Can We Be Slim if Obesity Isn't Bad?

You can't fight obesity without this question.

“You seem, Antiphon, to imagine that happiness consists in luxury and extravagance. But I hold that: to need nothing is divine; to need as little as possible is nearest to the divine.”
— Socrates, Memorabilia, 1.6

I’ve got a question for you: “Does anything matter?”

Weird question, I know. But I suspect it has some predictive qualities.

For over a decade I worked with clients trying to lose weight, and I was pretty good at it. The pounds fell off and health problems receded.

But adherence was often the problem I struggled against. It sometimes felt like I was ramming my head against an immovable wall. Clients said they weren’t very hungry, had little to no food cravings, and were happy with their weight loss. But they still often went back to the foods that made them sick and fat.

Through much experimentation, I found this question helped me predict who would relapse and who needed me to focus on their psychology and thought process.

You might think this is an inane, nihilistic-sounding question. Of course some things matter, Andrew! All your clients would say “yes”.

But this isn’t a question you ask directly, but rather probe obliquely. When you get into the habit, you’ll find many people think and live — and eat — like their choices aren’t particularly important beyond the usual sacred cows (be nice, don’t kill or steal, etc).

Yes, some people morally idolize healthy foods but still get seduced by pizza and Twinkies. But that’s not most people. Most people aren’t having their noble dietary beliefs subverted by French fry ads. Most people have few dietary standards beyond what’s pleasing and utilitarian.

Sure, they’d prefer to be lean rather than obese and healthy rather than sick. But failing to live and eat in ways producing those ends doesn’t seem shameful, immoral, or objectively bad to them.

So it’s worth asking: What if people did believe eating well mattered in a big-picture, moral sort of way? What outcomes might we expect?

Slim Christians

Why don’t Catholic priests talk about food?

I grew up going to mass every week, but it didn’t occur to me till my twenties that what was preached from the pulpit was just a smattering of the lessons one could take from the bible.

The priests never spoke of gluttony, for instance, despite it being one the so-called seven deadly sins. In fact, there was almost no talk about bodily discipline, health, or diet, even though priests can turn to Corinthians 9:27 and read “But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

Half the priests had big guts swaying under their robes, so perhaps fear of hypocrisy is explanation enough. But what if Christians did emphasize the healthy eating messages they could find in the bible? How might it affect their outcomes?

Turns out, some Christians do emphasize food and health, and it matters a lot.

The 7th Day Adventist co-founder Ellen G. White laid the moral implications of diet and lifestyle on thick:

“…health should be as sacredly guarded as the character, for God requires of us the highest improvement of the body as well as of the mind and soul.”
— Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 3, p. 485

And:

“Those who transgress the laws of God in their physical organism will be inclined to violate the law of God spoken from Sinai.” —Counsels on Health, p. 69

So shitty diets and lifestyles = bad. Got it.

As a result, many Adventists are vegetarian or semi-vegetarian, and even the omnivores smoke and drink less, eat more fruits and vegetables, and move more.

And the result?

Average white Adventist men lived 7.28 years longer than average white Californian men in a study of 34,192 Adventists. The women lived 4.4 years longer. Adventist vegetarian men and women lived 9.5 and 6.1 years longer, respectively. Statistics for minorities weren’t collected¹.

….wow. That’s a lot of extra years.

And how fat are the Adventists?

A meta-analysis looking at BMIs for various faiths found²:

“The closest to a consistent finding observed among these studies was the lower body weights of Seventh-Day Adventists compared with non-Seventh-Day Adventists.”

So out of many faiths surveyed, the one that cast the strongest moral aspersions on members’ diet and lifestyle choices was the consistently slimmer one.

In an ongoing study of 73,000 Adventists, including omnivores, vegans, and various kinds of vegetarians³:

The mean American’s BMI is now 29, or one point away from obesity.

And in a world where most people get fatter as they age, the BMI of a group of Australian Adventists was incredibly almost completely static between 1976 and 2006⁴ while their peer Australians packed on the pounds.

And what about minorities prone to obesity?

The American Hispanic mean BMI is 29.5, or almost obese⁵. But of Hispanics in the Adventist Church⁶…

Similarly, black Adventist college students are slimmer than non-Adventist black college students⁷.

Breaking The Spell

Think about what experts say about American obesity: Our slop food savanna locks us into shitty diets, which are so inescapably tasty and so addictive that unless you’re impossibly strong-willed or genetically gifted, you’re doomed to obesity. Might as well take Ozempic.

And then these Adventists — surrounded by our obese civilization — come along with the audacity to decide our diet and lifestyle choices are morally questionable because they pollute their bodies and takes them further from god…and they just stop eating it? En Masse?

I don’t know what Adventists think about food. But I suspect they see the carrot and the stick — Caring for their body avoids something quasi-sinful while elevating them to be closer to their creator.

And it’s not like we’re talking about a small cult here. There are millions of Adventists around the world, and studies find them slimmer everywhere.

So it appears the right idea fitted into a moral/spiritual edifice can offset the weight of our food environment and genetic propensity for dietary pleasure seeking.

Is This A Dead End?

So you may be thinking…so what. Isn’t this a worthless insight, even if it’s true?

You can’t force people to develop religious devotion and judge their diet choices. People are either dietary nihilists or they’re not. Those Adventists also belong to church communities where their health values are reinforced, and most Americans don’t have that. They’re drifting in a sea of dietary hedonism.

Another fair objection is that this sort of moral certainty might backfire.

If I believed cake was not only bad for me in the circumstances I’m in now, but that all cakes are bad for everyone at all times, I might back myself into a corner and start making mistakes.

Dogmatic certainty is behind much of the world’s stupidity.

But I don’t think we should throw out this insight. I think it has some power, and it helped a lot of my clients replace the stimulation and pleasure they once found in eating unhealthy food. That’s what I’ll be exploring next.

Until then, you might be interested in how throwing out “practice,” and “concrete morality,” can backfire in other way:

Why "I'm Not Religious, I'm Just Spiritual" People Flounder

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1. Fraser GE, Shavlik DJ. Ten Years of Life: Is It a Matter of Choice? Arch Intern Med. 2001;161(13):1645–1652.

2. Yeary KHK, Sobal J, Wethington E. Religion and body weight: a review of quantitative studies. Obes Rev. 2017 Oct;18(10):1210-1222.

3. Orlich MJ, Fraser GE. Vegetarian diets in the Adventist Health Study 2: a review of initial published findings. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014 Jul;100 Suppl 1(1):353S-8S.

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5. Zhang Y, Chen G, Sotres-Alvarez D, et al. General or Central Obesity and Mortality Among US Hispanic and Latino Adults. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(1):e2351070.

6. Singh PN, Jaceldo-Siegl K, Shih W, Collado N, Le LT, Silguero K, Estevez D, Jordan M, Flores H, Hayes-Bautista DE, McCarthy WJ. Plant-Based Diets Are Associated With Lower Adiposity Levels Among Hispanic/Latino Adults in the Adventist Multi-Ethnic Nutrition (AMEN) Study. Front Nutr. 2019 Apr 9;6:34.

7. Pawlak R, Sovyanhadi M. Prevalence of overweight and obesity among Seventh-day Adventist African American and Caucasian college students. Ethn Dis. 2009 Spring;19(2):111-4.