bearing blog

The young bard.

"BOOK I.
Sing, goddess, of Achilles' rage
Against Atreus' son
Who wouldn't give back Chryseis
Who he had fairly won
And for Chryseis' father
Who was Apollo's chief high priest
Apollo shot deadly arrows
Until Chryseis was released."

- My eleven-year-old son

English literature and composition is one of the subjects I dreaded having to teach to the kids. I think I am a pretty good writer, in an instinctive sort of way, but it isn't really something I work at or think about; I don't carefully craft my writing most of the time. I have a methodical, mathematical sort of mind; I am obsessively organized; I prefer clarity to obfuscation; and I am reasonably well-read. My communications training, if I can be said to have had any, is in technical writing. This makes it not hard for me to churn out halfway-decent pieces of writing without really trying very hard.

But I am not sure I can really teach writing, because it is the sort of thing I do without having to think about it much. I think I can teach revising, but I don't know how to teach the act of creation.

I stumbled a little bit over five-paragraph essays when my oldest was in fourth grade and finally appealed to H., who is a much more Englishy person than me, could she please pretty please take over English?

"BOOK II.
Atreus' son Achilles did hate
His heart for him unclean
So Achilles asked his mother
To give a lying dream.
To Agamemnon it was sent
And said he would not fail,
But when he tested his men's loyalty
All his soldiers tried to sail,
And in the bustling chaos
Odysseus stopped the flight
And hit the cowardly men
No Acheans would leave that night."

Our little co-schooled class of middle schoolers -- an eighth-grade girl and two sixth-grade boys -- was studying the Ancients in world history last year, so H. chose to study epic poetry with them. She spent the first part of the year with how-to-analyze-a-story fundamentals, which she taught using children's literature, and then they dove into the Iliad. And that was almost the whole rest of the year, except for a few weeks spent on Beowulf at the end. Depth, not breadth.

"BOOK III.
The two husbands of Helen
Did fight for one wife
Among their men on the plain
They engaged in mortal strife.
Paris threw his golden spear
At Menelaus' layered shield,
But off it it reverberated
And landed harmless on the field.
Then Menelaus threw his spear
And through the shield it went
And pierced Paris' breastplate
And the sweaty vest it rent.
Paris still not dead
Menelaus fought with his sword
And when this weapon did shatter
To Athena he did implore.
Then Menelaus grasped the helmet's plume
And Aphrodite flew through the air
For Paris the cow-hide strap did choke,
And for Paris Aphrodite did care."

She was going to have them write a summary of the Iliad anyway, but then she realized that she also wanted them to incorporate the things they'd learned about how the epics were composed and how they were memorized and retold orally and passed from bard to bard, and also various literary and poetic devices, so she decided to have the kids write their summaries in verse.

"BOOK VI.
Bloodthirsty was Agamemnon
Who wouldn't spare a life
His anger against all Trojans
His soul full of strife.
While kind and noble Hector
Found his loving wife,
Agamemnon quickly ended
Adrastus' pleading life."

I don't know how many drafts they went through. I didn't get to hear much of the instruction she gave the kids because I was busy teaching world history to a passel of first through third graders. I do know that the kids composed their own poetry, read it to each other, rattled off lists of rhyming words. H. edited, proofread, and helped let them know when they were trying to use a word in a way that didn't work very well -- they would stretch usage pretty far in an attempt to cram an idea into the meter and rhyme scheme they wanted. In the end each child wrote twenty-four stanzas, one for each book of the Iliad.

"BOOK XIV.
Hera did watch from above
The Achaeans sorely pressed,
And wishing she could aid them
To Zeus she did protest.
And when Zeus did refuse
She quickly went and pressed
The good god of sleep
To put Zeus at rest."

One of the things I really like about co-schooling is that your kids, working with some other adult, really get a chance to surprise you. I would never have guessed that my sixth-grader had this in him -- well, it is mostly in Homer, but the boy took it in and made it his own and transformed it, which is the point of all this narration and retelling and rewriting we keep doing with them.

"BOOK XXIV.
From the sky the gods looked down
On Priam full of despair
For Priam had lost his noblest son
And for Hector he did care.
So Hermes the slayer of Argon
To Priam quickly wine
And bid Priam not worry
'To guide you I was sent.'
So Priam traveled through the night
Guided by Hermes' glint
And through the Achaean gates they traveled
To Achilles' golden tent.
And passing Achaean lines
They entered Achilles' shelter,
And when Achilles turned to his guest
Each saw a man who was better.
And then Priam spoke with grief
And for the body he did implore,
'O Achilles I beg for my son
That is why I have come to your door.'
And Achilles thinking of his father
Gave the body of Priam's son
And Priam returned to fabled Troy,
And the burning was quickly done."

Treasure-hunting.

My eleven-year-old recently sat for his first set of fill-in-the-bubbles, comprehensive nationally standardized tests.  Till now we've fulfilled our legal obligations with an annual sitting of the PIAT-R or "Peabody" test, which is administered verbally; I like that format for younger children, but of course I'd prefer my older kids to get comfortable with the format they'll be using for college boards and the like.

I'm satisfied with his performance, but I had to point out to him something that amused me about his lowest score.  It was on the topic "Searching for Information" on the "Reference Materials" test.  

Let's just put it this way:  When was the last time you used an almanac?  When was the last time anyone used an almanac?    Isn't the answer to "Where would you find this sort of information?" always "Google it" now?

Don't get me wrong, I'll sit down with him and teach him about the various uses of an almanac, a multivolume alphabetical dead-tree encyclopedia, an atlas -- heck, I'll teach him about the Guinness Book of World Records if I have to.  But I'm afraid it's going to have to be a history lesson.

