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.

Comments

[LeeAnn Balbirona]

Yes and yes. Nothing more intelligent to add this morning, but I agree. Remembering the differing kinds of gluttony (too much, too fast, too delicate, etc), it is a matter of self-discipline on more than one front. Not just what I eat, but how; there will never be any magic formula of food that I can eat in limitless amounts without having to worry about using restraint eventually. Because restraint itself is good, I think. Hope you had a good mother's day! I finally learned to like shrimp after decades of saying I didn't like shellfish of any kind. It was a milestone! haha

[Jennifer Fitz]

I think it's a little bit confusing because there's a group of people who put on weight, or lose it, by simple lifestyle change. Cutting out seconds, going for a walk . . . it's not difficult or complex for them. A calorie is a calorie, more or less, and gluttony and sloth are the two strings you pull to make the machine get bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker.

And then there's everyone else. But I'm going to guess the situation has long been confusing because the successful dieters were the ones who really could just cut out an extra bowl of ice cream and lose the ten pounds, no problem.

[Christine]

Help me work on gluttony. Point me in the right direction!