Does God care what size we are? According to Christine B. Whelan in this morning’s USA Today, The answer is certainly not! But how can she be so certain? If there really is a God (I believe that there is) and if He/She/It geuninely cares about us (something which I also want to believe), then there is nothing outlandish about that God caring what size we are.
Having struggled with weight pretty much my entire life (have you seen my picture?), I appreciate how painful and guilt inducing this issue can be. But experiencing a measure of pain and guilt over not doing all that we can to care for the gift of the bodies we have been given is not so bad. Please note that I wrote pain or guilt, not shame.
The God in whom I believe does not love us any less or see us as any less beautiful because we may not be as healthy as we can be. And we should give ourselves the same due. We, as God, can love the lumpy bumpy bodies that we have, even if it pains us that they are not as healthy as we would like. But we should also accept a degree of responsibility for the condition of our physical bodies just as we do for our spiritual selves.
The Hebrew Bible commands it readers to “choose life” and to “guard our lives”.

These are sacred obligations no less important than keeping the Sabbath or honoring our parents. Somehow though, abstaining from pork (for Jews and Muslims, at least) became more important than abstaining from high-fat and high-cholesterol foods. Why that happened is for another post. But it has to do with faiths that honor old realities over new facts and have a hard time admitting that those practices not unique to a particular group could be as sacred as those that are.
The real issue here is that most of us confuse divine love with divine approval. We fear feeling guilty about anything because we worry about a God who withholds love and support when we are less thab perfect. Not my God!
It is precisely because I believe in One who loves beyond all measure and stands with us no matter what, as the prophets teach, in the midst of our challenges, that I am ready to to feel the guilt that comes from not succeeding at being healthier. And being less healthy is something about which to feel bad.
The less healthy we are, the further we are from the ideals which God teaches us to pursue. But no matter how short we may fall of those ideals, we are never far from God. So go ahead, allow yourself a little guilt. But never be ashamed of who you are.