Seven Deadly Sins Meditations: Part VII: Gluttony

I know someone who is fat. When she runs, her belly swings back and forth, flapping both against itself and her legs. She is rarely motivated to exercise, save running into the next room to eat her favorite food. She is addicted to a crunchy snack that promises on the container that it has only two calories per serving. The only problem is that like potato chips, she never can stop at one.

This fat individual is my beloved feline, Kiki. The snacks in question are Temptations cat treats. To be fair, my cat is elderly and there's no way I'm going to put her on a diet at this phase in her life. I won't deny her treats, though I can't allow her to eat them 24/7 as is her inclination either.

 

Gluttony is the most common deadly sin of all, thanks to our era of cheap petroleum wealth and the plentiful food and other forms of material excess it creates. My ability to care for a cat (plus a colony of ferals outside) in general is the result of excess: there are many other societies I could have been born into, both in this time and the ones before it, where adopting a pet would not have been feasible. I'm always shocked at how many people don't think about how much food we have compared to those who went before us. Or how many toys children have. Or how big houses have gotten.

Gluttony is Ingratitude

Gluttony is the most disposable form of hoarding. Gluttony means not sharing. Gluttony means taking far more than you need or sometimes taking more than you want. Excess does not occur in a vaccuum; that is to say it always comes from somewhere and at someone's expense. My cat is chubby while children in poorer homes than mine in this very town are going hungry. The slaughterhouse remnants and heaven knows what else that goes into her treats comes from the most hellish places on earth. The big guy stuffing his face at a fancy restaurant means that someone else (or more likely many someone elses) is starving. Shrimp farming not only destroys the most fragile and valuable ecosystems, it employs human slaves. Chocolate is produced by slaves, many of them children. Avocados are the product of violent cartels. Food production is often unfair and violent and the only way to ameliorate this condition is to grow everything you eat, which is obviously far easier said than done. Nevertheless, the throwing up your hands and not even trying because you can't be perfect approach is the number one reason our world is so mucked up, and that's why I don't advocate that form of nihilism.

Let's say there is a sale on chocolate bars. Instead of buying just one or two bars to savor, I scoop the entire shelf of them into my basket because hell, why not. I can afford it! Then I go home and binge. Or maybe I put them all in the freezer for later.  Or sell them for a profit.  The moral here is that I could have let my community share in the treats but instead I chose to stop everyone else from enjoying the chocolate so I could abuse it like an illegal drug.

This sort of tragedy of the commons pops up all over the place, in fact, this scenario played out rather oddly in the form of toilet paper shortages in 2020. Alternately, let's say I have the privilege of free time. I decide to use my free time to binge on Netflix or videogames in place of any work I could do that has a chance of improving myself the world around me. My mindless bingeing spirals into an addiction, and before you know it, shooting zombies in an onscreen fantasy land and/or watching the dramatization of a math teacher who sunk to selling meth becomes how I occupy most of my non-work day.

Everyone should be able to let off a little steam now and then.  Enjoying a little extra food, Netflix, games, or toilet paper is not problematic.  It's when the glut becomes a way of life that we lose appreciation for what we are given.  Inundating oneself in any form of pleasure for weeks, months, and years at a time is the quickest way to become desensitized to that pleasure.  Recovering drug addicts say that they are unable to feel joy in the things that used to bring them joy.  Their threshold to feel good at all has been raised to a stratospheric height.  To glut is to run away from the at first inconvenient/annoying and later on horrendous tests of deprivation.  

The Opposite of Gluttony: Orthorexia 

Ah, the "nothing is ever good or pure enough for me crowd".  I once made an hour and a half trip to Chicago with two friends of mine in order to go to a vegan restaurant on the North side.  My friends, also from the suburbs, traveled with me by train.  When we got to the restaurant, my now ex-friend went full prima donna, refusing to eat at the place because they did not have canned or bottled soda.  We sat at the restaurant for a half hour while he threw the thirty-something's version of a tantrum.  A long argument ensued -- he had designs on backpacking through Europe -- about why his Land of Precious attitude wouldn't fly in most parts of the world outside the molly-coddled US.  He won.  We went to another restaurant one or two el train stops away where they had soda in cans and bottles.

Never Say Diet  

Orthorexia is also ingratitude.  Dieting creates a push to which there is a corresponding pull.  Don't create the push and you won't get a pull.  Don't pick at the scab because you are bored -- instead of healing, it will bleed and potentially get infected.  Dieting is molesting to the scab to the point where it becomes a gaping wound far worse than the original mosquito bite.  

