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Chapter 1

Siren Song

But true love is the burden that will carry me back home Carry me with the memories of the beauty I have known

JOSH GARRELS, “ULYSSES”

Have you heard the story of Hannah from the Bible? With a love triangle, a little bit of religion, and a rivalry between two wives of the same man, it has all the hallmarks of a good soap opera. Hannah is the favorite wife of a man named Elkanah, but here’s the rub: Elkanah’s other wife, Peninah, has all the babies. Hannah’s body is unable to give her what she desperately craves: a baby of her own. The failure of her body to bear children fills her with pain and lament.

Elkanah begs Hannah to see that her body’s limitations don’t diminish his love for her. He says, “Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1 Sam 1:8). She ignores him and goes off by herself to bargain with God for what she wants, so loudly that the priest Eli thinks she is drunk. He tells her she is making a fool of herself and that she needs to sober up, but she responds: “No, my lord, I am a woman sorely troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. Do not regard your maidservant as a base woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation” (1 Sam 1:15–16).

The first time I read Hannah’s story, I was sixteen years old, and I felt Hannah’s pain. Except it wasn’t a baby I was longing for. It was a different body. I don’t mean to minimize the pain of infertility; indeed, Hannah’s pain at her inability to conceive would be reality for me almost ten years later. But my life at that point was marked by two distinct things: first, my desire to seek God above all else, and second, to have a smaller, thinner body so that I could be happy and enjoy my life and be all that God made me to be.

Even as a sixteen-year-old, in Elkanah’s tender plea, I sensed God speaking to me.

“Amanda, why do you weep? And why is your heart grieved? Am I not better to you than ten size-4 dresses?”

“Yes, Lord, you are,” I responded, even though my heart’s song of longing still played on in its minor key. I committed to seeking first God’s kingdom, hoping all things being added unto me would include a new, slimmer body. But even as I did my best to heed the prophet Micah’s words to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, my body stayed fat. It not only stayed fat, it got fatter.

In a culture that proclaims a gospel of thinness as salvation, I was clearly headed to hell in a handbasket full of fattening processed food.

If I were writing a memoir about my body, I’d subvert the before-and-after picture trope. Both pictures are of a fat Amanda, but the before picture is a girl who wanted a different body and who thought negatively about herself all the time, all while trying to love God and love her neighbor as herself. The after picture is a snapshot of her as happy as she has learned to be, knowing she is fat and loved by God, loving him back and enjoying her neighbors. Somewhere in between the before and after shots, I learned that if I were in a different body than the one God gave me, I wouldn’t be me anymore.

I didn’t set out to become an activist. I am a fat woman who writes a lot and isn’t afraid to speak the truth and call out inconsistency when I see it. I certainly never thought I’d be writing a book about faith and fatness. I just found myself writing and speaking out more about bodies and Christianity. The more I wrote, the more I heard from other people about their experiences, and the more I realized that people of girth need to know their worth in the eyes of God. There is so much that the teachings of the Catholic Church have to offer us, so much that can help us live happy lives in our good bodies, no matter what size we are.

When you use the word “fat,” people start to get uncomfortable. I understand it; we have attached a morality to fatness that gets defenses up. I have often encountered well-meaning people who think fat acceptance is a celebration of gluttony. It is not. It is, instead, a celebration of the dignity of the human person — a dignity that isn’t dependent on clothing size or the number on the scale.

Then this question inevitably comes up: “So, what about health?” Yes, health is important. I do want to acknowledge, though, that as beautifully complex beings, there’s a lot more to talk about than just physical health. A major motivation behind this book is to help us retrain ourselves to think about health more holistically and to consider our bodies in terms of mercy, kindness, and wonder, rather than criticism, failure, and self-loathing.

It’s hard to have a conversation about bodies without talking about physical health specifically (which we will do in this book), but for now, suffice it to say that I see health as a balance of four aspects of the human being: the physical, the mental, the spiritual, and the emotional. I like to think of these four components of health as the wheels on a 4x4. If one is out of whack, it cannot fulfill its purpose. Each wheel must be calibrated and fully functioning to engage in its intended task. Our culture focuses on physical health, so that “tire” gets all the air and care. So it’s no surprise that our society tends to get stuck in muddy places.

The simple truth is that every person, no matter their size, is valuable in the Kingdom of God. This truth has spurred me on to write this book. Our society has constructed a moral system around fatness and the implied superiority of thinness, where fat bodies are bad and thin bodies are good, no questions asked. Sadly, this has crept into our Church as well. This book will talk openly about the purpose of bodies, what makes a body good, and the need to reframe the way we think and speak about our bodies and the bodies of the people around us.

The sirens of our culture wail persistently, and their call to thinness is loud and persuasive. They sing to us that in appearance and fitness are the foundations of personal worthiness. The siren song of thinness can be intoxicating, and like strong drink it affects our minds and our bodies. We constantly hear the message of becoming our “true selves” through weight loss and dieting. We are inundated with images of happy thinness and attractive athleticism, a gospel of freedom from fat and loneliness that feeds on our insecurities.

Yet we must proclaim and live the truth. God loves each of us as we are, and he invites us to join in the beauty of the Church’s song. My body is good and valuable, as all bodies are. I want to challenge you to bind yourself to this truth, and to begin to think about bodies, faith, and fatness in a fresh way, so that you can counter the siren song of our broken world with a healing song of your own.

For reflection

What aspects of my body do I bring before the Lord in frustration, like Hannah did? What do I think God is asking me in response?

Do I believe that I’m valuable in the kingdom of God? What beliefs, fears, or insecurities are holding me back from believing this?