Heavy Faith: Is It a Sin to Be Overweight?

Full disclosure: I wrote the beginnings of this post years ago, when I was running two marathons a year and weighed 25 pounds less. By strict BMI standards, I fall into the overweight category. I'm not writing as a judge, but as a fellow struggler who wants to look at the spiritual side of body care. There are other significant aspects of this battle to address, but as one who has combed the Scriptures and the Christian classics to get some insight on this, I'd like to share my findings on the spiritual side.

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A Baptist pastor friend of mine described a typical Baptist conference as “50 souls saved and 2,000 bodies overfed.” Every few months, a new study seems to indicate that, regardless of their denominational affiliation, Christians and weight gain are as inseparable as the bread and cup at communion.

What’s going on? And does it matter?

Socially Contagious Weight Gain

I once walked into a Pro Athletes Outreach conference for professional football players and their wives, weighing in at 165 pounds. That stat alone will tell you I was there as a speaker, not as a player. When you see professional football players on the field, surrounded only by each other, you don’t realize just how big they are. When an offensive lineman walked by me, his arms literally bigger than my thighs, I felt like a scrawny half-man in comparison.

Three months later, I found myself in Duluth, Minnesota, to run in the Grandma’s Marathon. Grandma’s is a large marathon with a purse for the winners—which means it draws elite Kenyan runners. On one occasion I took an elevator ride with one. This Kenyan was about my height, but he weighed 25 to 30 pounds less. As the runner moved off the elevator with all the grace of an athlete who is trained to run very fast for a very long time, I looked down at myself and said, “Gary, you’ve got to start passing up the burgers and begin eating more salads…”

In one situation, I felt ridiculously small and thin; in the other, I felt heavy and undisciplined, even though my weight was identical in both situations. The same body created two entirely different impressions. The environment in which I found myself made me look at myself quite differently.

In fact, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that obesity is “socially contagious.” Your social environment has a tremendous impact on your own journey of either gaining or losing weight. When your close friends, siblings, or spouse slowly gain weight, you are likely to follow, and the reverse appears to be true as well: when those around you lose weight, you are much more likely to be motivated to lose weight yourself.

Perhaps that’s what has happened with Christians, especially given recent studies finding that Christians tend to be heavier, even more obese, than non-believers. When everyone around us in our church communities are just as heavy, or even a little bit heavier than we are, we think we’re doing fine—regardless of our true condition. We’ve succumbed to “socially contagious obesity,” and don’t even think to question it.

Yet we serve in a faith that historically lists gluttony as one of the “seven deadly sins.” If gluttony is so deadly and serious, why aren’t we talking about it? And while most everyone would say a lifestyle of gluttony is sinful, does that make being overweight a sin?