Real Gluttony Is Not About Size

Part Six: How understanding biblical gluttony restores our relationship with food.

Leave me, O Love, which richest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.
— Sir Philip Sidney

What is the most awkward sin to discuss in church? And no, it’s not sexual sin. It’s gluttony. How many sermons have you heard on gluttony? How many books have you read? I hated even putting it in the chapter title. Yet it’s in the Bible, it’s a real problem, and it must be discussed—especially in a book about eating.

What makes gluttony so hard to talk about? We know, despite how often we do it in private, we have no business discussing or commenting on someone else’s weight or their dietary choices. We make jokes about the nosy aunt who makes sly comments at family get-togethers about what each person puts on their plates. We know it’s not just awkward but unkind. 

As we learned with stewardship, each of us is given a set of circumstances that determine not only how our bodies look but what our bodies need. To judge my body and everyday diet against yours wouldn’t be fair. 

So how do we discuss gluttony? The problem we have with talking about gluttony is that we believe it is determined by what we put into our mouths and the size of our pants. But gluttony, like every single sin under the sun, is a heart issue.

Gluttony is a Heart Issue, not a Body Shape

In a world that values size and shape, gluttony is a lot easier. 

When I was younger, I used to eat ice cream after breakfast. In other words, before my clean eating obsession in twelfth grade, I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with no consideration to hunger cues or proper nutrition. I also ate in front of the TV, which likewise didn’t help staying in tune with whatever signals my body might be sending me. I hated vegetables (especially raw), ate three cupcakes as a snack, and consumed fruit when loaded with sugar on top.

My size? I still struggled to find clothes small enough to fit. 

When most people hear the word “gluttony”, they think of someone with a certain weight. Someone once told me that they considered a church to be condoning sin because they allowed “gluttonous” people to sing on the stage—and by “gluttonous” they meant people who were a heavier weight than themselves. Yet gluttony is less about appearance and more about our relationship with food. A person may have a great metabolism, so they can eat endlessly without it ever changing their pants size, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t acting gluttonous. That was the case with me. 

Abby Langer reminds us that people are different sizes by nature, and it’s not an indication of health or obesity. “Some people are just bigger, some are smaller. Isn’t nature wonderful? We can’t all be the same size, but just because you were born with a larger body frame doesn’t mean that you’re unhealthy.”¹ She considers a study done on people’s BMI weights and writes, “A 2016 study found that where BMI showed an ‘overweight’ result, nearly half of those people were actually cardiometabolically healthy. On the other hand, 30% of the people who came in as ‘normal’ on the BMI scale were found to be cardiometabolically unhealthy.”²

Bee Wilson, renowned food author and journalist, likewise reminds us that thin isn’t always healthier. “I’m not saying that to be thin is necessarily healthy. Some of the non-overweight may be anorexic or bulimic. Others avoid food through cigarettes and drugs or burn off a junk-food habit with manic exercise. When we speak of an ‘obesity epidemic’, as well as making those trying to lose weight feel worse than they already do, we miss the fact that the situation is more complex than thin = good and fat = bad.”³

If size isn’t the issue for gluttony, what is? Let’s turn to Scripture. 

“Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags,” the father of Proverbs said to his son (Prov. 23:20–21). The Hebrew word for “gluttonous” is used six times in the Old Testament and can mean to make light, squander, or be lavish with something. 

This brings us back to the parable of the talents and the servant who did nothing with his single talent but buried it in the ground. He wasn’t lavish with it, but he made light of it and squandered it when he could have doubled it like his fellow servants. Matthew Henry reminds us that had it been his own talent, he could have done whatever he pleased with it, yet it wasn’t—it belonged to his master.⁴ In the same way, our bodies belong to God. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). 

Gluttony is an act of squandering the body and food God has given us rather than glorifying him with it. We make light of our good health and the abundance of food God has given us when we overeat. 

So how do we avoid gluttony? Let’s go more in-depth on the three types of hunger.

Emotional Hunger: Tantrums & Chocolate Chips

I didn’t realize my relationship with chocolate chips was so connected with my children’s behaviors until I found myself walking straight to the pantry during a tantrum, knowing that there were no chocolate chips left. I caught myself rifling through the cabinet, wondering what on earth I was looking for. Yikes. This is emotional eating: eating in response to emotions in order to cope with them. 

Before we discuss this issue further, we need to first consider that emotional eating isn’t always bad. Abby Langer writes, 

. . . the occasional emotional eating episode is totally normal! We’re conditioned to think it isn’t, but we all do it sometimes. And hey—eating emotionally doesn’t have to be in response to a sad or stressful situation. We all eat out of happiness (hello, birthday cake!), relief (like that ice cream you ate after you finished that huge exam), and excitement (like hoovering popcorn during an exciting movie… I’m so guilty of that) . . . Most of the time, emotional eating isn’t a big deal. The big deal comes when it’s the only tool in our coping toolbox, and we’re using food to soothe ourselves all the time. That behavior can not only affect our physical health, but it can also perpetuate the stuffing-down of emotions that we’re trying to hide, but really need to be addressed.⁵

Emotional eating becomes a problem when we are using it to cope with emotions most of the time rather than some of the time, like my chocolate chip habit—it became my sole way of facing the children’s tantrums rather than an occasional pick-me-up on a hard parenting day. I had to learn a better way and utilize better tools for getting through my littles’ meltdowns. Singing. Deep breathing. Finding humor in the situation. Texting a friend. As with breaking all bad habits, it came with pains, but with each empty-handed trip to the pantry, I learned to use my new coping skills. 

