A few weeks ago, my teenage daughter asked me why one of our relatives talks about food like it’s a moral issue. “It’s like they think eating pasta is a sin.”
That observation—which became the opening of my post on Christian diet culture—clearly struck a nerve. Dozens of you asked for reading recommendations to understand how we got here and what healthier alternatives might look like.
I have to admit: I initially turned comments off on that post. Writing about diet culture feels vulnerable in ways that critiquing other forms of spiritual appropriation doesn’t. But I’ve reopened them now, so please give that original post a read and let me know what you think. And if you’re ready to go deeper, this reading list is for you.
Because here’s the thing: we can’t break free from diet culture’s grip until we understand that it’s not actually about health. It’s about centuries of Christian theologies that we’ve rebranded as secular wellness advice.
What This List Does NOT Include
You’ll notice I’m not recommending popular diet memoirs, generic “body positivity” manifestos, or anti-diet books that stop at “diet culture is bad” without explaining why it has such a death grip on American culture.
Those books have their place. But they can’t answer the question my daughter asked: Why do we talk about food like it’s a moral issue?
To answer that, you need to trace the religious genealogy. You need to understand that the voice in your head saying “I was bad today, I ate carbs” isn’t just internalized wellness culture. It’s the echo of medieval Christian asceticism, Protestant food reform, and evangelical purity culture, all dressed up in the language of optimization and clean eating.
So instead of self-help, I’m assigning history. Instead of wellness influencers, I’m pointing you toward scholars who’ve done the hard work of showing how diet culture is secularized Christianity complete with original sin (your appetite), redemption through suffering (restriction), and salvation through bodily control (thinness as moral achievement).
This reading list also doesn’t include alternatives—at least not many. That’s what my next book Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us will offer. For now, it’s enough to see clearly how we got here.
What This List Does Include
These eight resources trace American diet culture’s transformation from religious practice to secular obsession:
Historical foundations showing how medieval holy fasting became Victorian “fasting girls” and eventually modern eating disorders
The race and class politics revealing that fat phobia isn’t about health—it’s about using bodies to enforce white supremacy
Modern evangelical diet industry exposing how explicitly Christian weight loss programs like Weigh Down Workshop created the template for secular wellness culture
Contemporary religious foodways that offer radically different frameworks for thinking about food, bodies, and ethics
Some of these books are academic (Bynum is dense but brilliant), some are accessible (Strings is a page-turner), and one is a stunning memoir that weaves personal story with reporting and research. You don’t need to read them all—pick the ones that meet you where you are, whether you’re just starting to question your relationship with food or you’re ready for the deep scholarly dive into religion and appetite.
Consider this your syllabus for understanding why Americans have such a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with food—and why personal willpower was never going to solve a problem rooted in centuries of theology.
The Historical Foundations
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
Caroline Walker Bynum
What you’ll learn: Bynum examines medieval religious women who gained sainthood through extraordinary relationships with food—renouncing ordinary meals through fasting to prepare for receiving the eucharist, performing miracles of food multiplication, and experiencing bodily phenomena like stigmata and inedia (surviving without eating). Her analysis reveals that these weren’t random acts of deprivation but a coherent system where women used food practices to exert control within patriarchal family structures and claim religious authority on their own terms.
The payoff: This is where you find the original script that American diet culture still follows. Catherine of Siena survived on communion wafers alone and died of starvation at 33, celebrated as a saint. Bynum refuses simplistic readings of these women as victims or masochists, instead showing how they wielded real power through food refusal in a world that offered them few other paths to influence. The equation was set a millennium ago: women’s bodies become sites of spiritual achievement through restriction, appetite signals moral weakness, thinness demonstrates devotion. When you think “I need to shrink myself” or “less is more” while restricting food today, you’re channeling Catherine of Siena. Understanding this history reveals that what feels like personal struggle is actually inherited theology.
Buy on Bookshop.org
Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa
Joan Jacobs Brumberg
What you’ll learn: Brumberg documents how women’s food refusal evolved from religious devotion into medical pathology, focusing particularly on Victorian-era “fasting girls” whose families exhibited them as “wonders of science,” young women who supposedly survived on flower petals and air. She traces this phenomenon forward to silent screen stars whose “slimming” regimens inspired mass audiences, showing how industrialization transformed the cultural meaning of female starvation while keeping its basic logic intact.
The payoff: This is your bridge from medieval saints to Instagram influencers. Brumberg shows that Victorian fasting girls weren’t starving for God anymore. They were starving to demonstrate feminine delicacy, moral purity, and middle-class respectability. The theology disappeared but the formula remained: female appetite is dangerous, restriction proves virtue, and body control signals moral superiority. What changed was the justification, not the practice. By the time Hollywood emerged, the same techniques medieval nuns used to achieve holiness were being deployed to achieve beauty, and both promised transformation through suffering. After reading this, you’ll recognize that your friend posting “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” is performing the latest iteration of a script written centuries ago. Anorexia nervosa isn’t an entirely modern disease; it’s an ancient pattern with updated branding.
