- Association of Certified Biblical Counselors - https://biblicalcounseling.com -

Should Christians Count Their Calories?

Heath Lambert: The end of one year and the beginning of another always has Christians thinking about how they’re going to live and make changes in their life over the course of the next 365 days. And part of that process includes, for many people, a New Year’s resolution where they want to be more disciplined in a certain area of their life. People often pick numerous areas of their life where they want to be more disciplined. But a common one is concerning what they eat. And so here, as we think about the beginning of the year, we are going to be talking about some of these issues, and in particular, today, we’re going to be talking about whether Christians should be counting their calories as they think about changing their eating habits this year. And so, Amy Evensen the producer of the podcast, is here today, and she has put together some questions. Amy, what’s going on?

Amy Evensen: So, this is a time of year when people are recovering from eating a lot of holiday food, there are commercials on the TV about weight loss, and people are all talking about their goals for weight loss. So in light of these things, how should Christians think about weight loss?

Heath Lambert: I think the first thing that we should say, Is how Christians should not think about weight loss. So, I hear you ask that question, and I think you are describing the experience of a lot of people. They’re listening to this while digesting four days’ worth of a ton of food, their pants don’t quite fit, they don’t like what they see in the mirror, they don’t like the digits they see on the scale, they’re watching these commercials for a weight loss program, and they’re just thinking, “I got to lose weight.” And most of the conversations that I hear people have don’t have anything to do with the Bible. The Bible never motivates our eating by what we see when we look in the mirror, by whether our clothes fit, or by the numbers that appear on the scale when we stand on it. This is an issue that is of no concern in the Bible, and it is the issue that drives our concern about food. So, this is actually a pretty revolutionary thing to come to understand that when the Bible talks about what we eat and how much of it we eat, it is completely unconcerned with the issues that caused us great amounts of concern. And so we have to come at this from the right attitude and that means certainly for the way most Americans speak about food—we have to be suspicious of our motivations in pursuing weight loss.

When the Bible motivates us to eat, it does it very differently. You’ve got a passage like 1 Corinthians 10:31 that says, whether we eat or whether we drink or whatever we do, we need to do all things for the glory of God. And so eating is one of the “all things” that we are to do, and we’re to do it for the glory of God. So the issue for Paul in 1 Corinthians is not what kinds of food you eat or how much of that food you eat—it is the spirit in which you eat it. And you can eat a lot of food for the glory of God, or you can eat a little bit of food for the glory of God. Or you could do either one for your own glory. You could eat a little bit of food to lose weight to puff yourself up because you want to look good for somebody or for a bunch of people. Or you could eat a lot of food with no gratitude in your heart just to satisfy your own gluttony. And so the first thing we have to do is agree with God that our eating is about Him and for His glory. But then that raises a lot of questions. So what does that mean? Well, I can eat a lot or a little for the glory of God. What does that mean? Well, I think some other things that we could consider are the attitudes that we come toward food beyond our desire to glorify God.

So one attitude that we need to approach food with is the attitude of thankfulness. So you’ve got a passage like 1 Timothy 4:3 that says that God made all food to be received with gratitude by those who believe and know the truth. And so we need to have an attitude of gratitude for our food. We need to be thankful for food and resist the notion that food is bad or that certain kinds of food are bad. That’s controversial! There’s going to be people that are going to be upset when they hear me say that because they’re going to be thinking about a government food pyramid, or they’re going to be thinking about their particular diet, and they’re going to say that there are some foods that are bad. There are some kinds of fats that are bad, and there are some kinds of carbs that are bad, and you shouldn’t eat those. But that’s not what the Bible is talking about. The Bible, from a moral level, says that all food is to be received with gratitude. There is a passage in Proverbs 15:17 that says, “Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.” Now, that passage is based on an assumption. And the assumption is it’s a whole lot better to eat a big fat ox than it is to eat a plate full of vegetables. If you’ve got a fat ox to eat, you’re in good shape, is what the author of Proverbs is saying there. But his point is to say that there are things better than fat and an ox, and namely, it’s better to have the love of your friends and the love of the Lord and have vegetables—even though those aren’t as good as an ox—as it is to have the ox with hatred. So that text and many others in the Bible are based on the assumption that even rich food is good. And so we ought not to adopt the moral view that there are some kinds of food that are bad. We should be thankful for it; we should receive it with gladness. So you got it for the glory of God. How do you do that? Well, one thing is to approach all of these gifts from the Lord with an attitude of thankfulness, and then another thing that we can think about, as we think about that, is care for the body.