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The instant availability of searchable information has affected far more academic pursuits than those of schoolchildren writing reports about the annual rainfall in Colorado or the principal exports of Nicaragua.

I had this thought while reading over Melanie's latest installment in her "Blogging T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" series.  

The Waste Land is an exceptionally intricate poem, exceptionally difficult to analyze -- even to read and experience.  Advanced high school students can deal with something like The Hollow Men;  The Waste Land, by contrast, is packed full of so many allusions and references that the person who aspires to read it and understand it with any degree of ease must either possess

(1) a wide-ranging literary background including some facility in several languages  --OR--

(2)  a heavily annotated edition of the poem in which all the literary references are explained to you.

Number one is difficult, and renders the poem inaccessible to almost everyone.   Number two is not so hard to come by, but it is not very fun, and it also ruins the experience of sitting and reading.

That has been what it takes, for many years.

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But now, our information environment is so very different -- the experience of reading something like The Waste Land is more like a treasure hunt.  The reader reads along, comes upon a place that catches the eye:  Here is something intriguing; what can it mean?  

So, for example, in lines 31-34 of the poem, you come to this:

Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu/Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?

And hey,  I can recognize it as German, but I don't speak or read German.  I can guess at some of this (fresh is the wind? my Irish child?) but not much.  

But it's a simple matter to Google the whole mess and to discover that the passage is a quote from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. 

You could follow the links that are all about The Wasteland, of course, and other people's ideas about why Eliot quoted Tristan und Isolde just here, and why this passage.  That is, you could if you were in a hurry, or if you wanted to cheat, and if you were more interested in hearing what other people think than in thinking about the poem yourself.  (Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want.)

But if you are more interested in the treasure hunt, and coming up with your own ideas, you could instead turn to Googling Tristan und Isolde, in which case you'd discover that there is a British movie version released in 2006, and you'd also find the Wikipedia page with a synopsis, with a synopsis, plus other topics such as the influence of Schopenhauer on the plot of the opera.  

Maybe you would follow the Schopenhauer thread ("Hm, it says here 'The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires!' Could that be a theme of The Waste Land?") or maybe you would keep searching until you found a translation of just that bit of the passage.  That might lead you to compare different translations, as Melanie has in her latest post.  

We can meet the poem in a sort of middle ground now.  Even people who haven't had a really top-notch literary education can have all the references at their fingertips, and we can follow the rabbit trails of the poem as we will with relative ease.  We can do this now without having to passively listen to a lecturer explaining each line at a time, or passively checking the footnotes of our annotated edition.  Now we can read and enjoy it actively, individually, according to what strikes our fancy; exploring and discovering the poem on our own.  

Something like The Waste Land  is no longer a sealed message from one high-end mind to its fellows, accessible only to those privileged by a lavish education or the luxury of enough leisure time to become self-taught.  It is now almost like a puzzle carefully crafted by Eliot, a puzzle that the ordinary literate person can tease apart bit by bit, independently, or perhaps in a conversation among friends -- like the one unfolding in Melanie's combox.

If you enjoy that sort of thing, it's fun.  A lot more fun for me than it was before the Internet.   And if anyone ever asks me "In what source of information would you look to find out the analysis of a difficult piece of literature?" I'll be filling in the circle that goes with "the blogosphere."

"Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits/Who walked back into burning houses to die with men..."

Marc Barnes at Bad Catholic put up a post today in which he quoted a few lines from a poem by C. S. Lewis that I didn't know -- a poem that appeared to mock the idea that the modern world is falling into "paganism," on the grounds that paganism is much cooler and certainly manlier than whatever it is the modern world is falling into today.   I thought my classics-loving 11-year-old would like it, so I went looking.

Here's the poem, Googled and presented for your enjoyment.

Cliche Came Out of Its Cage

by C. S. Lewis

1

You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'. 
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour 
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave 
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush 
Arose (it is the mark of freemen's children) as they trooped, 
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. 
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, 
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, 
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged 
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die 
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. 
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune 
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; 
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears ... 
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? 
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, 
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. 
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll 
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; 
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, 
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, 
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope 
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; 
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die 
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong 
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, 
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. 
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits 
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, 
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals 
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. 
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; 
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event 
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Fun, isn't it?

Homeschooling in the afternoon.

I need a break from the gluttony posts, so I am going to do a homeschooling poll/bleg.

You know how there is this sort of unstated Standard of Good Homeschoolers that we all believe in, where you get up bright and early, start right after breakfast, and finish it all early so the kids have the afternoon to play and relax?

We don't do this. Never have been able to. We often don't finish till 4 or 5. I don't deal well with other people early in the morning, and I need a big break in the middle of the day.

Who else is like me? Who likes afternoon school better than morning school? How do you get everybody going in the afternoon and ready for work?

Securing the food supply.

A phrase in my last gluttony post fairly jumped out at me today as I re-read it over my eggs Benedict.

...[I]t is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  

The phrase is "to secure one's food supply."

It jumped out at me because it so perfectly encapsulates the constant feeling of need I used to have, all the fretting about my next snack or my next meal, before I got better, before the weight came off.  It sums up perfectly the remnants, almost like flashbacks, that I still have once in a while -- the sudden urges that I've learned to dismiss (most of the time), the odd tendencies I still have to fret about whether I've bought enough for the dinner guests.  

Back when I was heavy, I was always trying to secure my food supply.

Never mind that my food supply was not at risk; I had a constant feeling that I had to secure my food supply.

