Diet or be damned

Paradise was very nice,
for Adam and his madam,
until they filched the fruit and took the fall.
They lost their place and fell from grace
and you can bet we can't forget
that eating is the oldest sin of all.
Victor Buono. Heavy

In our office there are a lot of women and a lot of chocolate. This combination makes for the familiar cries of the dieter, 'No thanks, I'm being good', or 'Go on then, I'll be naughty' when offered a 'sinful snack'. But since when did a chocolate biscuit take on a moral dimension? With the emphasis on temptation and denial the language of dieting has turned food from something pleasurable to a matter of fire and brimstone.

This is terrifyingly illustrated by an American religious weight loss group promoting The Right Weigh, which claims that 'being overweight is a direct result of sin'. It goes on to explain that the reason overeating is sinful is 'because the core of this kind of eating is greed, lust, rebellion, and self-pleasure.' The way in which members of this group monitor their weight is by 'holding each other accountable once a week by turning in accountability sheets and confessing sins.' These ideas are not new. The separation of body and spirit in Christian philosophy has, in the past, led to an association between the thin and the pious - in the Middle Ages, for example, women in Britain were considered pure if they starved themselves.