“Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress…. For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”

When I read the above words from Psalm 107 one early autumn morning in 2020, I paused for a moment and pondered and underlined them. One image that the verses evoked struck me: the image of God satisfying the hungry – not just feeding them, but filling them.

Eighteen years old at the time, I was nearing the end of a brief but intense bout with an eating disorder. In the latter days of my sickness and the early days of my recovery, I began to notice and marvel at the language of food throughout the Bible.

Perhaps this was due to the heightened awareness of food that any hungry person feels. Or perhaps it was due to the gradual expiration of a misunderstanding of scripture and the Christian faith I had held for my whole life: that the stuff of Christianity was primarily spiritual – the salvation of one’s soul, “the conviction of things unseen,” the supplementation of “faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge,” and so on – and that the rest of life, what I ate and how I dressed and how many miles I ran, was only loosely governed by Christian principles, such as “do it all to the glory of God.”

Whatever the reason, I began to notice phrases and scenes in scripture that contradicted this conviction, teaching instead that God cares for the whole self. God bestows upon the wandering Israelites manna and quail; David is given holy bread when he is hungry. In one particularly striking instance of God’s care for our physicality, Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter from the dead and then commands her family to bring her something to eat. The Gospels do not show Jesus instructing the newly resurrected little girl to pray the sinner’s prayer; they show Jesus taking care that she is physically nourished.

Not to mention Jesus’ infamous first miracle at the wedding at Cana. Jesus takes ordinary water and turns it into the bane of both fundamentalist Baptists and calorie-counting health enthusiasts: wine. And fine wine, at that. He does not teach here about the metaphorical significance of wine. He does not say, “Sure, a little sip of wine at a party is fine, but I’m really doing this because wine is a symbol,” with a look that suggests “flip now to the institution of the Supper, you’ll see.” He gives no fatherly lecture about the difference between enjoying wine and being “drunk with wine.” No, he simply makes good wine abound, even for those who are likely already drunk.

Photograph by Phushutter / Adobe Stock.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, the character Alyosha reflects on this miracle and recognizes within it the truth that “He who loves men loves their gladness too.” Loving the gladness of his creatures, God changes water into wine that joy may thrive. Dostoyevsky here simply restates a principle that scripture teaches: God is the one who gives “wine that gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts” (Ps. 104:15).

My heart had not been truly strengthened by food in a while when I began to read the Bible with new eyes. My heart, in fact, had a problem, one that had developed over months of skimping on or skipping meals and running until I grew faint: bradycardia, a dangerously slow heart rate, which joined amenorrhea, the loss of menstruation, as one of the more serious effects of my habits.

My eating disorder was not an unusual case: naturally somewhat thin, a perfectionist at a prestigious high school on my way to a prestigious college, I used food and exercise as a way to control my life, and then that habit itself got out of control. (While these were my particular circumstances, I want to acknowledge that much of the time it’s unclear what causes eating disorders and other mental disorders, affecting others with a very different set of pressures.) I had spent much of my time as a child swimming competitively; I had grown up in communities, Christian and secular, where short shorts and swimsuits – and, of course, carefully curated photos on social media of those swimsuited bodies – were a matter of fact. As such, keen attention to physical appearance was, too, a matter of fact. In my communities there were always two or three family members or friends, usually women, in an apparently unending battle against the scale, against stretch marks, against carbs or sweets or butter, against their physicality. In Christian circles, excessive attention to the body often couched itself as deference to the “temple of God,” reasoning that the Christian’s body, as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, ought to be fit and beautiful in accordance with the standards of the world.

Because these attitudes were shared between the Christians and non-Christians I knew, I felt no qualms when I began to view my body as an accessory to be carefully smoothed and polished and presented, a machine that could be optimized to serve the edicts of my desire for control. It never occurred to me that this mindset was not so far off from the “transhumanism” I decried and its destructive parallels in the rise of “gender affirming care.” It never occurred to me that the way I was living was not unlike the Platonism I had studied in school: as if my body and soul were two separate entities, the body a mere item to be controlled and continuously renovated, the soul the agent of reason and refurbishment. Nor did I connect it to the early-church heresy of Gnosticism, which similarly maintained that the material world was separate from and lesser than the spiritual.

I learned the hard way that Gnosticism – including its manifestations in diet culture – assaults the goodness of God’s created order and of our bodily existence.

