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Point of View
It's clear that God must like fat people
By Carl Heintze
For a long time I've wondered if God likes fat people. I say that, of course, because I'm fat. I raise my question because it brings another: If he didn't like fat people, why would he make so many of them?
I count myself in this large group (no pun intended), but I have never felt it as a measure of God's favor. There was a time when I was thinner. But there have not many times when I could have been said to be skinny. The only time I was ever really skinny was when I was about 7. That's so long ago I can't remember how it felt.
In fact the only reason I know I was skinny then is that there is existent a picture of me looking skinny. It doesn't look much like me, but there is enough resemblance so I know it must be either me or a twin brother--and I never had a twin brother.
I was thin one other time in my life: during World War II. That period came about because of an enforced fast consisting mostly of K-rations, delivered in a haphazard manner. No K-ration was intended to do anything for one's appetite and they certainly did nothing for mine.
But their occasional consumption and a lot of forced marching had the effect of making my belt tighter, my face more cadaverous and my hunger insatiable. When I got a chance to eat a normal diet again, it became pretty abnormal. I craved such things as milk and chocolate cake, ice cream and apple pie and before peace had been around very long there I was back up to what I suppose you might call my non-fighting weight.
Since then it has been pretty much the same thing. Fat has triumphed over skinny; I have gone back to wearing shirts with 16 1/2-inch collars; my spare tire does not spare me and I am, well, you know, as a friend once politely put it, "heavyset."
I've also been called "stout," "chubby" and by a few people I would really not like to meet again, downright fat. (I know it is an apt description, but I'd just as soon forget it.)
This is the same kind of description my mother always gave people when she explained why I was not exactly like other males my age. "He's heavyset," she'd say, as if this were something to be proud of.
For a long time I blamed her for the extra pounds, for she had a tendency to equate maternal love with offspring feedings.
I've found this is not unusual. It's something all mothers seem to feel, that their children haven't had enough to eat, even after they are married and have a wife and children of their own.
But, in the end, I suppose, grudgingly, I have to assume some responsibility for my shape. We are, after all, what we eat and what we eat is what we put into our mouths and we are supposed to have control over what we put in our mouths. Well, mostly.
But I've always thought it also was partly God's fault. If He hadn't made apple pie a la mode so infernally wonderful to taste, we would not have to feel the effects of too many such desserts around our middles or under our chins.
That, of course, opens a deep theological question: Why did God make apple pie a la mode, chocolate bars and doughnuts and whipped cream so delicious? He could just as well have made them pleasant to taste while still making them non-fattening.
But He didn't.
Instead He made low-calorie things like spinach and broccoli and skim milk either tasteless or lousy to the tongue.
Does this mean pleasure is bad? Does it mean appetite is unnecessary? Does it mean that if we don't avoid too much pleasure that we are bound to pay the price, or at least gain too many pounds? Could the Lord not have taught us this lesson in overindulgence in some other way--say, like making too many pieces of pie begin to taste rotten?
Alas, as nearly as I can determine, having eaten more than one piece of pie with ice cream, succeeding pieces keep on tasting just fine.
So diets and losing weight seem to me to have a certain theological significance, sort of like the relationship between Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
That is, what's ordinary--food--also is extraordinary and deep and we need to understand it more fully.
Of course, I suppose I could call on God's mercy and ask Him to develop a non-fattening apple pie. We or He has done it with ice cream which is neither ice cream nor fattening, although it bears a similar taste. But so far no one has delivered a divine non-fattening apple pie, not even my mother--who, incidentally, did not make very good apple pies.
Or maybe she was just God's instrument and I didn't know it.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
