Fat, Syn, and Disordered Eating: The Dangers and Powers of Excess
HANNAH BACON
This article draws on qualitative research inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how ancient Christian suspicions of appetite and pleasure resurface in this group’s language of “Syn.” Following ancient Christian representations of sin, members assume that Syn depicts disorder and that fat is a visible sign of a body that has fallen out of place. Syn, though, is ambiguous, utilizing ancient theological meanings to discipline fat while containing within it the power to resist the very borders that hold women’s bodies and fat in place. Syn thus signals both the dangers and powers of disordered eating.
According to St. Jerome, “the attenuation, the slenderness, the deliverance of the body from the encumbrance of much flesh gives us some conformity to God and His angels.” Apparently, the less flesh we have, the more we become like the heavenly bodies who have none. Citing this passage by Jerome in his sermon on Easter Day in 1626, John Donne (1839, 314) recommends slimness to his congregation. “The flesh that we have built up by curious diet, by meats of provocation, and witty sauces,” he teaches, is “artificial flesh of our own making.” All flesh is sinful, so the more we have the deeper we bury the soul. The soul, he instructs, does not require “so vast a house of sinful flesh, to dwell in.”
Today we may be less inclined to ponder the theological content of current day discourses about fat, but ancient Christian suspicion of pleasure displayed within the moral requirement to properly order one’s desire and foodways, continues to lurk behind contemporary cultural obsessions with size. This essay draws on qualitative research conducted inside a UK secular commercial weight loss group to explore how its discourse of “Syn” evokes ancient theological meanings, establishing fat as disordered and as a site of danger and power. Although the spelling of Syn differs from traditional Christian usage, the original spelling—“Sin”—used by the organization up until 2004 exposes its alliance with ancient theological notions of disobedience and disorder. It may be that early theologians like Tertullian encouraged fasting as a corrective to the “primordial sin” of Eden and that women ascetics starved themselves in order to orientate their desire towards a mystical encounter with Christ, but such theological calls to organize desire through the re-ordering of foodways are part of the symbolism of sin this secular group reproduces. Fat is assumed to be a physical sign of Syn and visible proof of a body that has become disordered. Syn then operates as it has always done within traditional theology, to patrol the boundaries of order through the containment of the flesh, and female flesh in particular. Yet, this group’s narrating of Syn is ambiguous for Syn is both prohibited and permitted, and it is such ambiguity that, I suggest, has the potential to rupture the integrity of the theological discourse upon which this group’s suspicion of fat is founded.
DISORDERED EATING
The language of “disorder” when set against eating raises a number of issues. Most obviously, it is suggestive of a medical gaze that clinically defines certain foodways as disordered. Feminists have long since troubled distinctions between “normal” and “pathological” eating with figures like Susie Orbach and Susan Bordo suggesting that anorexia, dieting, bingeing, and overeating are best placed on a “continuum.” For Orbach (1978), all women share the same condition of sexual oppression, “taught to see themselves from the outside as candidates for men” (17) and confined to oppressive social gender roles. Dieting, like anorexia and other expressions of “compulsive eating,” is a response to women’s inequality—a product of social rather than individual disorder (Orbach 1986, 61). Bordo, although critical of Orbach’s theorizing of eating disorders as a site of protest against patriarchy, considers dieting, rigorous exercise, and anorexia as all part of the same backlash against women’s autonomy. The drive towards thinness, whether through dieting or more extreme forms of self-starvation, is not a unique pathology of the individual that the therapist must seek to treat and correct, but a “cultural disorder” (Bordo 1993, 55) reflective of the cultural demand for female thinness, constant self-monitoring, and self-improvement (Bordo 1993, 57). Bordo (1993) considers that “eating disorders, far from being ‘bizarre’ and anomalous, are utterly continuous with a dominant element of the experience of being female in this culture” (57). It is not then that the anorectic or compulsive dieter misperceives reality but that they understand it all too well. There are no clear boundaries distinguishing eating-disordered women from those with so-called “normal” eating practices, for it is all too “normal” for women to fear food and be preoccupied with weight.
Of course, it is true that “eating disorders” such as anorexia and bulimia are not out of kilter with the eating habits of the majority of women. Despite the obvious medical overtones of the terminology of “disorder,” then, I use it here not to assume certain foodways are atypical or abnormal, but because members recycle theological ideas about sin which take as their starting point assumptions about “order.” I seek to signal a similar troubling of hard and fast binaries, especially those that Christian theology has helped create and concretize between fat, disorder, and sin.
