Wouldnt the analogy be more appropriate if it were talking about scientifically engineered foods vs natural foods as opposed to bulemia. I mean we're not necessarily talking about gorging ourselves and then purging. Rather its more like utilizing scientific developments of diet soda and vitamin enriched cereals to help manage the desired outcome of a nutritious healthy diet.
Dear iranger,
"Wouldnt the analogy be more appropriate if it were talking about scientifically engineered foods vs natural foods as opposed to bulemia."
Analogies are never perfect, otherwise they wouldn't be analogies.
Nonetheless, I don't think that your analogy is as apt as what I've related.
"I mean we're not necessarily talking about gorging ourselves and then purging."
Sure we are.
Most contraceptive methods are sort of physically analogous to bulimic or anorectic acts, thus, these analogies work for me. In the case of some contraceptives, it's like chewing up the food, getting as much of the flavor as possible, and then spitting it out rather than swallowing it. In others, the contraceptive act literally expels after "consumption," and thus reminds me of bulimia.
However, it's interesting to me that you propose the analogy that you do. Frankly, I view the whole recourse to diet soda, artificially fat-reduced and fat-free food products, etc., in the effort to reduce/maintain weight to be nearly fraudulent. My own travails using these sorts of products have led me to reject them generally, as they did little to provide for me long-term physical health by helping me to achieve or maintain weight loss.
It is this separation of the natural means and ends that likely underlies the current epidemic of obesity. It is a change in mindset, in how we think about food, that has caused our problems. Not so long ago, food was first and foremost about maintaining life and health. We ate so that we did not starve. We often enjoyed what we ate, but for most human beings, the experience of starvation, of famine, was not so far off that we did not appreciate our food as sustenance first.
Only in the modern era in modern societies have we become so far removed from actual starvation that we've come to regard first the pleasurable aspects of food and eating. Only in our day and time is food so abundant and so cheap that most folks can focus on the pleasurable aspect of food and eating, almost to the complete neglect of food as sustenance.
Thus, we come to treat calories as enemies rather than as necessary to our survival.
Wow! That's BIZARRE when you think about it! For the first 3,999,950 years that humans have been around, we focused on absorbing as many calories as we possibly could, to avoid dying from starvation!
Now, we purposefully eat things that have REDUCED calorie counts!
We do things to negate the caloric content of what we eat, so that we can eat as much as we want without negative consequences.
Ironically, what folks are finding is that these "scientifically engineered" food products aren't quite doing what we expected. Ask me! I know! I can't count the number of low-fat and non-fat sweets and treats I ate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I've drunk diet soda so long that I can no longer tolerate the syrupy sugariness of regular soda (so, mostly, I don't drink soda at all, anymore).
None of that stuff really did me much good. My own view is that some of it positively harmed me.
I don't want to stretch the analogy any further than we have, but today, I focus on eating stuff that's just naturally good for me. I just try to moderate what I eat, and I try to achieve healthful levels of physical activity.
It's a struggle, but my own experiences suggest strongly that there are generally no short-cuts to good health through the use of "scientifically engineered foods."
Ultimately, these seem to generally be as helpful as anorectic or bulimic acts.
It's unsurprising to me that the Church comes to the analogous conclusion with regard to sex.
sitetest