Weighty matter(s): Religion, secularism, and American weight loss culture

Abstract

AbstractWhile calorie counting seems an utterly secular and mundane practice in the United States, body management has historically been and remains a weighty matter intimately linked with morality. Weight loss cultures and diet reform movements tell us quite a bit about both the aspirations as well as the apprehensions of particular times and places. Over the last few decades, scholars have started to chart different weight loss cultures in the United States and how they have emerged, interacted, and evolved over time. Diet reform movements in the United States, we have learned, are ultimately entanglements of religion, secularism, and gendered bodies. This essay considers how some scholars have tried to make sense of these entanglements by exploring three key approaches. Ultimately, we will find that bodies and weight management became and continue to be sites where tensions between religion and secularism were and are negotiated.