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Once I remember feeling faint at school and being taken to the cafeteria -- I remember sitting there with my saltine crackers and paper cup of juice, feeling naughty and special for being out of class.

That used to happen a lot:  the bottom would fall out of my brain and I couldn't think until I got something to eat.  A strange panic would rise, and I would go looking for food.   Within a few bites of, say, a cheeseburger, I would feel oddly soothed, relieved; but the panicky feeling wouldn't go away until I no longer felt the slightest twinge of anything that resembled hunger.  I would have to eat until I literally felt full before I felt safe.

This would happen between meals.

At meals there was never any question of stopping before I was stuffed. I hated that feeling of "head-hungry," not being able to concentrate; it always hit long before I felt "stomach-hungry."  I tried to prevent it by eating in advance.

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Though this is the first time I've lit upon this phrase, I've known about this problem for a long time.   One of my very first gluttony/weight loss posts on this blog, "What's wrong with me," identified the problem as "an  irrational fear of getting hungry:"

Consider the evidence: 

• I tend to "stock up" at meals by eating extra.  I catch myself explicitly thinking, "I'd better eat more now so I won't get hungry later."  
• There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don't taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time.  White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers.  I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem.  (No wonder going low carb helped me.  Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)  
• I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat.  If people around me are eating, I do too.  If there's still food on the table, I have another helping.  If something will be thrown out if I don't eat it, I eat some.
• I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven't yet planned when and where we're going to stop for the next meal. 
• I get irrationally irritated when I'm over at someone's house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason.  I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, "So, when's dinner going to be ready?"   I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it's really hard!
• My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being "enough" food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. "Erin!  Chill out!  If we get hungry we'll make some sandwiches!"  Doesn't matter.  Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
• Oh, and then there's this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it.  The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend's house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there.  I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year. 

Ready to psychoanalyze me yet?  Look, you can call it "gluttony" if you want.  I won't shy away from that term.  It is a self-centered way to be, I'm tired of it, and I'd be a better person if I overcame it.

Obviously I long ago "named and claimed" it as gluttony.  But looking at it deeper, what I was trying to do -- the reason I behaved as a glutton -- was "securing my food supply."

Even though, as I said, my food supply was not. ever. at. risk.

It's a little bit crazy.

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I could quite readily believe that the need to secure my food supply originated in my brain or body chemistry, and that it had something to do with the hypoglycemia and the insulin resistance that I pretty clearly experienced.  It's the hormones that drive hunger and cravings, most notably insulin; maybe there are more yet to be discovered (after all, ghrelin and leptin were only discovered in the mid-1990s).  Maybe there's some hormone that drives food-supply-securing behavior, some kind of hunting and gathering and storing away.     Something that drives you to stab people with your salad fork when they try to steal your French fries.  Something that drives you to hide your favorite ice cream in the back of the freezer where no one else can get it.  Something that drives you to eat "so you won't get hungry later" even if you're not hungry.  Something that drives you to fret all the time about whether you made enough food for everyone.

(What should we call this hypothetical hormone?  I vote for "squirrelin.")

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This isn't the only body-brain mismatch I've experienced.  Here's a bit from (believe it or not) a 2009 meditation on Holy Thursday:

Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again -- I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness -- my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something -- I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  

 It wasn't very nice of me to wake up my friend's parents, because I knew perfectly well that I had no "real" reason to seek help.  I put it off and put it off and finally my will snapped and I couldn't bear to be alone anymore.

I wonder now if this is a little bit analogous to resisting the cravings for unhelpful food at the wrong times.  I wrote that gluttony comes in once you know when and what you're supposed to eat, and once you've put the plan in place to get rid of all the obvious external barriers to doing "the right thing" by your endocrine system.    Gluttony's what's you're up against when you know what you are supposed to eat and you know why and there's nothing stopping you except your own lack of will.  

But that's sort of like saying that I was up against uncharity, selfishness, that night that I was sweating by the phone, wanting to call, knowing that I wasn't in any true danger, knowing that I would wake my friend's parents up and ruin their sleep if I called.  I knew if I called I would inconvenience several people and if I didn't call until morning the only thing that would happen was I would suffer for a few hours.   Oh, but it was hard, and in the end selfishness won out; I rationalized that I needed to call, and that they would not be so inconvenienced, and that was the end of that.

Yes, I was selfish.  But in part it's because I managed to convince myself "What I'm about to do isn't nearly as bad as what I'm going through now."

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So I wonder about that.  

I can point to my panic attack and say, "Well, I had this ideopathic reaction in my sympathetic nervous system, and it created an illusion that I needed something, and that I could get that thing (another person's voice) only by inconveniencing another person.  Even though I knew rationally I had no real need, ultimately I rationalized that my perceived need superseded another person's real need, and that is why I behaved uncharitably."

Can I point to my bingeing and hoarding and say, "Well, something in my endocrine system created this constant, low-level illusion that my food supply was endangered.   Even though I knew rationally that I would never really go hungry or even miss a meal, I rationalized that this constant need to secure my personal food supply superseded my obligations to my health and to others, and that is why I developed my habit of gluttony."

It is not an excuse.  It is more of a diagnosis.  A "motivation" for gluttony.  And I think that understanding that motivation, understanding that I had a fear of hunger, was something that helped me, finally, tear it out (if incompletely) by the roots.

I think there can be other motivations in other people.  I'll speculate about some possibilities in another post.  

In the meantime, if you think you might be a glutton, but it has nothing to do with securing your food supply, tell your story in the combox.

Why, even if illness causes obesity, you've still got to deal with gluttony to get well.