So, if you think about a passage like 1 Corinthians 6:16-20, it says, “Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her, as it is written, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” So that text is a text against sexual immorality. But then, the apostle Paul grounds his teaching against sexual immorality in a theological reality. He says in verse 19, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” And so the theological anchor to the command against sexual immorality is you have a gift, a blood-bought gift, in your body, and you need to take care of it. And so that theological anchor grounds, not only principles, having to do with sexual immorality, but also any other activity we would engage in that demean this precious body that God gave us, and that would include abusing our body with too much or too little food. In fact, even in the context, verse 13 says food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food. And so, Paul is even thinking about issues of food as he thinks about this issue of sexual immorality because they’re both grounded in the theological reality of the body.

And so we need to do all things for the glory of God, including eating, and we need to as we try to eat for the glory of God, we need to think about approaching food from a standpoint of gratitude and from a standpoint of trying to honor our body. And so when we hold those in tension, it’s going to mean that there’s going to be times when we’re going to enjoy food as a gift from God, and we’re going to be grateful for it. But there are also going to be times when we say no to food because what we know about how to care for our bodies teaches us that if we overindulge for too long, then we’re going to do damage to this good body that the Lord has given us.

Amy Evensen: So I want to be a good steward of my body, and I don’t want to obsess over my body. How can I balance these two?

Heath Lambert: So I think the question is really good because we all know people who are trying to be a good steward of their body, but they do obsess. They are over-scrupulous in what they eat, and it makes them miserable, or it makes the people who are around them miserable. Perhaps you, as you listen to this podcast, are one of those people. And I think that I would say in order to avoid an extreme and to keep the balance of being a good steward but let’s not obsess. I think there are a couple of texts that we could think about to keep the balance.

So one text is Colossians 2:21, starting in verse 20, which says, “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations—“Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” And so, that text is saying that we ought to not put things in a category of “I’m not going to have anything to do with it,” things like food—”taste not.” It’s not good to look at a category of food and say that I’m not going to eat that. That violates this principle of thankfulness that I was talking about before.

And so, we should extend that attitude of thankfulness to all different kinds of foods and be grateful and refuse to label some foods as bad. We might have health reasons for disavowing certain kinds of food—a diabetic, for example, might need to stay away from sugar. But in general terms, when we don’t have that kind of concrete issue, we’re going to want to avoid making a moral judgment on food and certainly on other people who are able to enjoy another kind of food.

So we want to be thankful and come at food from a perspective of enjoyment. Another passage is 1 Corinthians 8:13 and which says, “Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.” Now, Paul is talking there about eating meat in the context of idolatrous worship practices. But again, he grounds his principle of abstaining from food on a larger principle of loving your neighbor. And what he’s saying is people are more important than food. This is something that folks who are tempted to obsess over food really need to remember because that has everything to do with whether you show up at someone’s house as a dinner guest and make all sorts of demands about the food you’re going to eat or not going to eat that. That has everything to do with whether you are able to enjoy a piece of cake when you’re out for dessert at a friend’s birthday party or whether you’re going to shun that because you don’t want to do that. We’re not allowed, as Christians, just to think about the food we want and the food we don’t want; we have to think about the people we’re sharing our life with and make a decision about our food as it relates to our service to our neighbor.

And then another passage that is helpful, I think, in this regard is 1 Timothy 4:7-8. And it says, “Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” So I think there are two things there. The text says physical training is of some value. It’s a good thing to think about your weight and to be careful about what you eat. And that could be avoiding the extremes of eating too little or eating too much, which would include physical exercise. So the Bible says this kind of physical care is of some value, and we ought to think about it, but even in the context of making the argument that it has some value, Paul says that there’s something else that trumps that physical care, and it’s spiritual care. It’s our pursuit of godliness. And so people ought to be concerned about caring for their physical bodies. They ought to have the plan to take care of this gift that God has given them. But they also—and in fact, more importantly—ought to have the plan to pursue the Lord. And so, what this means is that if a person is listening to this and they think more and expend more energy on losing weight than they do on pursuing the Lord then they are by definition imbalanced.

And so the way to move forward I think is to think of the tension between thankfulness and self-control, gratitude, and self-control. Some people are going to find it very easy to eat and be very grateful, and they’re not going to be so concerned about counting calories. Other people are going to air towards the side of self-control, and they’re going to find it harder to eat with gratefulness. I think people listening to this podcast might think through which of those two extremes they favor. And towards which extreme do they need the Lord’s grace more? And if you are aware that you really need more of the Lord’s grace to be grateful for food, then I would reach out to someone you know, trust, and who loves the Bible and say, “would you help me be a little more balanced and enjoying food for the glory of God?” And if someone is listening to this podcast and they’re aware that they need the Lord’s grace more in the direction of self-control, then I would think they should reach out to someone they love, trust, and who knows the Bible and could say, hey, could you help me and hold me accountable to exert a little more self-control as I’m eating food this year?”