Ode to Self-Control; or, Eat Less and Move More in Order to Lose Weight

I’ve been doing some serious thinking about self-control lately. Specifically, our society’s general lack thereof.

Let me give you some background. I’m a pretty young guy. I’m not a baby by any means—I’d better not be, given my wife of nearly six years and my three children, with one more on the way—but I’m pretty young, certainly too young to be worrying about health problems. But I’d let myself get pretty unhealthy. I weighed in at 221 pounds (that’s about fifteen and three-quarters stones for you British people that haven’t succombed to the foolishness of metrication), whereas I ought to weight about 180, maybe even less. Furthermore, I got far too little exercise, even taking into account my work in the garden. Essentially, I sat on my butt all day and I ate too much. And when I took my blood pressure one day, it was 143/94—that’s “stage 1 hypertension,” if you don’t know.

I decided that I was lazy and gluttonous, which was true. I like to eat, and by that I mean that I really love to eat. I like most foods, with a few vegetable exceptions, and I like to eat as much of them as I can get. And when I was younger, of course, that was healthy; I was growing quickly, and I needed all the nutrients I could get. But I didn’t teach myself self-control in other ways. I knew that I could indulge my taste for food as much as I wanted with no physical ill effects, so I did, without compensating by training myself for self-discipline in other fields. I didn’t subject myself to a strict exercise regimen; I didn’t force myself to any regular, sometimes less than pleasant practice. I just gave into my wishes, and therefore rather than training myself for self-control, I trained myself for self-indulgence.

And now, of course, I’m paying for it. Following my dear father, may he rest in peace, I’m working on the Goodman Eat Less and Move More diet to control my increasing size. For about a month, I ate neither breakfast nor lunch, only dinner. My dinner was small and consisted largely of vegetables and grilled chicken. I ran one mile per day during the week, during my lunch break; when I could, I also walked to work, which is a two-mile trip one way. For the last week or so, I’ve gone back to eating breakfast again, though it’s a small one. I still run at least a mile a day (most days), but I’m doing it much faster these days and so I’m generally making a mile and quarter in the same time. (I can’t run until I’m too tired to run anymore, because I’ve got limited time for lunch.) I’ve lost nearly twenty-five pounds on this diet, with only about fifteen more to go, so I suppose it’s a success. God help me to persevere, and to turn this into better habits in the future.

Because that’s what this diet—and this post—is all about: habits. Specifically, a particular type of habit, called virtue. The problem was that I didn’t have any. Traditional Catholic teaching has provided for four primary “natural” virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. I was totally lacking in three of the four; and since justice is not just a part of virtue, but virtue entire (according to Aristotle), I suppose I must have been significantly lacking in that one, as well.

I had no temperance; I ate as much as I wanted when I wanted it, not as much as I needed when I needed it. As St. Augustine pointed out so many centuries ago, oftentimes vice is its own punishment, and he’s been proven right in my life now. Had I been temperate, disciplining myself in my youth, I surely wouldn’t need to subject myself to this kind of pain and trouble now to make up for my past indiscretion.

I had no fortitude; that is, I had no ability to persevere in my efforts to gain the other virtues. Many times I realized that I was getting unhealthy because I had no temperance, and many times I resolved to end it. But I never could see such efforts through, and after a few days of exercising, or after a few days of not eating every piece of candy that came into my sight, I gave up and went back to the way I was.

And I had no prudence. A prudent man would have seen what his self-indulgence was doing to him and chosen a better path. For me, it took a serious health shock to make me realize that my lack of virtue had finally started killing my body, the way that for years it had been doing constant damage to my soul.

So now I must train myself into the virtues that I should have learned many, many years ago. St. Gregory of Nyssa pointed out that the vicious soul (that is, the soul plagued by vice) is like a rope much used, caked in mud and filth. To clean the rope, one must pull it through a close-fitting pipe to scrape the impurities off. This is naturally extremely painful for the rope; it must be scraped repeatedly, and hard, to rid it of its filth. But there simply is no other way. Would it not be better, one can hear the great father saying, if the rope were kept clean in the first place, to spare it this agonizing pain?

Surely, it would. My soul had been cleansed in baptism and strengthened by the graces of confirmation. Yet I did not learn virtue, surrendering myself to self-indulgence. My soul had become filthy, so filthy that its vicious habits had begun to affect my body, as well. So now I have to drag that rope—my body, in whose passions my vice was primarily associated—through the pipe to scrape it clean. Would it not have been better if I had learned virtue while still in the grace of my infancy, or while strengthened by the proximate graces of that great sacrament of Confirmation? No doubt. But here I am; and here and now, there simply is no other way.

