When I was thirteen, my mom and I attended a women’s conference at our church. I can only recall two things from that event. The first is that my mom and I went to a bagel shop for a fun breakfast. The second is that the very well-known female speaker shared the story of how she and God decided how much she should weigh. Apparently, she and the Lord talked about it, she was given a number that she wrote down, and that was that. The speaker did whatever she needed to do to maintain this holy number.
I am grateful that my abiding love for bagels was able to survive this moment. However, I can trace how this moment has impacted my life, even seventeen years later. While this conference didn’t start my hatred toward my body, it added to the reasons why I believed hating my body was right in God’s eyes. As a ten-year-old, my parents made it clear that my body was not acceptable as it was, and that I needed to lose weight. My parents encouraged me to be more mindful of what I ate. They wanted me to move my body more. Eventually, when I got a little older, they even had me join Weight Watchers to help encourage me to lose weight, to be smaller. I began to loathe my body and the way it looked. Every curve, every roll, every stretch mark—it was all simply too much. I had begun to allow myself to go hungry, to be hungry, with the goal of shrinking myself. By thirteen, I hated my body, because it was already deemed bad by the adults in my life.
So, I took what this speaker said to heart and began to believe there was a specific amount of weight God wanted me to weigh. I prayed about it, wasn’t sure that I was able to hear from God and settled on a number based on something I had seen online. That number I picked wasn’t biologically attainable given my height and body structure. I know this now, but thirteen-year-old me was consumed by the desire to be that weight.
Once, I drew lines on my body to indicate where I would cut off my own flesh to be thin. To be desirable. To be good. To be pretty. To be someone people could actually be proud of. It was impossible to see past the size of my body to any of these traits; my weight would always be seen first. My weight was the lens through which I viewed myself, and I assumed others did the same. My intelligence and kindness could not matter until I had trimmed down. I was nothing if I was not thin.
But then, I learned there were more ways my body could be bad. I began to hear messages at church that my body was sinful and that I needed to be covered up. Not only was my body too big, but my body was also a temptation to the boys around me. I became responsible for their sin and my sin all of a sudden. How was that fair? How could it be true that no part of my body would be good—or even just okay? But “Your body is bad,” is all that I heard.
For years.
And I heard this message everywhere—from Christian magazines to trusted leaders—so it must have been true. If there was nothing redeemable about my body, then maybe there was nothing redeemable about me. What an incredibly dangerous theology to be crafted in my young mind, and it became stored in my body.
Perhaps this is the real reason I became a theologian: to rewrite the narrative of my youth. Something deep within me knew the narrative I was given about my body wasn’t the truest of truths. I was being beckoned to something different; something better; something good; something right.
What I know with certainty now is that there is no gospel of thinness. Jesus has not called me to a body size. Jesus has simply called me to himself, as I am. I bear the image of God, and that is declared good. This revelation has been the foundation of my theological work from the moment I realized it. This is the narrative I am rewriting.
The speaker at that long-ago conference told me how much to weigh; in doing so, she told me how much space I could take up. That feels like the real trick in the midst of all other young women and I were taught. When I was told that I was too big, or that my body must be covered, what I was really being told was not to take up space. Do not be seen or perceived; simply disappear into the background.
This narrative is not exclusive to the Church. Naomi Wolf coined the term, “beauty myth,” to describe how as women shatter more glass ceilings, the more pressure we feel to be and remain beautiful. Beauty became weaponized with one clear objective in mind: to restrain and confine.[1]
In the church, we just call the beauty myth something different. We say that God desires women’s smallness in body and spirit, so we must submit to male authority and perceptions of our bodies, no questions asked.
While a part of me, deep down, always suspected there was something amiss, it has taken work to see that this is the truth: My female body is good. God declared it so in the garden (Gen. 1–2), and along the way we have forgotten the truth, continuing to buy into the lie that our bodies are something to be ashamed of. The time has come to return to and believe what was once said—that our bodies are good. I feel that this work has not been done—at least not adequately—within the church.
I have often felt that Christians prefer to avoid talking about the body, labeling it “bad” and moving on from there, which allows Gnosticism to bleed through. Gnosticism is the belief that the spiritual is superior and good, while the body is something that is less than. But we cannot ignore the body, for in the garden God declared human bodies good, and there was no shame connected to them. This is how our relationship to our bodies is supposed to be—naked and unashamed, recognizing the inherent goodness of our bodies as image bearers.
How beautiful it is that Jesus came as a human. The incarnation redeems this body, reminding us that it is in fact good. What a gift Christ’s humanity was, with implications reaching further than what the disciples and early church members could have imagined. Jesus did not scoff at his body; he did not abuse it or harbor hatred for it. He embraced it. He worked with his hands. He ate food. He took naps. Jesus cared for his body. He performed the miracle that someone like me needed to see—that our bodies could be called good and used for good.
And in direct contradiction to everything I had been taught in church, Jesus let women take up space around him. He did not comment on their bodies; rather, he called them beloved.[2] Perhaps this is what it means to be a woman: simply to be beloved by God. Perhaps our beauty is found in how belovedness is lived out.
A conference speaker told me that my weight mattered. The Church has told me that hiding my body mattered. But Jesus has told me that I matter. That I bear his image. That I was meant to take up space, and this, too, is good.
Editor’s note: February 24–March 8, 2025, is Eating Disorders Awareness Week. If you or someone you love struggle with an eating disorder, please visit the National Eating Disorders Association website for help.
[1] Wolf, Naomi, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York, W. Morrow), 1991.
[2] When Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman, he does not condemn her; instead, he offers her a chance at living water; a chance at a different life (John 4). Then there is the woman with the issue of blood, willing to risk it all in order to touch Jesus and be healed—and heal her he does (Mark 5: 25–34). She wanted to shrink away but Jesus called to her and allowed her to be seen and to take up space.
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