Bodies, Food and Feels

Recently a congregant posed this question to her extended network: “Do you view your food choices in terms of potential effect on your weight or how you feel?” It was a powerful question eliciting meaningful, engaging dialogue. I had my own reactions, of course, but I sat on them and let the question have its way with me for a few days before responding.

Every day we take in and we put out. Every single day. We take in and we put out. Talk about Ordinary Time. All the time we take in and we put out. It's the rhythm of life, perhaps the most ordinary truth there is. We eat food. We poop it out. We drink water. We pee it out. We take in by listening. We put out by speaking. We take in by benefiting from the labors of others.

For instance, somebody somewhere made sure that the laundry detergent in my basement got packaged and delivered to the store where I could consume it. I took that in. But I then also use that detergent to do laundry for my family. That's output. Life is this rhythmic spiraling of taking in and putting out.

But how do we know what to take in and put out? And when should we consume versus produce? This gets more complicated.

There are all these maps out there, socially constructed maps. They tell us about the proper ways of taking in and putting out. With food, it's grown increasingly hard to follow directions because the maps keep proliferating and they all seem to say different things. There's the food pyramid. There's "3 meals a day and light snacks in between." There's gluten-free. There's certified organic. All these sources of enlightenment are chiming in about the perfect way to consume. They bank on science. They use before and after pictures to justify their claims. And, like a man behind the curtain, directing all of this, there's an ideal body we all should be aiming for. The ideal body is one that looks like something perfect. But apparently, it doesn’t feel perfect.

As a Christian, I wrestle with the increasing pressure in our society to ignore the body's inherent wisdom. There is no ideal body. There is only your body, and my body and their bodies. These are all we've got and they're frickin fabulous! It took me a long time to figure out that incarnation--divinity of the flesh--is real. Our bodies are worth listening to, worth tending to, worth caring for, not because of some pop self-care craze that only lasts 2 weeks, but because God made them and they are ours. Oh and because they inherently deserve it.

The body is a perfect, albeit complicated and complex barometer. Feelings are full of information and the body is full of feelings. Given that food is something we have to take in every day, maybe we ought to pay attention to how our body feels in response to consumption, as a means of making wiser and wiser choices. That means fretting less ahead of consumption time about our choices, and paying more concrete attention to how our choices feel as we exercise them and in the aftermath. 

I see and hear a lot of folks talking incessantly about what they do and don't want to eat. But I hear very little attention paid (besides the, "Oh I'm so full!" hands-on-the-belly routine) to the way our bodies respond to what we do eat. That requires present moment attentiveness to the body and the ability to integrate what we feel in our bodies in ongoing discernment of our choices. But before all of that, we have to consider our bodies worthy of that attentiveness. So, to that end, an offering, for you, so full of extraordinary power in an ordinary body:

"We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God. (...) we always carry in the body the struggle of life so that that the glory of life may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to struggle for God's sake so that glory may be made visible in our mortal flesh." (A re-write of 2 Cor 4:7ff)