Food has played a huge role in my life. I can remember being overweight up until my freshman year of high school. All the other students would make fun of me and call me names like "doughboy". My parents got a divorce right after my Dad got into a diving accident and became paralyzed. Going outside and playing catch wasn't something I ever got to do with my Dad. When I would visit him I always remember eating food. Watching TV and cooking together was what we did most. Our favorite game show was Press Your Luck and he made me watch ConAir with him like a zillion times. Before the accident my Dad actually worked at a few hotel restaurants as a chef so he taught me some cool recipes. We cooked and ate pasta like it was our job. Although we had a blast eating was a temporary comfort when I was confused, depressed, or angry.
I remember hitting my growth spurt going into my freshman year of high school. This was my third year on the freshman football team because they didn't have weight limits. Look, I was fat, I tried to make weights one year but I couldn't loose the weight. The process a fat kid has to go through at weigh-ins for the younger athletic associations is embarrassing. I was wearing a garbage bag and running laps around the football field before we got on the bus to leave. On the bus ride there I was encouraged to throw up in a garbage can as much as possible. Then when we get there every student in the league is looking at you, not just your team, all of them point and laugh at the fat kid that couldn't stop stuffing his face in the off-season. Then the last part was the worst. I had to strip down to my underwear and wait in line with all the other kids. All that to step on a scale and hear the sound of metal clanging up and down. The guy holding the clipboard looked at me like I didn't have a chance. So I played on the freshman team from 7th-9th grade because I made a promise that I would never put myself through that again.
When I hit my freshman year I lost weight, got faster, and I started playing middle linebacker on defense. People started noticing me more in school and it felt great. Even though my social life started to improve food still played a huge role in my daily routine. I never really stopped eating like I normally did. Food when from a comfort for depression to a celebration for pride. My first taste of this was when I discovered the mouth watering part of a chicken called the wing. Wing night at the lighthouse was something I looked forward to every week. I once entered a wing eating contest and devoured 74 wings. Eating became a social event and it was awesome.
The big idea behind me sharing this is that eating can become an idol. Regardless of weight, or the more sensitive term "girth", we can make food an idol. It has nothing to do with weight. Food is an essential to life which makes depending on it easy and dangerous. We need to be careful not to let our taste buds and stomachs deceive us into false worship. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. When does eating food become a sin? When do you go from eating to committing a deadly sin? Where is the line?
To be continued...
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