syn in this diet group serves to limit and curtail female appetite and to reproduce the dominant patriarchal discourse that female desire for food or for power must be contained.

The Adaption of Christian Discourses of Sin: the Positive and Flexible Side of Syn

As well as adopting the traditional theological symbolism of sin, this group also adapts and re-constitutes the traditional notion of sin to serve its own weight loss interests. This leads to the formation a paradoxical discourse which on the one hand affirms the seriousness of syn but which also – through a process of adaption – communicates that syn can be approached strategically and positively. On the surface this adapted definition of syn affords flexibility, communicating that no food is inherently ‘bad’. In fact ‘syns’, the dieting guide states, ‘take the guilt right out of eating’ and allow you to enjoy the foods many diets prohibit. ²⁰ You simply choose how to spend your syns each day. This diet plan thus contends that control works together with flexibility in a way which allows the dieter to experience both: ‘plenty of freewheeling, plus just enough structure and control’. ²¹ What becomes clear though, is that the two are in tension with one another. In seeking to practice flexibility, members employ greater levels of surveillance and restraint and so are caught in a struggle between indulgence and abstinence. This tension, I suggest, undermines the narrative of flexibility instead reasserting the serious side of syn and the need for control.

According to this adapted discourse on syn, emphasis is not on how to avoid sin but on how to manage it. Synning is a matter of strategic planning and members tell stories of meticulously co-ordinating their meals, social life, work and family lives in ways which allow them to lose weight without denying themselves, as Jacqui demonstrates:

[I]f I’ve been bad you know maybe gone out Friday, Saturday night, eating, drinking whatever … you know, I don’t have to go out … I can’t just go to a friend’s house and you know what it’s like … a glass of wine and a few nibbles. I have done that and then Sunday, Monday I really try to be strict just so … just so that maybe I can stay the same when I get weighed on a Tuesday.

For Jacqui, unrestricted eating and drinking is ‘bad’ and must be balanced by tighter regulation. Samantha reflects a similar view. In answer to the question, ‘do you count your syns?’ she answers:

[pause] Yes. Yes, only because I sort of tend to … pig out a bit more at the weekends cos I only see … My partner works away during the week so I only see him at the weekend so I don’t like to impose my diet on him quite as much. So we do tend to go out for meals and things like that. So I save up my syns to have at the weekend.

Samantha notes her deliberate approach to eating which includes ‘saving’ syns up in the week so she can ‘pig out’ at the weekend with her partner.

Reference to saving and spending syns is quite common in this diet group depicting associations between syn and payment. To be sure this echoes sentiments within the New Testament where sin is associated with debt or ransom. ²² It similarly reflects a variety of theological accounts of sin as a debt that must be satisfied (e.g. Anselm) or a ransom that must be paid (Gregory the Great, Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Peter Lombard and others). In the case of this diet group though, syn is about being wise and saving your allowance for something you will enjoy. The narrative in the group, developed by the leader and reproduced by members, is that this diet allows you to eat the things you desire; you do not need to deny yourself. No food/syn is inherently wrong. However, this is always accompanied by another discourse that syn comes at a cost and must be paid for, ‘atoned’ for: that in order to enjoy syn members must be strict at other times. ²³ The language of payment facilitates both messages about sin.

This double-sided discourse positions women at odds with their bodies. By gripping women in a struggle between abstinence and indulgence, it ensures that women remain committed to the patriarchal agenda of reducing their body space and their selves by choice. The invitation to indulge encourages women to place even tighter regulations on their eating and so restates rather than reshapes discourses about the seriousness of syn. The flexibility of syn is thus exposed as a lot less flexible.

It is not simply patriarchy which benefits from this tension, but the patriarchal mechanisms of western capitalism which use the female body as a site for playing out the dichotomies of indulgence and restraint in the interests of profit. Susie Orbach has argued that there is big business in trading the thin female body in a culture dominated by anti-fat sentiment. ‘Slimness’ she tells her readers, ‘sells women’s bodies back to them, promising in its wake the good life […] Selling body insecurity to women (and increasingly to men) is a vicious phenomenon’. ²⁴ It is clear from the language and symbolism of syn as adopted and adapted by this particular group, that Christian theology can be co-opted to fuel the profitability of this dis-ease.

Salvation through Thinness Alone!