In my post Untangling the Threads of Gluttony I asserted that none of the prevailing obesity narratives correctly account for the role of gluttony in weight gain and weight loss.  

In a subsequent post, I defended the notion that gluttony isn't typically the cause of obesity, on the grounds that a quite-ordinary, moderate-looking American diet seems, for many, to begin the slide into metabolic syndrome -- frequently, starting in childhood, when moral culpability is low -- and once it starts, it's self-perpetuating because the individual so afflicted supposedly perceives normal hunger signals, but the signals are actually driving abnormal eating.  As Aquinas wrote, "The sin of gluttony is... extenuated... on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable."  Metabolic syndrome destroys the body's ability to discern and regulate what to eat. 

Then I considered whether insulin resistance can cause gluttony.  I proposed that it can, because (even if metabolic syndrome destroys the body's innate ability to discern and regulate what to eat) it is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).  The same thing can happen in a person who doesn't suffer from metabolic syndrome, but I suggest that metabolic syndrome can be a trigger.

Now I want to write about gluttony as the barrier to weight loss.

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It almost sounds as if I have come back around to the calorie-is-a-calorie theory.  First I said "No, gluttony isn't why people gain weight."  Now I'm basically saying "Yes, but you have to overcome gluttony in order to lose weight."

(It isn't a contradiction, any more than saying "Nicotine cravings don't cause people to become smokers, but to stop smoking, people have to learn to resist cravings for nicotine.") 

Metabolic syndrome -- insulin resistance -- destroys or severely damages the body's innate means of discerning and regulating what is suitable.  But we do have another means of discerning and regulating what is suitable, and that is our own intellect and willpower.  It's a shoddy substitute for a working endocrine system.  But it is what we have.  And we have to get it working, at least in a rudimentary fashion,  before we run up against our gluttony.

The control-system patch that we jerry-rig from our intellect and willpower is glitchy and buggy.  

Bug #1:  Discernment.  Our intellect can have the wrong theory about what to eat, how much, and when.  Gotta get that right first.

Bug #2:  Regulation.  Our intellect can have the wrong ideas about how to arrange the details (who will shop?  where will I store food?  what will I do if I get hungry?) so that we don't have to rely as much on our willpower.  

But once you can discern what to eat (thanks to a working theory of what to eat, how much, and when) and regulate what to eat (thanks to a working plan of arranging your life so you can, theoretically, easily do what you're supposed to do) you don't get your "extenuating pass" from the sin of gluttony anymore.  

You are now ready to deal with...

...Bug #3:  Willpower is weak. In other words:  Here is where the gluttony comes in.  If you are a glutton, now is when you will discover it.

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 OK.  So, let's suppose that it turns out that the Taubes folks are right, that the answer to "what to eat" is "sharply reduce carbohydrates."  

And let's suppose that you have worked out the most feasible specific diet to do that.   This is going to vary person to person, from "total elimination of all carbs but a few bites of green leafy vegetables a day," through "cut back everything across the board and that will decrease my carb load," all the way up to "fairly normal diet, except I try not to eat a lot of sugar, bread, or pasta."  Because some people have to cut back a little, and others have to cut back a lot, to see results.  It's not fair, but it appears to be true.

And let's suppose that you have some strategies in place to overcome obvious external barriers:  you're planning menus, and you're getting the shopping done, and you've removed unnecessary temptations from your environment, and you have a plan for what to do when you eat out, etc.

You still might have to say no to things you want to have.

And if you find that it's really really hard to do this... you may be dealing with gluttony.

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Back to the definition of gluttony I came up with:

Gluttony is eating behavior that flouts the restraints

of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.

Now that you know that you should avoid (say) sugar for the sake of your health, if you refuse to be bound by this constraint, if you keep saying "Gosh darn it, I don't care about my blood sugar, I want a handful of gummy bears,"  you are dealing with gluttony.

(I'm not talking about the rational decision in advance to allow yourself a portion of chocolate every day because you judge it's a permissible pleasure, or a plan to have small desserts on the weekends so you can learn to enjoy them in moderation.  I'm talking about the decision, in the moment, to ignore the plan you've already set for yourself because you want cake NOW.)

It's understandable that it will be difficult to follow your plan in the face of real hunger signals that urge you to eat, or drive cravings for something that you know you shouldn't have, at least not now.  But if you really know you really should resist them, then it's gluttony that you have to resist.

Disobeying the rules you've set for yourself is probably the biggest problem, but you may discover other depths of gluttony that you didn't know you had.  Take charity, for instance.  If you suddenly become seriously stressed out and scream at everyone because the children ate your special sugar-free breath mints and you have to have those breath mints to keep from eating between meals then you are exhibiting what is basically a gluttony problem.  You are letting your food issues interfere with your generosity and kindness.

And manners.  If you are invited to someone's house for dinner and you have to pointedly scrape all the breading off your chicken, where they can see it, because they are  ruining your diet and they should know better, then you are letting your food issues interfere with your manners.  You may have never been this kind of a dinner guest before.  Having an eating plan that you are trying to stick to may bring this hidden gluttony out.

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The good news is that it's supposed to get easier as you go, because the more you heal your blood sugar problem, the less you'll have to deal with hunger and cravings.  But to start to heal, you have to work to resist the hunger and cravings.  There is not much way around this.  You will want cake, and there will be cake, and you will have to make a lot of individual decisions not to eat the cake that's right there and that you really want.

If you cannot -- will not -- make a lot of those decisions go in the right direction, you won't get better and it won't get physiologically easier.