Buy on Bookshop.org
Race, Class, and the Politics of Bodies
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Sabrina Strings
What you’ll learn: Strings traces fat phobia back to Enlightenment-era racial science, demonstrating that idealization of slenderness emerged not from health concerns but from beliefs about racial hierarchy. She analyzes art, popular media, scientific journals, and medical literature to show that fatness became coded as “savage” and racially inferior before doctors ever raised health concerns. The medical establishment’s war on obesity only began in the early twentieth century, after cultural contempt for fatness was already firmly established.
The payoff: This book explodes the myth that our beauty standards are neutral or health-driven. Strings argues that slenderness became valuable precisely because it distinguished bodies from stereotypes of “fat, lazy” Black women and supposedly “gluttonous” lower classes. When thinness ideology took hold in the 1890s-1910s, it became associated with whiteness, Nordic heritage, and American exceptionalism. It was a way to use bodies to mark racial and class boundaries. After reading Strings, you can’t pretend your wellness goals exist outside white supremacy. The clean eating obsession, the optimization rhetoric, the moral panic about the “obesity epidemic”—it’s all racist pseudoscience dressed up in the language of public health. Your diet isn’t just about you; it’s about proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness.
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The Modern Evangelical Diet Industry
Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity
R. Marie Griffith
What you’ll learn: Griffith investigates the massive Christian diet industry, from Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down Workshop (which served thousands of churches in the 1990s) to contemporary programs marketing books like What Would Jesus Eat? and Fit for God. She connects seventeenth-century Puritan bodily discipline to Progressive Era New Thought movements to late-twentieth-century evangelical fitness culture, revealing how Christians have consistently made body size a measure of spiritual health and divine favor.
The payoff: This is where you see the explicit theology that secular wellness culture merely repackaged. Gwen Shamblin taught that God created two types of hunger—stomach and heart—and that weight problems meant you were trying to fill spiritual needs with food. Overeating wasn’t unhealthy; it was idolatry. “Fat people don’t go to heaven,” she declared. Her program combined prayer with severe restriction, making weight loss tangible evidence that God was blessing you. Griffith shows this isn’t fringe belief. Hundreds of thousands of Americans enrolled in Christian diet programs that treated thinness as godliness. When you understand this history, you realize contemporary wellness culture didn’t secularize anything. It just swapped the vocabulary: “optimization” for “salvation,” “toxins” for “sin,” “longevity” for divine favor. The structure is identical. After this book, you’ll hear Christian theology underneath every wellness influencer’s promises, every “clean eating” protocol, every moment you feel shame about enjoying food.
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Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America
Lynne Gerber
What you’ll learn: Gerber conducted fieldwork at First Place (a Christian weight-loss program) and Exodus International (an ex-gay ministry network), documenting how both organizations frame natural bodily desires as dangerous temptations requiring supernatural intervention. She reveals that the logic, techniques, and even rhetoric of weight loss programs and sexual orientation change programs are virtually identical—both promise God can transform you if you have sufficient faith, and both blame program failure on the participant’s spiritual inadequacy.
The payoff: This similarities are genuinely shocking. Both programs teach that your desires are wrong and can’t be trusted. Both demand constant vigilance against temptation. Both frame “slipping” as spiritual failure. Both promise that submission to God’s design for your body will bring transformation. Both create cycles of attempt-failure-shame-renewed attempt. And both refuse to acknowledge that the programs don’t work, instead pathologizing participants who can’t achieve impossible goals. Gerber shows that evangelicals aren’t opposing mainstream culture here, they’re amplifying it. The same logic that tells queer people their attractions are disordered tells fat people their hunger is disordered. After reading this, you’ll recognize that when secular diet culture tells you to ignore your hunger cues and trust external experts, it’s using evangelical ex-gay ministry logic. They’re parallel systems of bodily shame and impossible transformation, and they fail for identical reasons.
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Religious Alternatives and Ethical Frameworks
Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions
Elizabeth Pérez
What you’ll learn: Pérez spent years conducting ethnographic research among practitioners of Lucumí (commonly called Santería) in Chicago, documenting how the primarily women and gay men responsible for “feeding the gods” create religious community through kitchen work. Before honey can be offered to the deity Ochún, someone must taste it to prove it’s good—these seemingly small gestures are actually complex rituals that construct religious identity and social bonds.