This account of syn, however, also helps dieters in this group establish their own quasi-religious salvation narrative. If weight gain is identified with sin, as a pull backwards or downwards into a place of shame and moral weakness, then it is weight loss which provides the route towards fulfillment, well-being, wholeness and a ‘good’ life. Indeed, it is common for women in this group to associate the attainment of weight loss with personal transformation and positive self-change. The shared narrative of this group is that there can be no ultimate fulfillment and well-being (salvation) outside the attainment of a thinner self, and this, for many, means there can be no ‘salvation’ outside the confines of the organized diet group itself. Like Ellen Granberg who finds that dieters within her qualitative study are motivated by a desire for self-enhancement and frequently identify weight loss with the pursuit of another ‘possible self’, ²⁵ dieters in my research note that weight loss leads to self-transformation – to an ability to do things they couldn’t previously do: to feel more confident in groups; wear smaller clothes; fit into a wedding dress; or run down the street without being out of breath.

Particular metaphors help construct this quasi-religious salvation discourse, the most important of which conjure weight loss in terms of improved health, appearance and achievement. Dieters frequently believe that a thinner future necessarily means a healthier future and thus reflect the dominant western ‘orthodoxy’ that the thinner you are, the more likely you are to escape disease and live longer. Lucy, for example, talks about her Father who died of a stroke at the age of 48: ‘That’s always in the back of my mind’ she says, ‘I must not be too overweight’. No mention, however, is made of her Father’s weight or her own weight. In fact she tells me: ‘I didn’t feel unhealthy you see. I went to the gym and had all my checks there and nobody said, “Oh my God, this is bad, that’s bad”’. Dieters also conjure weight loss in terms of improved appearance, in many cases identifying weight loss alongside the hope of being more attractive and able to fulfil heteronormative expectations. Four women in the group claimed that a central motivation for losing weight was to look good on their wedding day. Helen, for instance, told me that she joined to lose weight because she ‘didn’t want to look like that’ when she got married. She gave herself plenty of time to achieve her goal and was ‘successful’: in the end, her wedding dress was too big and her underwear did not fit.

As well as this, however, it is common for women in this group to identify weight loss with a sense of achievement. This construct is learned and reinforced by the leader’s presentation of awards each week: the ‘Slimmer of the Week’ award, the ‘Club 10’ award, the ‘Half Stone’ award and the annual ‘Woman of the Year’ award (which also exposes the gendered assumptions underpinning this diet organization). As such, the improved, more attractive, healthier self which women in this group identify with thinness is clearly linked with her ‘good works’. Salvation is achieved not simply by faith (i.e. the belief that weight loss will occur), but by working hard to secure and confirm one’s redemption. Julie comments that finally achieving her target weight was a source of happiness because it had not been easy and because it was not easy to stay slim. ‘I am happy with how I am now’, she says, ‘cos I’ve finally got there and it is nice to know that it’s not that easy to stay slim. It is an achievement.’

Of course, linking weight loss with accomplishment ensures that women who do not lose weight are stigmatized as being wilful violators of the diet’s rules. Like the Protestant work ethic this reflects, the implication is that being fat equates to being unproductive (lazy). A central supposition is that there is no excuse for fat. Lucy notes ‘It’s you: do something about it!’ This instruction to ‘do something about it’ echoes the Enlightenment sentiment of ‘mind over matter’ whilst also constructing the body as a malleable mass which can be controlled at will – what Susan Bordo identifies as the postmodern dream where the body is viewed as a form of ‘cultural plastic’ with no limits. Such a vision of the body, she argues, is invariably informed by a ‘disdain for material limits and the concomitant intoxication with freedom, change, and self-determination.’ ²⁶

The quasi-religious discourse of salvation in this group thus associates weight loss with belief in a better future – a healthier, more attractive body which has been successfully molded into shape by the faith and commitment of the dieter. In many cases, women convey a tension between the now and not yet of weight loss. For some, this tension is between the ‘now’ of fat and the ‘not yet’ of thin at which stage the weight loss journey reaches its final culmination. For others, it is between the ‘now’ of thin and the ‘not yet’ of an even thinner future. Such a proleptic vision is reinforced by the leader who regularly commissions members to ‘go forth and shrink!’, confirming that there is always more weight to lose.

Like the group’s message of syn, this framing of weight loss as in some way salvific works strategically (and profitably) to retain women within a state of dis-ease with their bodies. Although women in the group believe in the future hope of salvation through thinness and engage in practices of monitoring syn in order to realize their goal, their experience is often one of struggle rather than uninterrupted progress. Many women experience feelings of guilt and disappointment as they struggle to meet or sustain their weight loss targets and so ‘salvation’ comes to be experienced as a frustrated process which remains anticipated and rarely realized. As Jacqui remarks, ‘I don’t know what my target [weight] is … cos I’ll probably never get there the way I am because I’m putting it on one week and it’s off the next’.