You also have to deal with the force of habit, which is not so physiological, but still a strong force keeping you in that rut.  This is another thing that gets easier as you go -- provided you are not asking too much of yourself at once.  One step at a time, one small change at a time, may be more effective in the long run for the mind.

There's a certain tension here.  The physiology will react more quickly to a drastic change (the more carb-load you can remove at once, the quicker your blood sugar and insulin resistance will start to heal).  But the psychology, it seems, does not change quickly, and more-incremental changes may be more likely to stick.

Which just reinforces the notion that the path to healing (or redemption, depending on how you look at gluttony) is excruciatingly individual.

 

Can insulin resistance cause gluttony?

Before we consider whether people who are sick with insulin resistance develop gluttony as a symptom -- let's consider gluttony in healthy, non-obese, non-insulin-resistant people.

"Pure" gluttony, in other words.  Gluttony that's not mitigated by illness.

And we'll use my own definition of gluttony.  Which, by the way, doesn't contradict Aquinas's definitions of "too much, too soon, too eagerly, too daintily (pickily), too expensively" -- it's more that it attempts to clarify them, to show what's meant by "too..." in these clauses.  That is,

 

Gluttony is eating behavior that flouts the restraints

of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.

First let's consider a physically healthy person with normal hunger pangs.  When his body runs short on fuel, generally close to mealtime, he starts to get hungry and think about food.

If the healthy, hungry person is not a glutton:

• he is willing to share some of his food with other people
• he is willing to follow household rules such as "don't spoil your dinner" or "don't eat those crackers I'm saving for the party" or institutional rules such as "employees may not eat at their desks"
• he is willing to resist desires for food that doesn't fit into his budget
• he is willing to resist desires for meals that he believes won't promote health  -- even if what he wants is to eat a big bag of chips, he can choose to eat (say) a few chips and some fruit or nuts instead; he knows to stop eating or drinking when he's had so much that he'll feel sick
• he is willing to resist eating if it's not "permitted" -- he is willing to fast from meat on Lenten Fridays, or he is willing to resist eating factory-farmed meat if he believes it's not ethical, or to fast for a number of hours before a medical test, etc.
• he is willing to eat with attention to social norms, e.g., slowly enough to carry on a conversation and to keep from making a mess, and observing cultural norms of graceful dining.

If the healthy, hungry person is a glutton:

• he may say "No, I don't have enough to share; get your own" and may even steal food
• he may not care about rules for when, where, and what may be eaten, and may sneak food 
• he may spend too much money so he can eat the food he wants to eat, when he wants to eat it
• he may care more about eating what he wants to eat than about eating food that will support his health, and may eat or drink so much that he feels physically ill later
• he may complain that it's unbearable to observe required fasts or to abstain from proscribed foods
• he may be focused so narrowly on eating and drinking that he doesn't care if he spills, slurps, belches, or ignores his dining companions

Healthy people, who know better and have free will, commit all these acts from time to time -- and I name these acts "gluttony."  You have seen one balancing a cheeseburger on his steering wheel while he changes lanes.  You have read one griping about Ash Wednesday on her mommyblog.  You have caught one taking the last helping of mashed potatoes without asking if anyone else wants some. One has eaten the cookie dough out of the bowl even though it has raw eggs in it.  Another has said "yes, please" to that tasty stuff that gives him heartburn.   Another has woken up with a terrible hangover.  

Who hasn't done this kind of thing, once in a while? 

But some healthy people do this a lot, and I name them "gluttons."

What is it that turns a healthy person into a glutton?  Concupiscence.  Selfishness.  Narcissism.  Short-term thinking.  Habit.  Mistaking other people's reasonable desires and needs for unreasonable demands.    Mistaking his own wants for needs that must be gratified.  Deciding that the rules don't apply to him, or that it's okay as long as he doesn't get caught.  

Most of us do this at least once in a while, but some do it constantly.  Some have fallen into a habit of gluttony.

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It's important to note that the gluttonous behaviors listed above are gluttonous no matter how hungry the person happens to feel.  They would be gluttonous if the person was only feeling a bit peckish.  They would also be gluttonous if the person had missed a meal and felt positively ravenous.  The culpability of gluttony is mitigated somewhat when hunger feels unbearable, but the behavior is still gluttonous.  

This happened to me the other day.  I came home from church at 12:45 and was feeling woozy from low blood sugar.  (Something about the timing of the eleven o'clock Mass ruins me.  I can't quite figure it out.)  Mark went upstairs to take care of something or other and left me searching  irritably in the kitchen; while children clung to my legs and whined for food and milk, I whined back at them that I had to eat my own lunch first and then I could take care of them.  In one sense, I really did need to eat first, and my judgment was impaired.  But I could at least have asked Mark or an older child for help instead of just yelling.  So, yeah.  Gluttonous, even when very hungry.  But it's not too surprising that I got gluttonous just then, because I was in a weakened state.

So.  Gluttony is more likely when you're weak from feelings of hunger.  It's also mitigated  -- we're less culpable when we're in a weakened state.  

But it's more likely.

And if the insulin-resistance crowd is to be believed, then people with insulin resistance spend a lot of time in that weakened state.  They get hungrier, and they get hungry more often.  So they're maybe more often tempted to behave gluttonously:  eating uncharitably, breaking rules, ignoring manners.

Their guilt is mitigated because they are weak.  God knows they are weak.  God knows that illness makes it harder for them.

But they still have to live with the consequences imposed by nature.

And one of the natural consequences of frequently indulging in abnormal behavior is that it becomes its own new norm.  It becomes a habit.

