I seem to have been added to a few blogrolls in the last several days, because there's been a giant uptick in my traffic. (Or maybe it was just the Blogger outage. Thank you, Typepad! Fifty bucks a year has so far been pretty well spent.) Maybe we have some new folks around?
In the last post in the "acceptance" series, I identified a particular habit of mine (gobbling pinches of shredded cheese out of the bag while cooking, even though I always drop cheese on the floor) as an example of gluttony according to my own expanded definition. A commenter disagreed with me:
Surely you *could* eat cheese while cooking and not get in on the floor. It's not *that* difficult. So "This isn't so much a problem because of the cheese calories" really doesn't ring true. It IS the calories that are the problem, no? That's the whole point of these posts.
I answered in the combox, but I've been thinking. I wrote the posts, didn't I? So don't I get to say what "the whole point of these posts" are?
Okay, then, Erin, be more clear.
Ahem.
This is not a weight loss blog.
I'm glad I lost forty pounds in 2008. But one thing I've tried to re-iterate over and over — and you'd probably have to look at old posts to see it, I know, so if you've just arrived, it may not be obvious — is that weight loss only came for me when I turned my attention to rooting out the habits of gluttony.
I won't lie. I pay a lot of attention to the weight. It is hard work keeping it down. I've written about that.
Wanting to look good provides me a strong motivation to work on gluttony. I think I've been clear about that!
But I'm also interested in gluttony's technical definition as a vice, a fault, a sin. It has consequences for my health and my relationships, sure. Most sins do. That's why we always have mixed motives in rooting sin out of our lives. But I'm aware that gluttony has a spiritual component. And I want it out of my life even if I never gain another pound from it.
As I've gone on blogging and blogging about gluttony, even though I am now at a healthy weight, I have seen a new dimension to these posts emerge. I have a question which is emerging as a sort of obsession. I bring it to prayer over and over again. I write about it over and over again. You could even say that it is the real point of these posts. And that point is to figure out this:
How can I use what I've learned about gluttony to defeat my other besetting vices, faults, and sins?
So, no. The calories are not the point. Not at all.
[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 touch on what I’m talking about a little more clearly partway through this post.
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.]
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