Gluttony as Mental Illness

In our increasingly obese society, it is getting harder to find the point where a snack becomes a meal and a meal becomes a feast and a feast becomes a binge.

If you really want to scare yourself about this issue, take a look at this animated map of U.S. obesity trends, state-by-state, since the 1980s. If you live in a state that in a single generation has gone from less than 1 obese citizen in 10 to more than 3 in 10, then your perspective on where to draw the line between normal and excessive eating might well be fuzzy.

Why is gluttony everywhere you look nowadays?

The appetite machine

Our bodies are tightly regulated by a virtual appetite machine consisting of hormones and nerves that arouse food-seeking behavior and calorie consumption. For 99.99 percent of human history, food was rarely in abundance, and so our ancestors survived by seeking and eating food day after day after day, thus keeping this machinery finely tuned.

And now, just because high-calorie food has never been so cheap and plentiful as it is today, it doesn’t mean this machinery has lost any of its power. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's a good idea to glom onto all the calories you can, but this natural process within our bodies is now a major contributor to our national epidemic of obesity.

One other aspect of epidemics: they’re contagious. And so is overeating. How much you eat, what you eat, how fast you eat, and how long you eat, are all influenced by your surroundings. If you're with people who eat a lot, you'll probably eat more too.

So in one sense we perhaps can be forgiven for this explosion of gluttony, since overeating is in our genes and it bonds us to each other. But from another perspective--the viewpoint that declared gluttony a sin long before the modern age--sinful overeating has less to do with the flabby result than with the motivation. When you look at the kinds of things that make someone habitually consume excessive calories, you get an idea of how gluttony intersects with mental disorder.

Environment matters

Binge-eating is considered a disorder in the psychiatric world, whether it occurs alone or in combination with some compensatory behavior, like self-induced vomiting (which makes for the disorder termed bulimia nervosa). But binge eating tends to occur out of sight of others, so the social influence is nil. Binges are also beyond the natural regulation of appetite for two reasons. One, the food is ingested so rapidly that the stomach and the brain don't even have time to confer, and two, the eating is driven by other emotional demands outside the machinery of appetite. For the binge eater and the person with bulimia, stuffing food (and bringing it back up) provide a reliable means of achieving some emotional relief or satisfaction from whatever the stressful circumstances might be.

What is eaten, rather than how much

Some mental disorders center not so much on how much one ingests, but what one chooses to digest. In the disorder called "pica," for example, the patient has an almost irresistible drive to consume things that are not food, such as paint chips or dirt or clay, and often this is a symptom as much as it is a cause of other illnesses. Other patients (they generally have psychoses) come repeatedly to medical attention for having swallowed some solid and indigestible object--coins, hair, and tacks, for example.

Blunting the pain

Gluttony resembles lust in a way, in that it's rooted in a natural motivation but then is taken by the sufferer to an unhealthy or sinful degree. In both of these behaviors, overconsumption leads to a dulling of the senses, which is likely to be what the "sinner" has been striving for all along: a way to escape from some other, more acutely painful feelings.

Theological disclaimer: I use the term "sin" to mean not only behaviors we might all be tempted to do but also actions that can sometimes be driven by mental disorder. In no way do I wish to imply that "sinners" are deserving of either condemnation or damnation.