How to Love a Fat Woman
Incarnate Goodness
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
I still remember the first time I saw the movie Hairspray. The movie, based on a musical based on a movie, is set in the 60s and follows the adventures of Tracy Turnblad, an outspoken and overweight young woman in high school. Tracy is mocked and bullied by other students, but she never apologizes for her size; instead, she wins a spot on a local teen dance show and uses her influence at the studio to fight for racial desegregation. She insists on being accepted as she is, and she fights for a world in which no one is discriminated against because of what their body looks like. And at the end of the movie, she makes out with Zac Efron – what more could you ask?
I think I saw this movie in theater maybe three or four times. I cried every time. I can’t begin to tell you how profoundly moving it was to see someone who actually looked like me – a bona fide fat actress, jiggly arms and all – up on the big screen, as the protagonist of a movie. And while the movie does show Tracy and other fat characters struggling with the stigma against their weight, their stories are much richer than this one detail about them. And watching them, watching this movie, I felt truly seen for the first time. I felt like someone else finally thought a story like mine was worth telling.
Continue reading “Incarnate Goodness”
Exercise, Food, Your Body, and God
Long long ago, in a semester far away, I promised another intern — Kayla — that I would contribute a video to her internship project. I have finally come through! (Better late than never?) Kayla has designed a really neat body positivity education series for her youth group, with five videos from different folks each themed around different aspects of bodies and theology. Here is mine! Text of the video is below the cut. Enjoy!
Sermon: Mirror Mirror
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Peace Lutheran Church, Las Cruces, NM
Second Sunday after Epiphany
We have three wonderfully rich readings to dive into this morning: the call of Samuel and his faithful response, Paul’s somewhat difficult word to the Corinthians about fornication and the body, and the call of Nathanael to follow Jesus. So, naturally, with so many great texts to choose from, I actually want to start out by talking about the one text we didn’t read this morning. Continue reading “Sermon: Mirror Mirror”
Waging Holy War with the DSM-5
CW: fatphobia, eating disorders, IWL/diet talk
Introduction
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”; this was the oft-repeated mantra of the doctor who once helped me lose over 30 pounds (after having already lost 40) in a little under three months by dramatically restricting my diet. Her words are symptomatic of a larger trend that is deeply entrenched in the medical industry, namely, an underexplored and oversimplified conflation of health and wellbeing with weight. The automatic attribution of poor health to body size has led to an emphasis on reducing body mass, often to the detriment of health. By identifying fatness as a problem in and of itself, the medical industry has made itself a complicit player in the size-ism and weightism that run rampant in U.S. and other developed societies, lending professional credibility to the “fatphobic” attacks of the diet, fitness, and fashion industries on fat individuals. Eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, are a logical consequence of this rampant weightism and size-ism, a natural response to the medically reinforced notion that thin = good and that fat must be avoided at all costs.
The church has resources that can help heal our society’s disordered and unhealthy relationship to both food and body. These resources date back to the early centuries of Christianity; in particular, this paper will explore the relevance of the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century Egyptian desert monk, and Gregory the Great, a sixth century Roman pope. Both of these Christian figures wrote extensively about the ancient church’s understanding of gluttony, and about how the relationship between self, neighbor, creation, and God is properly to be understood. Two other key tools in the ecclesial toolkit are a theological affirmation of the inherent goodness of creation, and a robust theology of incarnation. Together, these resources present a countercultural and life-giving alternative to our eating disordered society that is deeply rooted in God’s love and promises. Continue reading “Waging Holy War with the DSM-5”
Recovering Ancient Understandings of Gluttony
Book Review/Reflection for Class:
The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters by Mary Louise Bringle
Mary Louise Bringle lays out her book, The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters, after the fashion of a meal, titling her chapters “Apértif,” “First Course,” “Second Course,” and so on. I found it fitting, because this book was, indeed, a rich feast of reflection on the issue of gluttony and its relationship to the culture surrounding weight, food, and dieting in our society. I also appreciated that this book was suffused with Bringle’s own struggles with disordered eating and self-image; she conveys a gravity and emotional complexity around this issue which I also deeply feel. Bringle opens up the riches of Christian tradition, history, and theology to respond to this still current question of gluttony. She explores patristic and monastic writings for wisdom on how gluttony is rightly to be understood; I particularly found her discussion of Gregory the Great’s five kinds of gluttony to be clarifying and helpful. And she ultimately shows that gluttony is a matter of disordered priorities that idolize the goodness of creation above its Creator, resulting in damaged relationship to God, to neighbor, and to self. This book was published 25 years ago, but it continues to be extremely relevant.