Just as a healthy person who ignores constraints too often can develop a habit of gluttony, a sick person, giving in frequently to strong temptations that overcome the "shoulds" and "oughts," can develop a habit of gluttony.  

And after a while, the sick person might start to believe that hunger is not resistable under any circumstances.  The sick person might start to fear the discomfort of hunger.  And isn't so much sin grounded in an unreasonable fear of suffering -- even slight suffering?

She can't give some of her French fries to her children, because she might be too hungry later.  She can't resist storing some snacks in a desk drawer, though it's against workplace rules, and she rationalizes that she (unlike those others) really needs it.  She can't wait to get home for lunch even though she and her husband agreed to curtail the restaurant budget.  She always has to finish the first plate of food before she comes up for air and conversation.  She must taste the soup one more time to make sure it's good enough before she serves it.  

Frequent out-of-line behavior, in response to frequent understandable weakness, becomes frequent out-of-line behavior, in response to... less and less.   Habit reinforces habit.  And many gluttonous indulgences makes one glutton.

Years of insulin resistance, of unrestrained eating in response to physiological weakness, can -- I think -- generate more unrestrained eating in response to the force of habit.  That habit may stand between the sickness and the cure, and I suspect it can even persist after physiological "cure" has been achieved.

Gluttony doesn't (typically) cause obesity.

A couple of days ago, I wrote that the existing competing narratives of obesity don't really "get" the role of gluttony right, because they lack philosophical grounding in the nature of gluttony.  

The calorie-is-a-calorie crowd say that gluttony -- eating too much -- is the whole problem, with some contribution from sloth, and if people would just eat less they'd get thin.  They've got the biochemistry wrong, and have unfairly accused fat people of causing their own disease by being gluttons.  

The insulin-resistance people (think Gary Taubes) have the chemistry right, in my opinion, but they reject the idea of gluttony playing a part at all.  I think that's wrong too.  Even though I'm convinced that metabolic syndrome exists and is caused by a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar and that it perpetuates a vicious cycle of eating and craving, I think gluttony is involved, and beating gluttony is part of the cure.

In this post (and a couple more) I want to explore the role of gluttony in obesity.  Starting with the question:  Does gluttony -- technically defined gluttony -- cause obesity?

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The insulin-resistance crowd, whom I think is correct as regards the biochemistry, says No:  Gluttony, or "eating too much," does not cause obesity; obesity is caused by eating the wrong things, not too much of everything.  Eating more than you burn doesn't cause weight gain; weight gain causes eating more than you burn.

But we aren't actually interested in that answer, because it's the answer to the wrong question.  The common, ordinary meaning of "glutton" is just "someone who eats too much."  That's the definition they are using.  But moral philosophers have defined "gluttony" more broadly than that for hundreds of years.  Recall that Aquinas subdivided gluttony into five categories:  eating too expensively, too daintily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly. Aquinas was also perfectly aware that it didn't count as a sin if you didn't realize you were eating out of order, or if you had doctor's orders, or something like that.  

More recently, I proposed an alternate definition of gluttony that drew brighter lines:   Gluttony, I wrote, is eating behavior that flouts the restraints of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners.  These sound more promising ways to pin the blame on gluttony, especially when it comes to the "health" bit.  But I agree with Aquinas that it can't count as a sin if you don't know your eating is wrong -- if you think you need the food. 

If we use Aquinas's definitions, the following are obvious:

1. Gluttony could  be a cause of obesity, if eating too much causes obesity.  
2. But even if eating too much did cause obesity,  gluttony wouldn't necessarily be the problem because eating too much doesn't qualify as gluttony if the eater has good reason to believe it wasn't too much.  For example, if he was truly experiencing feelings of hunger.

Seeking out food when you're hungry is not gluttonous behavior; it's normal behavior.

And guess what?  One of the things that metabolic syndrome causes is hunger and carbohydrate cravings.  This is from Why We Get Fat:

Even before we begin eating, insulin works to increase our feeling of hunger.... we begin secreting insulin just by thinking about eating... and this insulin secretion then increases within seconds of taking our first bite.  It happens even before we begin to digest the meal, and before any glucose appears in the bloodstream.  This insulin serves to prepare our bodies for the upcoming flood of glucose by storing away other nutrients in the circulation -- particularly fatty acids. ...

...The insulin makes us hungry by temporarily diverting nutrients out of the circulation and into storage... The greater the blood sugar and insulin response to a particular food, the more we like it -- the better we think it tastes....

[T]he fatter [predisposed people] get, the more they'll crave carbohydrate-rich foods, because their insulin will be more effective at stashing fat and protein in their muscle and fat tissue, where they can't be used for fuel.

Once we get resistant to insulin... we'll ... have longer periods during every twenty-four hours when the only fuel we can burn is the glucose from carbohydrates.  The insulin, remember, is working to keep protein and fat and even glycogen... safely stashed away for later.  It's telling our cellls that there is blood sugar in excess to be burned, but there's not.  So it's glucose we crave.

Grossly oversimplified, elevated insulin is supposed to make you hungry, makes you want to eat carbs in particular, and makes you store fat at the same time.  So even though from the outside, a heavy person may appear to be eating too much, from the inside the person may be experiencing unbearable hunger.  And hunger is the normal drive to eat.  

I live with one of those weird, always-lean people:

Mostly he eats pretty moderately:  oatmeal for breakfast, soup and salad at lunch, maybe a couple helpings at dinner, a little ice cream at bedtime.  On occasion, however, I have seen him put away what looks to me like an enormous amount of food.  The equivalent of two or three cheeseburgers or something like that in the space of a few minutes.  Is he a closet, occasional glutton?  Perhaps suffering from binge disorder?

