For the last few years, stress has been ambient. It sits in the background of everything — global pandemics, economic anxiety, climate disasters, political volatility and the general hum of uncertainty that defines modern American life. It’s no surprise that many people cope the way humans have always coped. They eat.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with finding comfort in food. But the last half-decade of constant stress has exposed something deeper than just late-night snacking. It has revealed how profoundly our eating patterns are tied to our mental health and, for many Christians, their spiritual well-being too.
Few people see this intersection more clearly than Nicole Mesita, a San Francisco dietician whose work focuses on helping people “discover body peace and acceptance through the unconditional love of Jesus.” Her approach stands out in a culture that often treats food as either medicine or moral failure.
Eating disorders, she says, sit at the center of that cultural confusion.
“Eating disorders are one of the deadliest mental illnesses,” Mesita says. “They’re actually second. The first is narcotic usage. People don’t really realize that, and they also don’t realize that the number one cause of eating disorders is dieting.”
Research supports her concern. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness except opioid addiction, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Studies repeatedly show that restrictive dieting is a major predictor of disordered eating. And yet Americans continue to pursue extremely restrictive food plans at astonishing rates. A 2024 survey from the International Food Information Council found that more than 52 percent of adults attempted some form of diet in the last year.
Mesita sees the fallout up close.
“People are dieting at a younger age, they’re going on diets earlier and what we know about diets is that 95 to 98 percent of them don’t last,” she says. “They result in weight regain and even more weight gain. There’s metabolic problems that can happen.”
For people of faith, this isn’t just a mental health crisis. It’s a spiritual one.
“So many clients tell me that 95 percent of their day is spent thinking about food and their body,” she says. “That’s not biblical. That’s the opposite of what God says in Philippians — think about things that are praiseworthy. God doesn’t want us being obsessed about our body.”
Mesita is a dietician who does not promote dieting. Instead, she teaches intuitive eating, a framework that rejects restriction and helps people reconnect with the basic cues they were born with.
“God gave you, me and everyone hunger and fullness signals,” she explains. “Those were innate in us when we were babies. We cried when we wanted food, and then we stopped when we were full. I’m teaching people to go back to hunger and fullness signals.”
Her approach is theological as much as clinical. Food cravings are not, she argues, moral weaknesses in need of discipline. They’re part of the diversity of God’s creation.
“Sometimes you’re going to crave a big salad and other times you’re going to crave a burger,” she says. “God gives us a variety of food that we do crave, and those things aren’t wrong.”
This reframing matters because many Christians have absorbed unspoken assumptions about holiness and health — assumptions that often cause more harm than help.
“I think we’ve created this idol about physical health where physical health only looks a certain way,” Mesita says. “What the research really tells us is that it can look a variety of ways, and God created us all with different body sizes. If we’re idolizing a certain body, that’s not spiritual.”
Her point echoes a growing body of research suggesting that weight is a poor predictor of overall health. Studies published in journals like JAMA and The Lancet show that factors like stress, sleep, movement and socioeconomic stability often matter more than size alone. Spiritual well-being matters too. Research from Duke University and the Mayo Clinic links spiritual engagement with lower stress, reduced blood pressure and increased resilience.
“You can achieve health no matter what your size is,” Mesita says. “And it’ll free you up to really focus on your spiritual health, which is more important.”
If the last several years have taught anything, it’s that stress shapes our habits in ways we don’t always notice. Mesita encourages people to treat their patterns with curiosity rather than shame.
“If you are saying, ‘I’ve been eating a lot more than usual,’ or ‘I’ve been eating at random times in the night,’ I’d say ask yourself why that might be happening,” she says. “Not in a judgmental way but in a genuinely curious way. Because oftentimes the way that we eat does directly affect what is going on with our mental health and the stress that we’re experiencing.”
Much of that stress, she notes, is compounded by layers of cultural messaging — and, at times, church messaging.
“We’re often not creating a very inclusive environment for people with larger bodies in churches,” she says. “You’ll hear about different diets in Bible studies or people will make jokes about gluttony. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear clients say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable going to my church because of these comments.’”
Weight stigma is not only spiritually harmful. It’s physiologically damaging.
“The stigma for those individuals increases cortisol in their body,” Mesita explains. “Cortisol is a stress hormone that makes you, funnily enough, gain weight. We’re just creating this cycle of stress causing this weight gain, and that’s something people really can’t control either.”
In other words, shame doesn’t make anyone healthier. It pushes them deeper into the very cycles they’re trying to break.
The invitation Mesita offers is both simple and countercultural: pay attention to your body, honor your hunger, release your fear of food and treat your physicality as something God declared good long before anyone declared it insufficient.
That doesn’t mean ignoring health concerns. It means redefining health beyond the narrow image that dominates American fitness culture — an image many Christians have adopted without question.
“It takes a lifetime to unlearn some of the weird ideas we’ve picked up,” Mesita says. “But it’s worth doing. Because the goal isn’t perfection. The goal is freedom.”
Freedom from shame. Freedom from obsession. Freedom to think about something other than calories or macros or the scale. Freedom to be present to God and to people.
And maybe, freedom to enjoy food without fear.