INSIDE A SECULAR COMMERCIAL WEIGHT LOSS GROUP: GO FORTH AND SHRINK!
The slimming group inside which I conducted research1 belongs to a very popular UK commercial weight loss organization. It boasts 10,000 groups nationwide, a total of 3,500 trained consultants, and an intake of over five million slimmers since its inception in 1969. I spent fifteen months inside one regional group attending weekly meetings and participating as a fully paying member. I joined the group as a researcher and as a dieter, committed to losing weight and conducting ethnographic research. Similar to other feminist women researching fat, I was aware of the “fraught standpoint” I embodied (Heyes 2006, 127), caught between my feminist convictions and a personal desire to lose weight.2 It seemed to me, however, that seeking to rise above my own body and its contradictory desires only reinvested with new power the body/mind dualism feminists have long since tried to critique, not least within Christian theology.3 Consequently, I decided to include myself in the research as a participant.
During my time inside the group, I chatted informally with members and conducted thirteen semi-structured interviews with volunteers, twelve women and one man. Most defined themselves as “Christian,” although none raised faith or religion as a motivation for weight loss. Meetings took place in the hall of a local evangelical Anglican church (ironically suggestive of the theological meanings the organization resurrects) and lasted for one and a half hours. Members varied in age but the group was comprised of mostly women with only two male members, neither of whom came regularly. While it is possible that other men joined but chose not to attend (cf. Bell and McNaughton 2007), the products and services of this organization were clearly marketed at women. Weekly attendance averaged at around fifteen to twenty members and the majority of the group was middle class, reflecting the affluent social location of the meeting and members’ ability to afford the weekly subscription of £4.95.4 Hevala was the only non-white, non-British woman in the group. She moved from Kurdistan to the United Kingdom when she was three years old.
The consultant, Louise, appeared to be in her mid to late thirties. She was usually involved with most aspects of the meetings, receiving members’ weekly subscriptions, weighing members, and speaking to new recruits about the weight loss plan. She always led the formal meeting that would routinely begin with her welcoming new members and presenting awards to those who had reached significant “targets.” She would invite each individual to give an account of his or her weight gain, loss, or maintenance that week, and would often intersperse such profiling with a game or talk. The meeting would always end with a raffle and with Louise commissioning the group to “go forth and shrink!”
SYN AND BOUNDARY SETTING: PERMISSION AND PROHIBITION
The language of Syn is fundamental to this organization’s approach to weight loss. Indeed, so foundational is it that the organization opposed a trademark application by Sin and Slim (another UK slimming company) in 2005, contesting the use of “sin” in its weight loss plan.5 “Syn” typically refers to foods like crisps, chocolate, ice cream, cake, and alcohol that are high in saturated fats and sugar. All Syn is ascribed a “value” reflective of its nutritional value—a cheese straw: two Syns; a 28 gram piece of chocolate fudge cake: five Syns, for example. Members are instructed to consume between ten and fifteen Syns a day and are advised to keep a log of their daily intake. Syn values are calculated by “Head Office” and members are never informed about how these are decided. Instead, such values simply appear as a seventeen-page list in the weight loss guide. Members can also discover Syn values by consulting the company’s website, “Syn calculator” or by calling the “Syns Hotline.”
Syn stands for “Synergy,” expressing the organization’s view that Syn works alongside two other food groups—“Healthy Extras” and “Free Foods”—to “optimize”6 weight loss. The fine detail of what constitutes each of these categories depends on which plan members follow. On the “Original plan” (which was the most popular), members observe either “red” or “green” days and must take care not to confuse the two. On red days, “Free Foods” include lean meat and poultry, fish, seafood, and game. Fresh or frozen fruit, vegetables, eggs, fat-free dairy products, and vegetable proteins such as Quorn and tofu are also Free, technically “Superfree” because they are Free on both red and green days. All Free Food can be eaten without restriction. “Healthy Extras” are divided into Healthy Extra “a” choices and Healthy Extra “b” choices and must always be weighed. Members must choose one or two from category “a” and two from category “b”. On red days, “a” choices include milk and cheese. “B” choices include vegetable pulses and pastas, oil, cereals and crispbreads, cereal bars, bread, dried, canned and cooked fruit and soups. On “green” days, “Free Foods” include vegetables and pulses, rice, pasta and grains. The same “Superfree” foods are also Free on both red and green days. Healthy Extra “a” choices include milk and cheese, but “b” choices now include meat and poultry, fish, shellfish, oil, cheese, nuts, and seeds as well as cereals, crispbreads, bread, cereal bars, soups, and dried, canned, and cooked fruit. All food which is not Free or a Healthy Extra is “Syn.”
