Gluttony: Not Just About Food

Lately I’ve worried I might be a glutton. I don’t frequent all-you-can-eat buffets. I do not lick butter pads, nor do I drain creamers. My weight is not approaching 400 pounds. Instead, I go to the gym—a lot. "Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking," wrote medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, "but an inordinate desire … leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists."

Inordinate desire: that's me, boy. I’m a gym rat, exercising for up to two, sometimes three hours a day. Some afternoons, as I’m finishing my fifth set of bench presses--and after I’ve already climbed eight miles on the elliptical cross-trainer and jogged two miles on the treadmill—I consider how I’m spending my time and wonder, “Have I lost my priorities?”

Aquinas would have said yes. He didn’t discuss excessive exercise--in the Middle Ages, a treadmill would have been a torture device--but his principle is clear enough. Our desire for more of anything than we need is wrong. Nature, Aquinas says, endows us with appetites to ensure we consume what we need to survive (and, he’d say, to do God’s will).

That’s why food tastes good (at least some of it), and why a decent meal is pleasurable. Exercise, too, is essential to sustain a healthy lifestyle, and according to most doctors, we should exercise 2 to 3 hours a week to be fit. I workout every day, sometimes twice a day, for a total of 10 to 15 hours a week. And that's after cutting back. At one time, while averaging 10 to 12 miles a day jogging on the road, I would, once a month or so, put in 25 to 30 miles on the treadmill. This is like the average adult American eating 50 Big Macs in a single day.

For some exercise nuts, pride better describes their vice than gluttony. These are the types who boast about their running times or how much they can lift. (It's common knowledge that our president, who takes his treadmill on Air Force One, runs at a 6:45 pace and bench presses 185 pounds for five reps.) Competition, however, doesn’t interest me. I’ve never entered a marathon, nor felt the need to. When I ran 30 miles on a treadmill, I did it for the physical and mental challenge of it, for the (believe it or not) fitness of it, and for what I felt was the sense of freedom and escape it offered.

I didn't lack humility, then, but temperance, or self-control, which is the virtue that regulates gluttony. Heeding reason, Aquinas says, is the key to moderation. There’s nothing reasonable about running 30 miles on a treadmill (self-indulgent, reckless, yes). I was after the pure pleasure of it, the "runner’s high"--that euphoric rush of complex neuro-chemicals that clears the head, heightens the senses, and leaves you feeling deeply content and a bit spacey for hours.

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