No.  The "binges" happen after a day of skiing, or hiking at altitude, or heavy yard work, or maybe rock climbing.  When he exerts himself, he needs to eat more.

As astonishing as it is to people like me who have had to think about food their whole lives, I hear that this is what actually happens in metabolically healthy people.  They don't need to think "Does that workout mean I get to eat more?" because their body tells them to eat more.  So they do.  And we never accuse those people of gluttony -- because they don't look fat.

Anyway, there is no moral difference between a fat person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food, and a thin person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food.  Even if the reason for the hunger is different -- in one person, excess insulin, and in the other person, excess physical activity -- the subjective experience of the need for food may be the same.

 Look, Aquinas knows this:

 ...[T]he sin of gluttony is rather extenuated than aggravated...in consideration of the necessity of taking food, as also on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable on such occasions.

Gluttony is mitigated insofar as it is difficult to "discern" and "regulate" what is suitable.  Metabolic syndrome creates a feeling of hunger, and that is exactly what makes it difficult to discern and regulate what is suitable to eat.

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So, if it's true that eating the wrong things (too much sugar and white flour and potatoes, for instance) creates metabolic syndrome, can that count as gluttony?  Maybe under the "too expensively" or "too daintily" categories?  

It might, if a person (before they developed the syndrome) knew that they were eating too much of the wrong things and obstinately persisted.  

Culpability is hard to establish, though, because in many cases it isn't an entirely free choice to do so:

•  many people begin to develop metabolic syndrome while they are still children, being fed by parents and institutions; 
• government policy has been giving us counterproductive advice for more than a generation;
• the low-fat doctrine is still pushed heavily by schools and physicians; 
• we seemingly reasonably assume that if we're not visibly obese yet, we must be doing okay;
•  the food that promotes metabolic syndrome is ubiquitous, widely advertised, and cheap.

It isn't impossible for gluttony to cause obesity.  But for that to happen you'd have to posit an apparently healthy individual who, as an adult, and knowing that it was bad for him, made a free choice to begin consuming large portions of sugar and white flour until he wrecked his metabolism.

 I think this might happen sometimes.  It's the sort of thing that people say will happen to kids who are raised in homes barren of soda pop and sugary cereal:  As soon as they're out on their own, they'll go crazy, subsisting on fast food, Cheez Whiz, and Captain Crunch.  (One of my friends in grad school claimed to have known a guy in her college dorm who actually got scurvy his freshman year.)

Most of the time, though, I think we just sort of slide into metabolic syndrome, not by eating a diet that is obviously unhealthy, but by eating... the normal American diet.  Normal Americans drink soda, eat white bread and white rice, and consume a lot of sugar in the course of an ordinary day.  Some are more susceptible than others, and those people develop metabolic syndrome, gain weight, and get hungrier -- so they begin to eat regularly in a way that looks like gluttony, from the outside.  But because of the subjective experience of hunger, we can't automatically call it that.

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The next question I want to consider is whether metabolic syndrome causes gluttony, of any of the types that Aquinas identified or that I reclassified.  I've already written that eating in response to real hunger isn't, I think, gluttonous.  But is that the only kind of behavior change created by metabolic syndrome?  

I'm going to cover that in another post.

Where to start with gluttony: some links back to my archives.

Christine, in the comments to the last posts, asked "Where to start with gluttony?"

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I reviewed Gary Taubes's book some time ago in three parts, and I think these are some of my best gluttony posts, especially the second and third one.

•  here is an introduction, 
• here is where I explain why the book lacks the necessary real-life context to be considered a "diet book," 
• here is where I start to explore why gluttony isn't off the hook -- even if it doesn't cause fatness.

 

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Here is the part where I cheekily suggest a definition of gluttony, complete with new categories, that I prefer to Thomas Aquinas's.  (Yes, I really am claiming to have improved on the Summa Theologica.) Here's my new post-Summa definition of gluttony:

The sin of gluttony is the refusal to eat within the restraints imposed on us by charity, obedience, resources, health, religious/ethical duties, and manners.   

(The weakness of gluttony is the inability to eat within those restraints.)

 

Aquinas's definition of gluttony seems to have one glaring problem:  it lacks a bright-line rule.  "Gluttony means inordinate appetite in eating," he tells us, and we rightly ask:  What do you mean, "inordinate?"  Out of accord with the natural order of things, one supposes....

We've been over this before:   we can be a glutton by eating too expensively, too daintily ("pickily"), too much, too soon, or too eagerly.  

This is a nice categorization because it expands the usual definition of gluttony, but it still leaves us asking:  But Thomas, what do you mean by "too" anything?  If one can eat "too" expensively, then surely one can eat "just expensively enough," and so forth.  Where is the line?  How do we know when we've crossed over from eating promptly, to eating "too soon?"  Eating with relish, and eating "too eagerly?"   Selecting good food and being a glutton of pickiness?

I think the answer is that gluttony, like most concupiscence, abhors restraint; what makes gluttony different from other vices, such as sloth or lust, is that the restraints it abhors all have to do with food.  

Different people live under different sets of restraints, some more stringent than others; and different times call for different restraints; so the boundaries of gluttony cannot be defined clearly as a set of rules that are appropriate for everyone.   And so eating quite a lot of food, or eating expensive food, or eating at odd times, isn't inherently gluttonous; what makes it gluttonous is if the eater is supposed to be exercising restraint, but isn't.

