Parishioners Reluctant to Admit Eating Ills to Clergy : Nutrition: Religious groups need to lift veil of secrecy around food abuse and treat it as a serious spiritual and emotional issue, experts say.

As a graduate student, Mary Louise Bringle would go for days or weeks ingesting huge quantities of food, such as whole bags of cookies or half gallons of ice cream at a single sitting.

Then, ridden with guilt, she would fast for an equal number of days on coffee and an occasional glass of diluted grapefruit juice. She suffered leg and stomach cramps from abusing laxatives and diuretics.

Yet in therapy with a pastoral counselor for five years, the theological student only mentioned her discomfort with food once. When the therapist responded that she was not fat, Bringle did not persist.

“Secrecy seemed, after all, the proper setting for such disgusting practices,” she revealed in the recent issue of the Journal of Pastoral Care.

Half of Americans regularly thank God before meals, but food is more often a curse than a blessing to millions with eating disorders. Caught within a culture that glorifies physical perfection and centuries of religious teachings warning of temptations of the flesh, they feast or fast in private.

Although religious groups have begun to come to grips with the sexual revolution--elevating the goodness of sexuality even as they painfully struggle with the ground rules--food abuse remains the final taboo, some scholars and counselors say.

“We have so trivialized food issues that it is much easier for people to talk about their sexual issues,” said Bringle, now a professor of religious studies at St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, N.C.

The problem is not hidden. On an average day, an estimated 65 million Americans are dieting, including 50% to 80% of fourth-grade girls and nearly two-thirds of female high school students. As many as a third of female college students use laxatives, vomiting and diuretics to rid their bodies of unwanted food and weight, Bringle said in the journal article.

But that does not mean the issue is out in the open in sanctuaries.

Kim Chernin, a Berkeley counselor who has written three books on eating disorders, says women will speak more easily to her about issues of incest and child abuse than food abuse.

“There is a greater shame and sense of taboo about it,” she said. “Every one of them feels as if it is unique to them.”

From a religious standpoint, the secrecy seems understandable. Since early times, there has been a tendency in Western Christianity to distrust the body as the locus of temptation, lust, pain and mortality, according to Bringle, author of “The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters.”

“No wonder so many women among us feel deeply ashamed of our bodies; no wonder so many of us get caught up in vicious cycles of compulsive eating to swallow the shame, and compulsive dieting to do penance for the excesses of our fallen flesh,” said Bringle, who speaks from the experience of someone who spent 30 years as a compulsive eater, and six years as a full-fledged bulimic.

The first thing religious groups need to do is lift the veil of secrecy around food abuse, and treat it as a serious spiritual and emotional issue rather than a problem of vanity, Bringle and Chernin say.

Religious leaders should then encourage women to follow the biblical injunction to glorify God in their body by learning to appreciate the many sizes and shapes of human bodies and enjoying food as a divine gift.

Bringle says one way some Christian dieting programs fall off the religious scale is by encouraging compulsive dieting to reach a cultural ideal that love and acceptance come from a model-like figure.

“It’s as much making a god of the belly--the flat belly--as it is to ingest tremendous amounts of food,” she said.

For all its tortured history regarding elements of the body, Christian tradition offers a rich resource for a healthier attitude toward food, according to Bringle and Chernin.

Even John Calvin--hardly the faith’s most noted hedonist--created a category of “legitimate enjoyment” of the blessings of the world, Bringle points out.

According to a December, 1993, Gallup Poll, slightly more than half of Americans always or frequently say grace or give thanks to God before meals. An additional 34% occasionally say grace before meals.

Recovering the profound theological meaning of grace by treating it as a shared celebration of God’s gift of food rather than as a perfunctory exercise can go a long way toward treating the shame and guilt of eating disorders, which flourish in private, according to Chernin and Bringle.

“If we started making our spiritual and religious celebrations around food . . . we would certainly have changed our idea of food as sinful and shameful to a celebration of a collective sense of the spirit of God,” Chernin said.