For some, however, dieting is not about achieving a goal not yet realized, but about retaining the target weight they have already achieved. Dieting becomes a matter of holding on to salvation and ensuring one continues to manifest the signs of a changed life (again, reminiscent of Calvinist theology). One ‘target member’, ²⁷ Kerry, spoke to me about the importance of going to the gym and drinking coffee instead of eating cake upon her return in order to keep herself trim. She explains, ‘I don’t want to go back to how I was, to how I looked, to how I felt’. Fear of going ‘backwards’ after reaching target keeps Kerry, like many others, attending (and paying for) the group. Helen also admits to feeling increased levels of anxiety about her body as a result of reaching her target. She laments, ‘for me it seems to be [that] the smaller I am, the happier I am, which is kind of worrying …’, unsure about whether she will ever reach an ‘end’ point when she will be satisfied with how she looks. Importantly, for Helen, achieving her target weight also fails to equate with the ‘good health’ and well-being promised by this salvation narrative. She tells me how her substantial weight loss now meant that sleeping had become uncomfortable; her bones stuck out and the bed dug into her. She was also starting to feel the cold more. She admitted musing about the possibility of stopping treatment she was trialling to help with a demobilizing illness, because she was experiencing weight gain as a side effect.

What this shows is that dieters’ experiences of thinness often conflict with their quasi-religious soteriological beliefs about thinness. In many cases, the pursuit and even attainment of thinness feeds rather than dissipates women’s body anxieties. This exposes the vision of salvation by thinness to be a spurious one. Moreover, because ultimate happiness and well-being often remain suspended, anticipated events, this creates an ideal setting for ensuring that women remain committed to working towards weight loss. The language and symbolism of syn thus works together with the quasi-religious salvation narrative this helps construct to help keep women in a state of dis-ease with their bodies.

Feminist Theology in Pursuit of a Fatter Future? Towards an ‘Alimentary’ Theology

What then is an appropriate feminist theological response? I suggest that feminist theology must go in pursuit of what I purposefully call a ‘fatter’ future – one which theologically values rather than demonizes fat and one which refuses to demarcate ‘normative’ bodies. My contention is that by valuing fat, we potentially contribute to lessening the cultural appetite for slimness which characterizes the white, western, hegemonic feminine ideal and which is increasingly colonizing women’s bodies across the globe. This goes beyond mere size acceptance to a positive valuing of fat bodies. Theologically speaking, this calls for a redeeming of harmful Christian discourses to do with sin, particularly those which serve to demonize food, appetite and eating and which fuel the quasi-religious, commercial and patriarchal drive towards female thinness.

Given that theology is not always a source of nourishment for women’s bodies, central to any theological response is a theology of food which is actually good for women’s health. Angel Mendez Montoya reminds us that food is not just food because it symbolizes God’s nurturing sharing of God’s self as bread – as food – with us. ‘Because food matters’, she says, ‘theology’s vocation is to become alimentation: a theology not only concerned about food matters, but also a theology envisioned as food’. ²⁸ As alimentation, theology must become a form of nourishment to people; we must see food as theology and theology as food. ²⁹ This is especially important when constructing a theology of food from the basis of a critical glance at the commercial dieting industry. Given this, I now turn to the task of reconstruction; to bring to the table two proposals – two courses – which begin to build an alimentary feminist theology. The first reflects on the figure of Divine Wisdom and the second moves to reflect on what it might mean to image the Trinitarian God as a fat, corpulent God.

Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word: Feminist Theology in Search of a Fatter Future

I have suggested that both related depictions of God – as Sophia and as Trinity – potentially enable the theological logic underpinning discourses of sin and salvation, as manifested in this diet group, to be severely challenged. Food, desire, appetite and eating are sources of life and lead to wholeness. We do not become more by eating less, but by eating in community and by welcoming all bodies as equal participants in the expansive life of God. Food means life, joy and nourishment and the responsibility to share means that we are only able to taste God and become more truly ourselves if we feast together. This takes us some way towards a feminist alimentary theology since it provides a theological approach to food and eating which disrupts inherited associations between sin, food and death that have been shown to operate in this diet group; associations which – as we have seen – conveniently function to retain women in a profitable state of dis-ease with their bodies. It provides a theological view of fat which is both good for women’s health but which also recognizes that health, happiness and fullness are themselves embodied by a diversity of different bodies, including fat bodies. It seems to me that we must join in with the sentiments of Qohelet and ‘commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun’ (Eccl. 8.15).