This purification, this rearguard action by a tardy soul, is certainly made no easier by the constant barrage of advertising for products which promise to make what I undertake with such difficulty easy and without tension. Everyone, it seems, has a promise to make it easy to lose weight while eating the same foods and exercising little or not at all; in other words, to change your life without actually changing anything about it at all. Don’t worry about gluttony; don’t stress about self-indulgence; those things are your rights! Don’t you deserve the box of chocolates every night, the ice cream for breakfast, the Whopper that you’ve had for dinner three nights this week? Don’t you deserve to give yourself a little treat now and then? Of course you do; go ahead and eat that doughnut! Then, when you’re done, take this magic pill and drop ten pounds in only two weeks!

Our society is plagued by an “obesity epidemic,” so called as though gluttony were not a vice but a disease. Like drug addiction, it’s only a disease in the loosest possible sense of the term; and if it is a disease, it’s the most preventable disease in creation. Being obese causes health problems, to be sure; but once again, as St. Augustine pointed out, sometimes vice is its own punishment, and gluttony, whether of food or drink, is probably the most obvious example of that. Obesity itself, however, is not a disease, but rather a symptom; and it is a symptom not of a medical disease, but of a spiritual one: a lack of self-control.

My place of work has a candy dish. That candy dish is, most of the time, full of candy. Sometimes it’s good candy, sometimes it’s not so good; but it’s always sugary and sweet. Every time I walked by the candy dish, I ate a piece of candy. Every time I went to a buffet, I had three plates plus dessert. Is that a disease? Or is that Donald Goodman failing to control what he puts into his mouth and what he doesn’t?

I refused to control myself. That’s how I got overweight, and that’s how I began to suffer from the health problems that accompany being overweight. It’s not a disease; it’s a simple refusal on my part to practice the virtue of temperance, no more and no less.

But Americans want it all. Americans want to eat all they want without paying the penalties for eating; they want to be in good shape without buckling down and doing the hard work that is real physical exercise. In other words, they want vice without the consequences of vice. Then, when the consequences of vice come along anyway, they don’t want virtue, but a doctor who will cure those consequences for them.

The thing is, God didn’t create man that way. God didn’t create man so that man could constantly give in to his appetites; He created man with the ability, and the obligation, to subordinate those appetites to his reason. My reason told me I didn’t need to eat all that candy; my appetites told me that I wanted it; and I let my appetites rule the day. What was necessary, and what is still necessary, is for me to use my will in accordance with my reason, not my appetites, so that I don’t go ahead and eat what I don’t need. Plato famously made the analogy of a chariot and horses; the driver is the reason, the horses are the appetites. The soul which allows the appetites to guide it will never arrive at its end; instead it will be pulled about willy-nilly, with no way to get where it must go. But the soul which allows its driver to guide it, to subdue the horses and direct them toward their proper end, will arrive safely at his destination.

What is the end of my appetite for food? Nourishment, of course; the fulfillment of the nutritional needs of my body. Nothing more. My appetite for food is not ordered toward my delight in eating; it’s not ordered toward consuming maximum resources; and it’s not even ordered toward obligatory cultural consumption of hot dogs at baseball games. (Obligatory though that is; just make sure you’re actually hungry when you go.) It’s ordered toward nutrition. It’s certainly natural and good that when our appetites achieve their purpose, we experience some enjoyment; it’s good, in other words, that I like to eat. But when I allow the joy of eating to take precedence over the nutritional needs of my body—that is, when my appetite is no longer directed at its proper end—I’ve fundamentally disordered my soul. The horses are pulling the driver, rather than the driver directing the horses; I will inevitably be pulled off course.

In other words, I’ve lost the virtue of temperance; I’ve lost the virtue of self-control. But that temperance is the only solution to our country’s many obesity problems. There is no pill that will grant virtue. Indeed, there is only one thing that will grant virtue: repeatedly acting in a virtuous manner, such that acting rightly rather than wrongly becomes a habit. That is virtue. It’s not easy, any more than it’s easy for the rope when it’s cleaned; but it is the only way. The sooner we Americans learn that the road to strength and to health is deliberate and controlled virtue, rather than unconstrained vice with appropriate medical treatment to mitigate its effects, the better off we’ll be.

Thank God I became aware of this problem of mine, and thank God that He gave me the strength to begin dealing with it, before it got too bad to remedy. (If indeed I did catch it in time.)

Praise be to Christ the King!

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