Ditching Diet Culture by Chavonn Shen

Ditching Diet Culture

**—Chavonn Shen**

Day 1 of 3: Dwelling in/on Diet Culture

So don’t let anyone judge you about eating or drinking or about a festival, a new moon observance, or sabbaths. These religious practices are only a shadow of what was coming—the body that cast the shadow is Christ. Don’t let anyone who wants to practice harsh self-denial and worship angels rob you of the prize. They go into detail about what they have seen in visions and have become unjustifiably arrogant by their selfish way of thinking.
—Colossians 2:16-18

No, I'm not a snack at all / Look, baby, I'm the whole damn meal.
—Lizzo, “Juice”

Making goals can be the worst. It’s too much pressure to have to think of goals that you want to work on for an extended period of time. It’s like they’re asking to be broken!

Not only can they be hard to keep, but sometimes they’re embarrassing to make because it makes us come face to face with our own shortcomings. They remind us of all the ways we failed to be better than we were before. And I find this to be especially true when it comes to weight loss and exercise goals. So many of those goals are rooted in the assumption that something's already wrong with our body and that we can fix it if we follow the right rules, and the right rituals. But there’s always someone out there doing more that makes us feel like we should be doing more and then we start to judge others who we think aren’t doing enough and then starts the shame spiral.

That’s why I love the verses for today. They’re about not letting people judge us on how to follow the faith, particularly in regard to what we eat and drink. In addition, Paul makes it clear that self-denial is not religion and self-righteousness is a toxic thing to worship.

The verses are from the book of Colossians, which is a series of letters that the apostle Paul wrote to the Colossian people. These letters were meant to be instructions to Colossians, who were new to Christianity. When you’re new to any group, you have a million different people giving you advice on how to be in that group, and not all of it is good advice. You’ll also find people who have been in the group for a while and have certain expectations of how the group should be because that’s the way it’s always been. But Paul is telling these new Christians that they didn’t have to be judged for not following old rules and that not all instructions are holy. Paul said in verse 18: “Don’t let anyone who wants to practice harsh self-denial and worship angels rob you of the prize. They go into detail about what they have seen in visions and have become unjustifiably arrogant by their selfish way of thinking.”

Our spiritual ancestor Paul told the Colossians that these rules are merely human commands.

These verses go beyond how we view religious instructions. They apply to how we view our own bodies. Diet culture gives us distorted advice on acceptable ways to be in a body. Self-denial is not of God. Getting a perfect body according to a distorted view of your own body is a toxic thing to worship.

If we are to live by the Bible and to view our bodies as temples, the place that God dwells and delights in, it is honoring God when we can acknowledge that whatever exercise trend may work for some people, but maybe not ourselves, and that we shouldn’t treat them as holy scripture when they’re not. When we see the results of the latest juice cleanse on Instagram, we can take comfort in knowing our God is not a one size fits all God, but rather a God that builds relationships with us as individuals, with individual wants and needs.

Journal/reflect:
What does it mean for you, personally, to view your body to be a temple?

Day 1 of 3: Dwelling in/on Diet Culture

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