One of the implications of the creedal words “I believe in the resurrection of the body” is that our souls and bodies are inextricable and that our bodies thus have inherent dignity. The resurrection is not one of spirit only but of the whole self. We are not mere spirits that happen to dwell in flesh and bones for a short while on earth; instead, we are embodied beings. Physical embodiment is a good aspect of God’s creation.

Food, too, is a good part of God’s created order – not merely for sustenance or even for its symbolic, spiritual significance. Bread and wine are not only good because they can provide energy or because they represent our Lord in the Eucharist. They are simply good. Not instrumentally, but in itself, food is good. That is how God created it: to strengthen and gladden our hearts.

He created a good world, good even in its physical aspects, and it is still a good world. Until I suffered and recovered from an eating disorder, I did not understand this.

There is a strain of Christian thought, perhaps a perversion of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, that suggests that everything in our earthly experience is bad. That all of creation is fallen – and nothing but fallen. That our only hope and joy while on earth is in the fact that our souls may be saved and that we may (only by the grace of God!) refrain to some extent from the deep wickedness of the physical world with its brioche bread and chocolate cake and margaritas and other physical pleasures.

But God’s world retains some of its original goodness even after the Fall: we know this intuitively from the delight of a breeze on a summer afternoon, of a bright blue sky after days of rain, of that first bite of a just-ripe-enough peach. Of course all things “groan together,” as Paul says, with the travail of brokenness. But some things – not just yet all things, not for a little while longer – sing together too. There is beauty here in the broken things of the world.

As Robert Farrar Capon, a priest and cook, writes in his book The Supper of the Lamb, “The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God’s design, our lawful love.” Capon maintains that there is a “resident goodness of creation” that we are to delight in as image-bearers of the God who first delighted in it and delights to sustain it.

“The calorie approach is the work of the devil,” Capon writes. “The modern diet victim sees his life at the table not as a delightful alternation between pearls of great price and dishes of lesser cost, but as a grim sentence which condemns him to pay for every fattening repast (even the sleaziest) with a meal of carrot sticks and celery.” Instead of viewing food as sometimes festal and sometimes ordinary, our culture has rendered food a burden that must be balanced perfectly on the machine of the body.

If we take the resident goodness of the physical world seriously, we must regard “the calorie approach” perhaps not as Satanic but at least as bad theology. MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, the keto diet, the guilty exclamation of “Oh I really shouldn’t!,” the endless quest for a “bikini body” – all represent a poor vision of God and his world. They present a vision of the physical world and of our physical bodies as lesser. They present a vision of the gifts of creation – sugar and wheat, for instance – as objects to be quantified and resisted, and of even the everyday movements of the body – steps, for example – to likewise be quantified and controlled. They present a vision of a God who does not desire his creatures to take joy in the good gifts of creation but to be so “disciplined” according to the standards of the world that they cannot enjoy a church luncheon.

Now, this is not to say that obesity is not a real danger, or that Doritos are just as worthy of our delight as a loaf of homemade bread. The manifold chemicals in a bag of Skittles and those in processed “meal replacement” powder (with zero sugar and twenty grams of protein) both reveal a lack of appreciation for the simple things of God’s good creation.

The solution to the self-centered asceticism of extreme dieting is not the embrace of excess. “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it,” Proverbs 25:16 tells us. But Proverbs 24:13 advises: “My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.”

Christians ought to be mindful of their health, but they ought not misunderstand what true health is. As Ecclesiastes puts it, “there is a time for all things.” The truly healthy person will adopt an attitude not of anxiety and fussiness nor of sensual overindulgence but of glad-hearted moderation when it comes to the things of this world. This spirit will not shy away from a scoop of ice cream on a summer afternoon, nor a glass of beer on an autumn night. A spirit of glad-hearted moderation will fast in times when fasting is appropriate and will put down the fork when satisfied and will move and use the body God has given too.

As Proverbs 14:12 states, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” Though for most people diet culture does not end in a serious eating disorder or heart problems or infertility, these things are the logical end of rejecting the body as something lesser, something servile. The calorie-counting, step-counting, continual-diet way I had embarked upon in my late teenage years was the way to death.

By God’s mercy he did not allow me to reach this end: my heart recovered. My mind and my habits slowly changed. My weight and my cycle and fertility were eventually restored to me. By God’s grace he gave me a husband and a daughter, and I am blessed to cook and bake for them every day. My husband and I relish our bread and butter and wine. “He who loves men loves their gladness,” after all.