Don’t consider yourself weak if you have fallen prey to emotional eating. Our bodies were designed to desire food and feel good when consuming food; happy hormones are released when we eat. God in his goodness gave us food for pleasure. David sang, “You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth     and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart” (Ps. 104:14–15). 

Wine gladdens hearts, oil makes our faces shine, and bread strengthens our hearts—and I think we all know that last to be true (cinnamon raisin bread was a go-to comfort food for much of my childhood). The Preacher of Ecclesiastes even commands it: “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do” (Ecc. 9:7–8). Don’t burden yourself with further shame over emotional eating; shame never changed anyone anyway. 

Whatever emotional issue you have regularly smothered with food, you can dig deep to the root cause of it and learn healthier ways to cope with those feelings. You may even need to see a counselor if you unearth dark, traumatic emotions that you’ve been squashing for years, and that’s okay. Seeking help for emotional eating isn’t a failure but a step towards courageous healing and freedom. It’s not just freedom from the emotional eating itself but also freedom from the heavy feelings you’ve carried for so long and desire to be rid of. 

You’re as strong as me, friend, because we both have Christ as our foundation and endurance. Going into those dark caves where we’ve stowed emotions away feels like going back into a nightmare you just woke up from—we just lived this experience, why go back to it? Yet our God is compassionate, and he does not long for us to carry these emotions by ourselves. He proclaims to the broken, fearful, emotionally-laden daughter in Christ, “Come, cast all your cares on me, because I care for you” (1 Pet. 5:7). 

Visual (or Mouth) Hunger: The Snack Table

It doesn’t matter how much I have eaten before going somewhere, if there is free food I will eat something. How many of us resist dessert when offered a beautiful plate of gooey, fudgy cake even though our stomachs are bursting out of the top of our pants? There’s a reason we say the eye is bigger than the stomach—it’s because food is desirable to the eye, and that desire is hard to resist (just ask Eve standing below the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). 

Let’s not forget the other form of this type of eating: watching cooking shows and facing the irresistible food cravings for whatever happens to be on the screen at that moment. Sometimes all it takes is a character on our favorite sitcom to slice through a cheesecake for us to be on the hunt in our own kitchen for something that may resemble their mouth watering dish.

How do we face this kind of hunger? Abby Langer comes to the rescue: “If you’re not truly hungry but feel the need to eat because of a visual cue, acknowledge the feeling. If you really want what you’re seeing, eat it and get over it. Obsessing over your choice isn’t going to help you, and in fact, it could lead you down the path of overeating out of guilt . . . Anticipate your visual hunger beforehand and manage it by eating a balanced meal and not making anything off-limits.”⁶

That sounds counter-intuitive, right? Society tells us we’re “good” and “behaving” and “healthy” if we tell ourselves no everytime a craving comes. Yet Abby Langer reminds us that it’s easier to satisfy the craving with a taste and then move on. Even better, to think ahead to how visual hunger might catch us and seek to satisfy our true hunger beforehand or not keep such items in easy reach to begin with. 

This isn’t like resisting sin or addiction; it’s about our good desire for delight in the food God has given us. It’s a part of God’s common grace that food is both appealing to the eye and tongue and we shouldn’t feel the need to always deny ourselves that good pleasure. 

Anger can lead to sinful rage, longing for relational touch can lead to sexual immorality, and eating for delight can lead to overeating, but does that mean the original good thing is no good anymore and should be avoided altogether? Of course not. God gave us these senses, flavors, colors, textures, and the like for a reason: to be enjoyed. So take in the visual feast on a full stomach, appease the cravings if they come, and eventually they will lose their power. We give them more power the more we fight them with guilt and shame and misplaced morality.

Stomach Hunger: Listening to and Re-Parenting Our Bodies

True hunger is felt in our stomachs: the growling, nausea, cramps, faintness, and shakiness. Hunger knows how to make itself loud. Yet as we said before, if you have ignored your hunger cues for years, it may be hard to hear them now, especially if you’ve become accustomed to listening to visual and emotional hunger as your default instead. You’ll need to spend time becoming in tune with your body again.

As you do, you’ll need to learn another signal God created for our bodies to survive—fullness. Satisfaction. Not stuffed or engorged or rolling around on the floor in pain, but simply fullness. This can’t be measured; we can’t define that because of this height and weight you should eat X amount of calories each day. Our hunger levels change depending on hormones, levels of activity, and stress. We should never limit ourselves to a specific amount of daily food. Rather, we should listen to the hand-crafted body God has given us when we are full. 