What constitutes Free Food, Syn and Healthy Extras then is ambiguous. Syn is, however, also ambiguous because it is both permitted and prohibited. On the one hand, members do not have to avoid Syn. Indeed, the weight loss guide instructs that Syns are the way members can enjoy the foods many diets ban “without a shred of guilt!” Syn, the guide asserts, “takes the guilt right out of eating.” Members must simply decide how to spend their Syn “allowance” and so become strategic managers of their weekly budgets. The official message of the organization is that Syn is positive and flexible. Syn, though, must also be policed since any food that is not Free or designated a Healthy Extra must be counted as part of one’s Syn “allowance.” Confusing or blurring the boundaries between Syn, Healthy Extras and Free Food in ways that exceed one’s weekly Syn allowance always results in the kind of Syn which falls outside the permitted boundaries of the plan. Syn then emerges in this group as positive and negative, liberating and restraining, harmless and dangerous. It both bids members to eat while also insisting that they abstain.
SLIDING INTO SYN
The original spelling of “Sin” formally used by this organization is telling, for despite being permitted, Syn continues the legacy of dominant theological tradition as it is reconstituted as dangerous and named as wrong. Louise plays a vital role in establishing this. She tells us repeatedly that all foods that are not Free carry a Syn value7 and this serves to construct Syn and Free Food in opposition to one another. Free Foods are “safe,” she advises, because they do not need regulating, thus Syn is conversely framed as unsafe and in need of tight control. Comparing a pastry sausage roll to one she has made which substitutes the pastry for wholemeal bread, she remarks that it is “scary” how many Syns are in the “proper” sausage roll: eleven to be precise. She cautions that a lax attitude to Syn places the slimmer in a “danger zone,” recounting in one meeting the instance of a woman who, on Christmas day, ate seventy Syns just by not watching the food she polished off between courses.
Louise’s recurring message is that our eating must be watched and watched carefully. She hands out fake eye balls to the group to place in their lunch boxes as a reminder that she is watching them and it is this eye for detail that she encourages members to develop. We must cut the rind off of our bacon she tells us, even those little bits between the bacon that are fiddly, otherwise what we think is “Free” becomes Syn and unsafe. Part of the alarm surrounding Syn then is that Free Food might suddenly mutate and tip the member into the kind of Syn that is irrecoverable. Vigilance is, therefore, crucial.
Members share Louise’s unease about Syn. Sarah, for instance, tells me that it is the taste of crisps that stalls her weight loss potential:
The only thing I find hard is [the] Syns. When I have a sandwich – so that’s like the bread’s Syns – I just have this thing where I want to eat crisps. But we get like these velvet crisps. I don’t know what they’re called, what the name is, but they’re like four Syns. But they’re so tasty. Or we’ll get Quavers and um … I just like find a sandwich with a few crisps on the side. And I have done that quite a lot and it’s still worked but I know if I didn’t have them.
Although she is still losing weight, she implies that resisting crisps would probably help her lose even more, but the taste is too irresistible. Mark similarly defines savory food as his “downfall.” For Nicola, it is the “wine at night and just silly things that creep on without you knowing at the time, until you look in the mirror! You go to put something on and you think, oh … what have you done? Get the wine back out and drown your sorrows!” Syn then is dangerous because it creeps up, hides in unsuspecting foods and seduces members with its taste. It also leads to serious consequences since “little pickers wear big knickers!” warns a poster displayed in the meeting room. Syn, it would seem, can have weighty ramifications.
Of course, Christian theology traditionally holds that this is indeed the lesson of the fall, and it is the theological notion of fallenness which resurfaces most strongly in members’ narrations surrounding Syn. Syn deceives and causes them to “slip,” “slide,” or “fall.” Mark, although feeling good about his weight loss, wonders why this is not enough motivation to prevent him from “slipping.” Ruth perceives a danger with her own foodways which make it “very easy to just slide back into your wicked ways […] and eat all these things which are responsible for how you got where you are in the first place.” Nicola tells me that in the last four years she has “probably gone down a slippery slide,” consuming more wine than previously and causing her to put on weight. She talked too about “not doing enough” to avoid tempting Synful foods and concluded that she was “still slipping.”
Wine, sausage rolls and crisps are all defined as Syn by this organization. By identifying the...