Dieting is always a short term project, no matter what the guru diet writer claims on his book jacket.  The body has a perverse way of fighting back.  To diet successfully to ultra-thinness is almost guaranteed to either permanently damage you, make you into a terrible person, or both.  Depriving oneself of food is an addiction.  I know this because I have been vegetarian for 30 years of my life and vegan for 11 of them.  There is a self-righteous glory in denying oneself of certain types of food.  Though I personally do not have an eating disorder, I know plenty of vegans who are disordered eaters. 

Dieting is a form of killing the messenger.  The appetite for food is the messenger -- dieting murders him and buries his body in a shallow, fetid grave.  An unhealthy relationship with food should never be addressed with a diet.  Instead, it should be tackled first and foremost with discursive meditation.  Dieting is the ultimate thoughtstopper that is designed to prevent you from analyzing your own psyche in a meaningful way.  It is a bandaid.  Why sit still in a chair and think about your life's troubles when you could be planning an improved grocery shopping list that will deliver The New You in a few short weeks?  

Changing your eating habits needs to be an extremely mild, almost unnoticeable process if it is going to stick.  Personally, if I wanted to lose weight, I would not revamp my diet or my portion sizes overnight.  Instead, I would subtract one food item, let's say corn chips, and eat salted nuts instead.  It is really important to replace the missing food item when you are trying to make a change -- this is why successful vegans have to expand their diets beyond the unholy trinity of french fries, ersatz meats, and box wine.  I would create no friction for my body to resist.

Long ago, I was forced to take a class in high school called Aerobics Slimnastics.  This class, which was the alternative to skilled sports that I sucked at, required us to document our daily calorie intake for eight weeks.  For a friend of mine I'll call Gina, documenting what she ate triggered anorexia.  I remember her being proud of limiting herself to less than 800 calories a day.  At 4'11", my weight hovered around 110 pounds through most of high school.  Gina was six inches taller than me.  She got down to 95 pounds at one point.  I'm pretty sure she was subsisting upon 500 calories a day.   I remember the sadness in her eyes when she said, "Do you remember when we were kids and we didn't have to try to be thin all the time?  Those were the days."

Dieting is Ungrateful

Like my soda-preferring ex-friend, there's not a great deal of gratitude in dieting.  Dieting is a rich person's game -- the poor cannot afford to play.  I remember when I first fell into the lower middle class and I pondered the delectable irony of my vegan peers who extended Herculean efforts to stop themselves from hoovering up vast amounts of delicious, Instagram-worthy food I simply could not afford.  There's nothing like choosing between paying an electric bill and a grocery trip to keep the waistline trim, especially when you're an ethical vegan and fast, non-homemade food is largely off the menu!  

I believe that in the future nobody will go on diets... they won't need to because they won't have enough food to get fat in the first place.  

Moderation

Moderation will never sell any diet books because it is boring, it is cheap, and it works.   A leitmotif of my Seven Deadly Sins meditations has been this theme of not diving off the plank at either end of the pool.  

I weigh more than I did high school -- I would guess that I weigh about 125 pounds or so but I have not weighed myself in nearly a decade.  I don't get weighed at the doctor because I don't have health insurance, so I don't visit the doctor for regular checkups.  Despite my middle-aged weight gain, I remain serenely unconcerned.  Getting fat isn't the end of the world.  Staying skinny does not make me a better person.  Another bonus is that when your hips and arms inflate, your head stops looking so huge on top of your body.  But even if I lost all of my padding and became a hideously shriveled, black-haired lollipop, I wouldn't sweat it.  I'm old and it's not my time to be the object of desire -- that torch I gladly pass on to women younger and prettier than me.  

What seems to work the best for me and always has is eating when I am hungry.  I don't torture myself about a late night sandwich.  If I'm hungry, I just eat.  I have neither binged nor purged in this incarnation and I have no plans to start.  I wish I could go back in time and somehow get Gina to eat a normal, home-cooked meal despite the admonitions of the crazy Aerobics Slimnastics teacher, who by the way was morbidly obese.  I don't talk to Gina anymore, but I suspect she still battles with food as most of the women of my generation were conditioned.  

And so I wrap up my Seven Deadly Sins meditations -- I hope you enjoyed reading them half as much as I have enjoyed writing them!  The Aristotlean approach of transforming each Sin into a ternary was one I employed (and still employ) to understand the Ogham.  As always, I appreciate any thoughts you care to contribute in the comments and though I doubt I need to mention it, I thank everyone in advance for avoiding the use of profanity.