Whether we admit it or not, physical attraction plays a large role in paving the way for love. We don't like to look closely at this fact, especially inside the walls of the church where we hope to find less superficial dating criteria than one's pant size, but the surplus of single, godly, intelligent plus-size women speaks to reality.

It feels like things should be different in the church. Markers of spiritual maturity, like depth of character or willingness to serve, should trump my above-average BMI, but rarely is that the case.

I see it in the faces of guys I'm meeting for the first time after being matched on eHarmony, even though we've exchanged weeks of witty banter and embarrassing confessions.

I hear it in the concerned tones of mentors and parents who repeat phrases such as, "You've got such a pretty face," and "I know you want to be married someday. Do you think losing weight would help?"

Every ounce of my being cringes, because they're probably right. And I hate that. I am talented and opinionated and passionate and valuable. I am good at writing and making jokes and cleaning. I would make a wonderful wife.

I would love to pass my days maneuvering a minivan full of foster kids to soccer games and recitals and tutoring. None of these things would be diminished because of my size, yet none of them seem to matter because of my size.

This problem only seems to be magnified by another byproduct of conservative Christian culture: the pressure to be married. As a single woman, I have often felt like an outlier in the church. The natural assumption is that I want to be married, so to still be single at 27 makes me the object of pity, scrutiny, or, at worse, apathy.

While I do dream of marriage, I feel helpless in pursuing it when I've only experienced rejection from men in the church. People assume I should be actively working toward finding a husband, an exhausting process that leaves me feeling rejected and judged as a result of my weight, or I should be working to lose weight in order to make myself a more appealing option.

I've had Christians justify this pressure by dismissing unrealistic beauty standards with a simple, "Well, men are visual creatures after all." Continue reading

• Joy Beth Smith is the editor of Boundless, a blog for young adults run by Focus on the Family.

‘I am fat,' it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?).'

It was 1968, when most of the world's people were more or less ‘height-weight proportional' and millions of the rest were starving. Weight Watchers was a new organisation for an exotic new problem.

The notion that being fat could spur Russian-novel anguish was good for a laugh.

That, as we used to say during my Californian adolescence, was then. Now, 1968's joke has become 2013's truism. For the first time in human history, overweight people outnumber the underfed, and obesity is widespread in wealthy and poor nations alike.

The diseases that obesity makes more likely — diabetes, heart ailments, strokes, kidney failure — are rising fast across the world, and the World Health Organisation predicts that they will be the leading causes of death in all countries, even the poorest, within a couple of years.

What's more, the long-term illnesses of the overweight are far more expensive to treat than the infections and accidents for which modern health systems were designed.

Obesity threatens individuals with long twilight years of sickness, and health-care systems with bankruptcy.

And so the authorities tell us, ever more loudly, that we are fat — disgustingly, world-threateningly fat. We must take ourselves in hand and address our weakness.

After all, it's obvious who is to blame for this frightening global blanket of lipids: it's us, choosing over and over again, billions of times a day, to eat too much and exercise too little. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: The Guardian