It bothers me when people equate dietary efforts with religious or moral terms. Like a sinful chocolate dessert or I'm being so good today. It's not overly surprising, especially looking at the morality of our culture, but it really does bother me. I'm not planning to go through the forum and bash everyone who says things this way, I just thought it might make an interesting discussion. Hopefully not something too warlike, although I put it here just in case.

I think it's because people tie in the fact that if you're fat, you're somehow morally lacking. You're lazy, corrupted, or you don't try hard enough. It's as though you sin with food and you don't properly redeem yourself with exercise.

Even people saying "Oh, I'm being so good today" in a dietary way kind of bugs me, too. I'm not being "good" today, I'm on target today. I'm focused on my goals today.

Sloth and gluttony are sins according to one set of moral rules.

In my understanding, one causes the other, gluttony causes sloth or sloth causes gluttony. But neither, not even combined, causes obesity. For obesity to exist, one must eat carbohydrates. We can't grow fat by eating too much of anything else. Obesity is the exclusively domain of carbohydrates.

The moral rules don't take the above into account perhaps because the science behind it hadn't even occurred to those who wrote the rules. All they probably had to go on was the result of eating carbohydrates. Eating carbohydrates causes both sloth and gluttony. It causes sloth by reducing the amount of energy the body has access to thus slowing down the metabolism. It causes gluttony by doing the same thing with the effect of increasing hunger. We could easily mistaken those effects as causes of obesity if only because obesity is achieved over a long period where insidiously. We still do even today.

So, if sloth and gluttony are sins, they are so only by virtue of eating carbohydrates. Thus, the original sin is the eating of the apple.

ysabella - you are right. They are not moral issues. About the last thing people need is more guilt complexes, shame blaming added to a complex dietary and nutrition situation. One may say that it is good to take care of yourself, and in that sense all of this is not totally divorced from morality. But successful dieters (and diabetics) do not use a morality model.

I like Martin Levac's views on it. Another point to add is that there is at least one other "moral code" out there that confuses food with evil, at least in terms of specific foods. This is actually a WOE, not a specific religion, but it might as well be a religion as far as many of its participants are concerned. The dogma goes, eating animals is Evil, and abstaining from eating animals is Morally Righteous. I have always wanted to ask one of these people, are carnivores evil because they hunt and eat other animals? Lions, Tigers, Bears...evil? They're just doing what they were designed to do, eating the way they were designed to eat, and healthier for it. Nobody seems to question that Lions for instance would be sickly and die on a meat free diet, but humans are told that they are cruel if they can't thrive on meat free diets.

Oh, hey, responses! Good points, too.

You know what really becomes close to religion, and it happens even on this board, is the idea of Purity. Many people have this idea that there is some ultimate diet, and they have to attain some kind of dietary perfection to lose weight. Often the diets get more and more extreme as people seek greater dietary purity.
And there's often an idea that people who use treat meals as a tool, or use cyclical diets, are somehow lesser than people who stick to a plan with an iron will - even if both are having the same amount of success.

Food in itself isn't evil but I have my doubts about people and companies that produce mass quantities of 'garbage' without any nutritional benefits and market it as acceptable 'snacks' to people that don't know any better all for the almighty dollar.

i tell myself all the time that i'm being good today. it doesn't have anything to do with the things you've mentioned, it has to do with my own difficulty in long term goals and slow weightloss and building frustration. instead, i strive for being good/doing good, day by day, and in that way am less frustrated by slow loss and remind myself of the ultimate goal, which is not weight loss, but one day less of potential diabetes which is rampant within my family. it is not a path i wish to take until i absolutely must. i do not go to doctors, so this is one really great thing i can do for myself to manage my health better and hopefully have a better outcome healthwise in the long term than i might have. it really helps me to remember the ultimate goal more than anything else, and i have a couple of friends, they will either ask me if i'm on plan today (wanting to go out for fast food) and i've found that for some reason, saying it in that way is more apt to cause them to not bug me about deviating from my woe. beats me, but it works, and i need that, as i am one that has great difficulty saying no to people. all in all, i don't mean anything by it in regards to anyone else, it's just a phrase, and one that works well for me, for the reasons i gave. i never really thought it might be an aggravating factor to someone else because i never even considered it sounding the way it sounds to you.

I think as our society becomes much more secular, dietary purity has replaced moral purity, with the ultimate goal being long life instead of everlasting life. Immorality used to be responded to with shame and the guilty were made to feel that they were putting a burden on society at large, by becoming destitute, ill, etc. Nowadays, the guilt is focused on the overweight, who are constantly shamed and told that they are a burden on society, because of increased insurance costs, loss of workplace productivity, etc. (I'm not saying either of those is a real cost of overweight, btw, just that that's what we're told. In fact, I believe there are statistics that show the opposite is true.)

Wow, you really nailed it!! So true on so many levels!

I might agree with this if religion didn't have such an incredible grip on the US, and if this sort of moral judgment of the overweight were something new.

I don't think religion has any kind of grip on the US right now. You may mean that in a political way, and if so, that's not what I mean and I really don't want to get political. All you have to do to see what a secular society we've become is turn on the tv and compare what's on now with what was offered in the fifties. Or look at a school textbook from the ninteenth or early twentieth century. They used to have schoolchildren copying bible verses for handwriting practice! As a matter of fact, when my older sister was in elementary school they would say the Lord's prayer every morning. People today may claim to be religious in polls, but everyday life was quite different as recently as a couple of generations ago, mainly because Christian morality was deeply imbedded in our society.

People used to think a "bad girl" was one who had sex before marriage. Now that's accepted as the norm, but a girl considers herself bad if she eats a piece of cake! While gluttony may have been one of the seven deadly sins, I don't believe being overweight was as scorned as it is now, especially in older people. Gaining weight with advancing age was considered normal. And can you imagine having a president the size of William Taft today?

How do you account for the same shame based view of obesity in the far east?

Or the UK?

Don't know. Western influence? They have McDonald's, jeans and Hollywood movies. Why not also adopt our adoration of thinness?

Wouldn't the same hold true in the UK as the US? England was a Christian nation. IIRC, the great social reforms of the Victorian age were based in Christian morality. I don't think Great Britain would be considered Christian today, though.