The solution to gluttony isn’t diets or suppressing our hunger cues—it’s about listening to our body and giving it what it needs until it is full. This will take time and require patience from us, but it is one of the ways we glorify God with our bodies and our eating.  

This will require self-control in a different way than dieting. Dieting tells us to stop even when our stomachs still grumble and complain for food—that’s not godly discipline but harsh punishment. It’s like muzzling the ox while he treads the grain (Deut. 25:4) or provoking a child to anger through our parenting (Eph. 6:4). Discipline is meant for growth while punishment comes for destruction, and destruction can only follow when we deny our body what it needs. We are called to steward and discipline our bodies to Christlikeness. 

Self-control requires the emotional intelligence to recognize when we are seeking pleasure rather than fulfilling true hunger and knowing how to process those emotions instead of stuffing them with food. It requires being aware of our own cravings and desires that visual hunger may drive us to so that we can prepare for them by eating ahead and perhaps keeping a limited amount of that food around us. These we already discussed, but there’s also some rewiring that may be necessary too. 

Getting back to listening to our bodies (rather than overeating through emotional or visual hunger) requires not just becoming in tune with ourselves but also potentially re-learning better habits in place of the bad habits. Bee Wilson says that everything about how we eat is first learned when we are infants being fed by our parents and watching our parents, leaving little to genetics that are out of our control. “Assuming you are not living in a state of famine, the greatest determinant of how well you eat is the way you have learned to behave around food.”⁷

This means that if you were taught that you had to finish your plate before you left the table, you may have a long history of not listening to your body that needs to be undone. Don’t be too hard on yourself. What varieties were you exposed to? Was mealtime a positive experience of connection with those you love or a fearful time of heavy silences, yelling, and plates being thrown? Were certain foods restricted and others proclaimed as superior? These all come into play when we consider how we interact with food and how our mind and body responds to it. 

How do we return to our God-given state of listening to our bodies? Bee Wilson recommends learning these three habits: follow structured mealtimes; respond to our own internal cues for hunger and fullness rather than relying on external cues such as portion size or diet elimination; and to make ourselves open to trying a variety of foods. “All these three can be taught to children, which suggests that adults could learn them too.”⁸ She says that in order for our diets to change, we need more than logic and education and the ability to cook for ourselves. 

. . . we need to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us. The change doesn’t happen through rational argument. It is a form of reconditioning, meal by meal. You get to the point where not eating when you are hungry—most of the time—is so instinctive and habitual it would feel odd to behave differently . . . This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes us happy rather than sickening or tormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits.⁹

Like a good parent nourishes their child, so we should nourish our bodies. In other words, stewardship. Just as parents are entrusted with children to raise to God’s glory, so we are entrusted with our physical bodies. We would never deny our children food if they were hungry, and so we wouldn’t deny our own bodies food when they need it. Instead, we train it to love what is good through positive exposure to good. We provide well-balanced meals at proper times and snacks when required. 

But to do all of this, we may need to go back and truly treat our minds and bodies like infants as we retrain them. This means patience and kindness, just as we would with a baby fumbling to spoon porridge in their gummy mouth. What does this kind of discipline look like in God’s kingdom? The author of Hebrews tells us:

And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. (Heb. 12:5–12)

Godly discipline happens from a place of love in order to grow us in holiness. Matthew Henry reminds us that “afflictions, though they may be the fruits of God’s displeasure, are yet proofs of his paternal love for his people and care for them . . . To be allowed to go on in sin without a rebuke is a sad sign of alienation from God.”¹⁰

So we, too, must discipline our bodies in all love and grace, bending to the will of the Father to become more like the Son through the internal work of the Holy Spirit. We exercise self-control not to deprive but to teach our bodies to give voice to our stomachs again so we know when we are truly full. We don’t need to beat our bodies bloody, so that we’re going around light-headed, moody, and shaky in order to defeat gluttony. We can listen to them, and in that glorify God. 

1. Abby Langer RD, “Should We Even Be Using BMI Anymore? Here’s Why I Don’t Think So,” Abby Langer Nutrition, January 21, 2021, accessed December 4, 2024, https://abbylangernutrition.com/should-we-even-be-using-bmi-anymore-heres-why-i-dont-think-so/.

2. Langer, “Should We Even Be Using BMI Anymore? Here’s Why I Don’t Think So.”

3. Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Basic Books, 2015), 13.

4. Matthew Henry, Zondervan NIV Matthew Henry Commentary In One Volume, ed. Leslie F. Church and Gerald W. Peterman (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), 136.

5. Abby Langer RD, “How to Deal With Emotional Eating by Getting at What’s Really Bothering You,” Abby Langer Nutrition, July 7, 2020, accessed December 5, 2024, https://abbylangernutrition.com/how-to-deal-with-emotional-eating/.

6. Abby Langer RD, Good Food, Bad Diet: The Habits You Need to Ditch Diet Culture, Lose Weight, and Fix Your Relationship with Food Forever (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2021), 60.

7. Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, 20.

8. Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, 23.

9. Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, 24.

10. Henry, Zondervan NIV Matthew Henry Commentary In One Volume, 740.