Lovely. Amanda Martinez Beck

but the before picture is a girl who wanted a different body and who thought negatively about herself all the time, all while trying to love God and love her neighbor as herself. The after picture is a snapshot of her as happy as she has learned to be, knowing she is fat and loved by God, loving him back and enjoying her neighbors. Somewhere in between the before and after shots, I learned that if I were in a different body than the one God gave me, I wouldn’t be me anymore.

      I didn’t set out to become an activist. I am a fat woman who writes a lot and isn’t afraid to speak the truth and call out inconsistency when I see it. I certainly never thought I’d be writing a book about faith and fatness. I just found myself writing and speaking out more about bodies and Christianity. The more I wrote, the more I heard from other people about their experiences, and the more I realized that people of girth need to know their worth in the eyes of God. There is so much that the teachings of the Catholic Church have to offer us, so much that can help us live happy lives in our good bodies, no matter what size we are.

      When you use the word “fat,” people start to get uncomfortable. I understand it; we have attached a morality to fatness that gets defenses up. I have often encountered well-meaning people who think fat acceptance is a celebration of gluttony. It is not. It is, instead, a celebration of the dignity of the human person — a dignity that isn’t dependent on clothing size or the number on the scale.

      Then this question inevitably comes up: “So, what about health?” Yes, health is important. I do want to acknowledge, though, that as beautifully complex beings, there’s a lot more to talk about than just physical health. A major motivation behind this book is to help us retrain ourselves to think about health more holistically and to consider our bodies in terms of mercy, kindness, and wonder, rather than criticism, failure, and self-loathing.

      It’s hard to have a conversation about bodies without talking about physical health specifically (which we will do in this book), but for now, suffice it to say that I see health as a balance of four aspects of the human being: the physical, the mental, the spiritual, and the emotional. I like to think of these four components of health as the wheels on a 4x4. If one is out of whack, it cannot fulfill its purpose. Each wheel must be calibrated and fully functioning to engage in its intended task. Our culture focuses on physical health, so that “tire” gets all the air and care. So it’s no surprise that our society tends to get stuck in muddy places.

      The simple truth is that every person, no matter their size, is valuable in the Kingdom of God. This truth has spurred me on to write this book. Our society has constructed a moral system around fatness and the implied superiority of thinness, where fat bodies are bad and thin bodies are good, no questions asked. Sadly, this has crept into our Church as well. This book will talk openly about the purpose of bodies, what makes a body good, and the need to reframe the way we think and speak about our bodies and the bodies of the people around us.

      The sirens of our culture wail persistently, and their call to thinness is loud and persuasive. They sing to us that in appearance and fitness are the foundations of personal worthiness. The siren song of thinness can be intoxicating, and like strong drink it affects our minds and our bodies. We constantly hear the message of becoming our “true selves” through weight loss and dieting. We are inundated with images of happy thinness and attractive athleticism, a gospel of freedom from fat and loneliness that feeds on our insecurities.

      Yet we must proclaim and live the truth. God loves each of us as we are, and he invites us to join in the beauty of the Church’s song. My body is good and valuable, as all bodies are. I want to challenge you to bind yourself to this truth, and to begin to think about bodies, faith, and fatness in a fresh way, so that you can counter the siren song of our broken world with a healing song of your own.

       For reflection

      What aspects of my body do I bring before the Lord in frustration, like Hannah did? What do I think God is asking me in response?

      Do I believe that I’m valuable in the kingdom of God? What beliefs, fears, or insecurities are holding me back from believing this?

      Chapter 2

       Mercy

       It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.

      BESSEL A. VAN DER KOLK

      “Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy.” These words opened Pope Francis’s declaration of the Year of Mercy, which began on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in 2015. Every diocese in the world opened its Door of Mercy for pilgrims to come and encounter God-made-flesh. I was a relatively new Catholic, and this was my first Jubilee year. I was excited to be a pilgrim myself, journeying to the doors of my diocesan cathedral to receive the mercy promised to me.

      During this Jubilee year, the Church urged us in a special way to receive mercy from God and his Church for ourselves so that we can extend it to others. The Holy Father wrote, “At times we are called to gaze even more attentively on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Father’s action in our lives.” And when it came to offering mercy, I had room to grow. I could offer it more to my children and husband on a daily basis. But the person in my life who needed my mercy most, especially when it came to my body, was me.

      In that Jubilee year, I found myself a pilgrim, praying before the Blessed Sacrament in a chapel far from home. I looked up at the cross above the tabernacle, with the image of a broken man in agony, suspended between heaven and earth. In front of me was the monstrance, the crafted metal display stand for the consecrated host, Christ in the flesh.

      My body tells my story.

      The words pressed themselves against my heart, and I considered them. The story in front of me — on the crucifix and in the monstrance — was told in nails and wood, blood and sweat, in a body broken for me, to eat and to remember. It is a story I love, this story that the body of Jesus tells.

      I looked down at my own body. Could it really tell my story? I sighed, because this question scared me. I was not sure I wanted to know what story my body was telling. There was so much about my body that I wanted to change. So much that I wanted to cover up. So much that I hated. I wished I could hide it most of the time. My body made me feel so vulnerable, and that made me angry. But Pope Francis was calling me to mercy, not just to others but to myself, and that had to include my body. I knew I had to choose whether I would engage the story before me, and it was a hard — and scary — choice to make. It was scary, first of all, because it meant that I had to remember.

      I remember becoming aware of my body and how it didn’t exactly fit anywhere. I remember me in my favorite red sweater, and the taunts from boys on the playground in their newly acquired Spanish vocabulary. They called me grande rojo — “big red.” Even more, I remember the mix of emotions their nickname gave me; yes, they were being cruel, but they were giving me attention that I craved.

      I remember sitting at the piano as a preteen with messy hair and no fashion sense whatsoever, my piano teacher giving me advice on losing weight so that the dimple in my chin would go away. I fumbled with the keys while the sting of her words pushed me deeper into hating my body as it displayed my weakness and failings.

      I reach further back to pull out one of the earliest memories I have of my body, in a closet with two neighbor boys my age. We are