Super-sized Christians?

French fries are my greatest weakness. I long for the possibility of eating endless amounts of heavily salted, "natural-cut" fries with no health consequences. I have had periods of gluttonous eating of French fries (in the past!) and the evidence is now on display around my formally lean stomach. Gluttony is one sinful indulgence towhich Christians usually turn a blind eye. A glutton is someone whose life is driven by and oriented around eating.

There are two types of gluttons: (1) the overeater--this person eats more than is necessary; and (2) the health-food nut--the obsessive calorie counter who is equally anxious about nutritional perfection.

A few questions: Which is the real death stick, by the way, a cigarette or a French fry? Can you eat too many organic carrots? Binge drinking is condemned for college students but what about binge eating? On most college campuses in America, dining halls are nothing more than covered trough centers where students, like pigs, can binge and graze on food without any care for enjoying the goodness of food's aesthetic potentialities.

While there are legitimate psychological and physical (genetic) reasons why some of us are overweight, for most of us, however, we simply eat too much. What message does a church full of fat Christians send to a world who needs to see that living a life in deep communion with Jesus changes everything, including what we do with food? Does the Gospel not affect our eating habits? Should Christians even go to buffets? I've even heard that some people actually binge eat at church functions and no one says a word. We are in the midst of an epidemic of Type-II diabetes that researchers connect to poor diets but we would rather "pooh-pooh" smoking because it can lead to cancer than tell someone that going to Old Country Buffet is just as harmful.

Henry Fairlie has the perfect description of the health-food nut glutton:

One the one hand, there are the dieters and calorie counters; on the other, the addicts of health foods. No one now seems able to rise in the morning and go out to meet the world without stepping on the bathroom scales. These may seem to reflect a self-denying abstemiousness, but there is Gluttony in all of them. . .Each of them shows an inordinate interest in eating, even though it may appear to be in not eating. They make their own fetish of eating. ... They are just as obsessed with their food, even if their attention is fixed only on a raw carrot and a prune ... [and] of the energy and the anxiety that they give to the most natural of functions, (From The Seven Deadly Sins Today).

The health-food gluttons often look down those not eating "organic" food, or not shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joes. And, please, if you eat processed meat you have committed a grave sin against God and humanity! Like the glutton who eats too much, the green glutton has a disproportionate obsession with perfect food. Green gluttons are just as obsessed as over-eaters.

If we took Proverbs 23:20 seriously what would it mean for our lives together? Would we continue to ignore the massive over-eating that lives freely in the life of the church in our gluttonous, overweight, food-obsessed America?