Gluttony is different from sloth: Induced exercise, part 2.

(Part 1)

By now I’ve written a great deal about my forty-odd-pound weight loss and my struggle to conquer gluttony*—what I called my diet of “not eating so damn much.”   I have written only a very little, so far, about the role that induced exercise (defined in part 1) played in my improved health.    With this series I hope to explore it a little bit.

I spent a few days thinking and came to my first conclusion:  The analogy “gluttony is to overeating as sloth is to not enough exercise” — does not work.  I tried to draw on what I’ve learned about the relationship between gluttony and overeating, and apply those lessons to sloth and lack of exercise, and very few obvious parallels can be drawn.  So let’s contrast them instead.

1.  Overeating/gluttony are usually problems of excess, and nonexercise/sloth are problems of negligence.  Overeating and nonexercise are both patterns of bad decisions.  But overeating is a pattern easily described as choosing too much of something that’s necessary, and nonexercise is a pattern easily described as choosing to do too little.  You don’t have to describe it that way; you could say that gluttons choose to eat when they ought to choose to fast, and slothful people choose to remain still when they ought to choose to move.  But the minute you try to write about them with any clarity, the awkwardness of the sentences make it obvious that gluttony and sloth are natural antiparallels rather than parallels.  (Why else would I have to coin a weird word like “nonexercise?”  Do you prefer my second choice, “sedentation?”)

2.  They can’t be broken down into similar categories.  Unless you are a very holistic person, physical activity or nonexercise can often be divided up into stuff you do for fun, stuff you have to do anyway for your daily work, and stuff you choose on purpose because it’s good for your body  (“induced exercise” or deliberate resting).  Food and fasting may not split up evenly along those lines, certainly not in the same way.

3.  The vice isn’t related to the behavior in the same way.  Eating more food than you need is a decent measure of gluttony.  Eating less food, almost by definition, makes you that much less gluttonous.  But slothfulness isn’t automatically fixed by adding exercise.  Sloth has to do with not doing your duties, spiritual and otherwise, because of their laboriousness.   If you get some exercise, but you still go home and flop in front of the TV instead of helping with the dishes or horsing around with your children, you’re just as slothful as you were before.   Sloth and nonexercise are only directly related insofar as it is your duty to get yourself into better physical condition.

4.  One change may be more drastic than the other.  Ending overeating requires “only” paying deliberate attention to something you have to do regularly anyway, and have been doing since the day you were born.  Ending nonexercise may require you to introduce whole new activities into your life.  A corollary:  It is possible and fairly straightforward to eat less food without affecting the people around you much at all; it is hard or even impossible to add exercise “quietly” unless you live alone.

5.  Fighting gluttony fits much more comfortably into the everyday Catholic religious context.   We have a religious tradition of ordinary people’s fasting to gain spiritual benefits and strengthen us against vices.  We don’t have a religious tradition of ordinary people’s physically exerting themselves for that purpose.  Now, mind you, we do have a religious tradition of physical penance, hair shirts and other sorts of self-punishment, but that’s not exactly what you call widespread today, and anyway a hair shirt is not exactly what you’d call aerobic.  Anyway, my point is that we have a lot more direct experiences to call on, and more well-known spiritual benefits to gain, associated with eating less and with fasting.  We don’t have so many associated with physical exercise.

None of this is to say that it is impossible to connect gluttony/overeating with sloth/nonexercise.  You can make it fit, I think, but you have to push reeeeeeal hard.  I think it’s better to abandon the gluttony template and start fresh when it comes to thinking about sloth and physical movement for health.

*[Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]