Continue reading “Recovering Ancient Understandings of Gluttony”
The Disorder that Isn’t a Disorder (Except that it Totally Is)
I forgot to post this from a while back! I wrote an article in my school’s newspaper for Eating Disorder Awareness Week. CW: disordered eating (obvs), weight loss. Plain text follows the images below the cut. Enjoy!
Continue reading “The Disorder that Isn’t a Disorder (Except that it Totally Is)”
My Own Independence Day
CW: diet talk, weight loss, profanity, disordered eating
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I quietly celebrated an important anniversary yesterday. It’s been exactly one year since I gave up dieting and stopped trying to lose weight. I had been resistant and afraid to do it, terrified that I would lose all control over my eating and constantly gorge myself on all the fatty, fried, and sweet foods I so desperately craved. I felt like a crazy person around food and even thought that perhaps I was a food addict. I used to hide my eating from those closest to me who I knew would disapprove: hiding candy in unlikely places (like my closet or behind books on a shelf), hiding myself in the bathroom to sneak my little treats. I felt guilty and hungry and ashamed all. the. time.
A year ago, I was lying face down on my bed, sobbing uncontrollably, feeling like the most miserable life form in the universe. I don’t even remember what set me off, if indeed, there even was anything. I was so sick of dieting, so sick of constantly denying myself the pleasure of eating. And most of all, I was just unbearably sad. The ideal of the thin (or even the thinner) me seemed impossibly far out of reach, and getting further by the minute. I had legitimately given it my best. I have lost as much as 70lbs in a single go in my life, but without fail, it always comes back, and when it does, it brings along reinforcements. Continue reading “My Own Independence Day”
On the Plus Side
Some of my writing was featured recently on LSTC’s diversity blog: We Talk. We Listen. I was honored by the invitation to write about fatphobia and body positivity and my experience of the world as a “woman of size.”
On the slim chance that you are visiting my blog without having linked here from said post, I encourage you to read my article, and then like, share, and liberate!
Continue reading “On the Plus Side”
What Becomes of Boasting?: A Body Positive Reformation Sermon
Read more of my body positive / fat liberation writings here.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
“Encountering the Living Word” preaching course
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC)
Romans 3:19-28
Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For no human being will be justified in God’s sight by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. God did this to show God’s righteousness, because in divine forbearance God had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that God themself is righteous and that God justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.
Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.
I have to be honest: When I was assigned to preach a sermon for Reformation Sunday, I groaned a little on the inside. It’s not that I’m not proud of my Lutheran heritage or anything. I see the value in celebrating the dramatic ways in which God has renewed the church and more fully revealed to us God’s grace. And of course, it’s important to honor saints like Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and others who have gone before us to be agents of renewal in the church.
But I can’t help but wonder whether, in commemorating the Reformation, we are acting as though God’s most important acts of renewing the church all happened in the past. By focusing on an act of reformation that happened nearly five hundred years ago, I wonder whether we are ignoring the ways in which God is still making the world new today. I worry that focusing on the transformative change that happened so long ago may be a means for protecting ourselves from the transformative change that God would wreak on us today. Continue reading “What Becomes of Boasting?: A Body Positive Reformation Sermon”
This is the Day 