The payoff: This book offers a completely different paradigm for thinking about food and spirituality. Instead of restriction and denial, Lucumí practitioners emphasize nourishment and abundance. Instead of individual transformation, the focus is communal sustenance. Learning to prepare the gods’ favorite dishes means being “seasoned” into divine relationship and food becomes a way of entering into connection rather than evidence of moral failure. Pérez shows how cooking and conversation around kitchen tables create belonging and transmit religious knowledge across generations. After reading this, you’ll understand that food can be sacred without being moralized, that feeding others (including deities) can be spiritual practice, and that entire religious traditions exist where appetite isn’t the enemy but the foundation of relationship. This is what it actually looks like when food serves “connection rather than moral test,” not as abstract principle but as lived daily practice in Black Atlantic religions.
Buy on Bookshop.org
Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet
Jonathan K. Crane
What you’ll learn: Crane synthesizes insights from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, philosophy, cognitive science, and metabolic research to argue for eating practices that honor both biological reality and ethical responsibility. He distinguishes among the eater, the eaten, and the act of eating. He offers a framework that shifts attention from external dietary rules toward internal awareness of hunger, satiety, and bodily wisdom.
The payoff: Crane recovers religious resources that treat appetite as trustworthy rather than dangerous, that see eating as relational practice rather than moral performance, and that understand bodily pleasure as gift rather than temptation. Unlike Christian diet culture that teaches distrust of hunger and dependence on external protocols, Crane’s framework asks you to develop practical wisdom about when, what, and how much to eat by listening to your body rather than overriding it. He grounds this approach in both ancient philosophy about appetite and contemporary research on satiety and metabolic health. After reading this, you’ll have a religiously grounded framework for eating that’s completely free from diet culture’s shame. One that honors embodiment, celebrates nourishment, and treats eating well as fundamentally about relationship with food, others, and the sacred.
Buy on Bookshop.org
Personal Stories and Contemporary Resistance
Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl
Anna Rollins
What you’ll learn: Rollins’s memoir blends personal narrative with interviews and research to expose how evangelical purity culture and diet culture operate as parallel systems of bodily control. She traces her own journey from Baptist Appalachia—where being a “good girl” meant managing both food and sexuality—through disordered eating that persisted into motherhood. Through interviews with other women, she reveals the social mechanics of church diet programs: “Nearly all the women in the church participated,” one woman recounts about Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down Workshop. “There was definitely FOMO. If you weren’t doing it, it was like, you weren’t spiritual enough.” Women participated in Daniel fasts and programs like the “Holy Diet” that explicitly connected eating patterns to Eden’s garden, tying together holiness and thinness with the message: “fat people are fat because they’re undisciplined and irresponsible.”
The payoff: Where other books on this list provide historical context and scholarly analysis, Rollins offers something equally essential: what these systems feel like from inside them, and what recovery requires. She shows how women watched others experience pregnancy losses and immediately turned to dietary changes as their “first line of recourse,” as if controlling food intake could control devastating outcomes. One woman Rollins interviews characterized years of starving “in response to an abusive romantic relationship as an attempt to make [herself] less juicy to men” revealing how disordered eating becomes a way women attempt to access power and safety in systems designed to subordinate them. Rollins’s own realization came while obsessing over burning off dinner calories as her infant son struggled to breathe in the ICU. She discovers that breaking free requires rejecting both diet culture’s and purity culture’s central lie: that controlling your appetites makes you righteous or safe. Read this last, after absorbing the history and theology from other books on this list, and let Rollins show you what reclaiming appetite—and agency—actually looks like.
Pre-order at Bookshop.org
Your Assignment
Pick the book that speaks to you right now:
Want the medieval origins? Start with Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Need to understand how religious fasting became medical pathology? Read Brumberg’s Fasting Girls
Ready to see how white supremacy created fat phobia? Strings’s Fearing the Black Body is essential
Want explicit evangelical diet theology exposed? Griffith’s Born Again Bodies or Gerber’s Seeking the Straight and Narrow
Looking for religious alternatives to Christian food morality? Pérez’s Religion in the Kitchen or Crane’s Eating Ethically
Need the personal story that ties it all together? Rollins’s Famished
💬 Which one are you adding to your list? Let me know in the comments—they’re open now.
(Read one from this list and you’ll never look at “clean eating” the same way. Read three and you might realize your entire relationship with food has been shaped by theology you didn’t even know you’d inherited. Read them all and you’ll understand why breaking free from diet culture requires something more radical than willpower—it requires recognizing and rejecting centuries of Christian body shame dressed up as wellness advice.)
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Such a great list! I would also recommend Fat Shame by Amy Farrell, an historical account of race and purity intersections with fat shame. My book, Fat, Pretty and Soon to be Old: a makeover for self in society is a sociological memoir in essays about the imperative to prettiness and antiaging, which weaves in "goodness" as well.
So grateful to have FAMISHED included in this excellent lineup