Counting calories and sins

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I am sitting at my computer eating reduced-fat potato chips, using them to scoop up tuna fish once packed in water but now swimming in low-fat mayonnaise. And I am feeling smug and Spartan because there is no bread in my lunch, no yummy roll grilled in butter, no slice of white American cheese melted on top. There's 1 percent milk in my coffee and just a single cookie on my plate: my neighbor Katherine's homemade - without butter - almond biscotti. Ah, healthful eating.

I am almost patting myself on the back when across my computer screen comes a little teaser: "Your Body, Your Temple - Food That Wrecks Immune System." Of course I click and go there. But I go there a lifetime too late, dragging behind me, like Jacob Marley's ghost, decades of cookies and fried clams and bologna and pecan pie and brownies with ice cream and chocolate sauce, fatty, delicious, sugary chains I wrought one by one in life, and in ignorance, too.

Who knew about polyunsaturated fats and immunotoxic contaminants 30, 40, 50 years ago? Who knew that liver pate, scallops wrapped in bacon, and marshmallow fudge could kill you?

When, years ago, the good sisters of Notre Dame talked about our bodies as temples, it was in a totally different way. Our bodies were the temples that housed our immortal souls.

Every day, every chance they got for the two years I attended St. Mark's in Dorchester, our bodies as temples was their constant theme. It was the late 1950s, cellulite and body mass index were not yet part of the standard vocabulary, and foreign invaders were Russians in tanks, not toxins that attack the body and turn it against itself.

Food was not a mortal sin. Imagine that? Food really was manna from heaven. The sisters didn't care that we seventh- and eighth-graders ate sugar doughnuts and orange soda for breakfast, and canned ravioli over white toast for lunch. Hot dogs. French fries. Hostess Snowballs and Twinkies. Macaroni and cheese. Bring them on.

The nuns didn't even confiscate the candy bracelets we used to wear under our long-sleeved, white cotton shirts.

Boys were the only sin back then. And if you were a boy, the sin was girls. So, much in the way that health food is separated from junk food in grocery store aisles today, the nuns, always a step ahead of the game, separated us. We sat on separate sides of the classroom, boys on the left, girls on the right. We walked down the long ramps to the outdoors in separate lines, boys on the left, girls on the right. We played in separate playgrounds, boys in a fenced-off area in back of the school, girls in a smaller side yard. Even in church boys sat in one cluster of pews and girls sat in another.

Our bodies were temples, and the nuns took this seriously. Occasions of sin were discouraged: being alone with a boy, dancing too close. ("You must leave room for the Holy Ghost.") Even walking home from school hand-in-hand.

Every classroom lesson was a moral lesson, too. In geography we learned to be careful where you go and how you go and how you behave when no one knows who you are. In English we learned to be careful about what you read, what you take in, because that's what will come out. In history we were taught to remember. And in arithmetic we were told that although there is no number for forever, eternity exists.

There was such attention to the inside of us back then. And now it's all about the outside, about carbs and fat content and excess sugar and exercise and aerobics and the constant maintenance of a body that, no matter how you take care of it, is destined to wear out.

Now having a quart of chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer is an occasion of sin.

My daughter ate mine. It's time to buy more.