If I may say so myself, I think it's worth reading the whole thing.  Rather than Aquinas's categories of gluttony as eating "too expensively, too pickily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly" my categories -- stripped of the vague modifier "too" -- could be phrased as 

• eating inconsiderately
• eating disobediently
• eating wastefully
• eating unhealthfully
• eating irreligiously (or, if you are not religious, substitute "unethically")
• eating rudely.

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Oh, and for the people who would like to eat low-carb but feel bad about the environmental impact of consuming so many more animal products:   here are some things to keep in mind for improving the sustainability of lower-carb eating.  I am rather fond of this article.  The short of it is:

1. Eating enough fats and oils, and not too much protein, will alleviate the famous unpleasant side effects of low-carb diets. 
2. Don't overestimate your daily protein requirements.  Three grams for each ten pounds you weigh is a good rule of thumb for the minimum.  You could eat more, of course, but you don't necessarily need more.
3. Eat your veggies, and eat them with plenty of tasty, tasty fats and oils -- enough to give you all the energy you require over and above your calories from protein.
4. Don't waste so damn much food, especially protein.  Avoidable food waste is the most shameful portion of our environmental impact.  
5. Choose animal products that make efficient use of agricultural protein.  In order, the most efficient "ordinary" sources from the grocery store are dairy; eggs, tied with aquacultured fish; chickens; pork; beef.  (Wholly grass-fed beef, or beef fed on non-human-edible agricultural residue, is great if you can get it, but not everyone can get it).

Untangling the threads of gluttony.

As I have been struggling with weight maintenance more than usual this month, I have found myself contemplating the two dominant narratives about weight loss and weight gain, and why neither of them ultimately satisfies.

Here they are, in brief:

"A calorie is a calorie." Weight gain is caused by eating more calories than you burn, and storing the extra as fat; to lose weight, burn all the calories that you eat, plus extra that come out of your fat stores. In this narrative, the amount of calories is far more important than the type of food the calories come from. People who cannot lose weight are people who have a gluttony problem.

"Insulin resistance and glycemic load." Gluttony does not cause people to gain weight. Excess adiposity -- fatness -- is a symptom of metabolic syndrome, an endocrine disease. The disease comes from a diet that has more sugar and refined carbohydrate than the body can handle, because of an environment that constantly pushes such foods. The only cure for the endocrine system is to cut back on carbohydrate load, and some people have to cut back drastically for a long time to see results. People who cannot lose weight are people who have not tried the right cure, who have not tried a drastic enough cure, or who have not yet given it enough time to work.

I think the insulin-resistance theory has the chemistry right, but it gets gluttony wrong. It is enormously comforting for a heavy person to hear that gluttony is not the cause of his fatness, and it is even more comforting to hear that it is unnecessary to beat gluttony in order to get better. The message from the insulin-resistance crowd is "You are not bad or weak; you are just sick. Take the cure and you will get better."

The calorie-is-a-calorie theory has the chemistry wrong, but it doesn't have the gluttony part entirely right either. It persists, by the way, because it is so comforting to the not-fat people. The people who can control their weight get to go on, like Job's friends, believing in the essential justice of the universe: that person can't get thinner because she is weak-willed and lazy. The laws of thermodynamics make it so. Perversely, there is some comfort for heavy people: I am this way because I deserve it and because the universe is just; but there is hope for me, because if only I can become a better person, I will surely lose the weight and become beautiful and accepted. Someday I will.

Americans don't grok gluttony because they don't grok sin and human failings in general. We believe in an essential dichotomy: Either a man's failing is his own damn fault, so we stigmatize and punish it, and maybe (if we are religious) call it "sin;" or it is someone else's fault, so we try to pass laws and social programs, and de-stigmatize it and raise awareness. The only difference as you move from Left to Right is which failings are your own damn fault and which failings are someone else's.

But the reality is that we each participate, with varying degrees of freedom, in the flaws and failings that nature and society have thrust upon us. Sin and failings beget sin and failings -- sometimes in other people -- so they spread like a disease. And so it can simultaneously be true that a fat person is sick through no fault of her own, and that she struggles with the sin of gluttony.

Here is what I think is the right way to look at it:

• Gluttony does not cause excess adiposity, nor metabolic syndrome. 
• Too many refined carbs for the particular body to handle causes metabolic syndrome. Of that, excess adiposity -- fatness -- is a symptom.
• Metabolic syndrome contributes to the development of certain types of gluttony. You could say that gluttony is another symptom, along with fatness.
• A person who has metabolic syndrome must fight and beat gluttony in order to apply the prescribed cure.

So the insulin-resistance crowd is correct that gluttony did not make the fat person fat. But the calorie-is-a-calorie crowd is correct that the fat person must overcome gluttony to become thin.

(You have to overcome gluttony, but you have to do it the right way.)

Did I really just say that gluttony, technically a sin for many people and at minimum a human failing of will, is a symptom of a disease? Doesn't the disease mean they aren't guilty of the sin?

 Guilt is mitigated where will is limited, sure, but the mitigation of guilt doesn't destroy the effects of the fault. We all know this, and so does our legal system. Abusers are likely to have been abused themselves, but we don't give them a free pass; if we are merciful we try to help them change, but we do insist that they stop abusing others. So -- gluttons are likely to be sick, and mercy should move us to compassion rather than sneering, but it doesn't change the fact that they will not get better without doing the hard work to overcome gluttony.

It is a sort of hysteresis of disease. We amble accidentally along an easy path from health to sickness. The path from sickness to health is not just the return trip. It is a different, and more arduous one, and it requires from us strengths that we may not find entirely within ourselves.

 

More on this later.