Early Christian ascetics counted seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and lust—that threaten our ascension to goodness (and, by extension, to heaven). But in an era ruled by an all- knowing Internet, a surreal beauty standard, and an insatiable appetite for material wealth, these vices are more of a playbook for success than a warning. What is a sin in 2026? For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Purnell reflects on gluttony.
I ain’t even gon fuckin’ lie to you dawg, when the term “body positivity” dropped, all I heard was “CHEAT CARD” and I was balling out RECKLESS.
I had been starving myself half my life waiting for people to notice and love me back, and it was like the world finally said, “Be fat and love yourself bitch,” to which I said “ASHE”—I was eating donuts and fried chicken all of quarantine pretending my genes ain’t hella diabetic. And then came the blood test.
“Um, you have type 2 diabetes,” said the doctor. All of a sudden, I was like, “Wait, you mean I’m mortal?! FUCK.” And then came the drugs.
I went on the designer one, Mounjaro, in 2024 and literally dropped 64 pounds in a month. I can’t tell you the DYSMORPHIA that ensued from going from proud fat bitch to fake skinny bitch in 30 days, but the main thing I noticed was less Black dudes hit me up online when I wasn’t thicc anymore. This is kind of why I love us, but in truth, it was a come-to-Jesus moment.
A friend said it best: “In gay world, you can be really skinny, really muscular, or even fat as fuck, but you can’t be average.” I was like, “DAMN, that seems very likely. I will immediately adopt this saying as absolute truth.”
The one thing lingering in the air was the fact that I actually had diabetes. Like, my doctor explained to me that when you actually have a disease, the cost of the drug drops like 96 percent—but I still had this weird knee-jerk reaction that by being a fake skinny bitch I was crossing this moral picket line, that I personally had never even thought about. By taking GLP-1s, was I “being a poser”?
As always, I called my biggest hater (and supporter), my mother, and she was like, “You are almost 50 fucking years old, you don’t have to justify yourself to ANY-fucking-body.” She said it in a you’re half dead, bitch, just be skinny kinda tone. Okay, but then my whole skinny girl retrograde took another astrological shift—I lost my insurance, so they took me off the designer drug and put me on the cattle call GLP-1, Ozempic. Oof.
They put me on an extremely low dose (to make sure I didn’t shit myself—one side effect of the drug), and I started packing on the pounds again. I felt like Icarus falling back to Earth, but then I realized that, after four decades of struggling with my weight or being wildly different weights, I have actually never known exactly WHAT the fuck I’m supposed to look like. I just didn’t wanna die like the grandma in that movie Soul Food (even though, I dunno, that food looked bomb so I can imagine her dying happy).
I have learned the hard way that “beauty” as we know it isn’t about happiness—it’s about making sure that the world knows how much you suffered to be beautiful. My biggest question mark with the weight loss drugs was how EFFICIENTLY they cut through that equation. They left me with one deep ponderance: Is Ozempic just an elevated form of anti-gluttony? Is that sinful enough? Either way, elevated anti-gluttony feels elegant.
More Deep Dives on the State of the Seven Deadly Sins
Artist Christine Sun Kim on How Her Deaf Rage Grew Into Deaf Wrath
The Laziness Canon: Helen Molesworth on Artists Who Made Great Work by Doing Nothing
Dries Van Noten Unpacks the Greed That Made Him Step Back From Fashion
What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
According to Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, Pride Gets a Bad Rap
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