A Killer Diet, or Gluttony: a serious and ugly sin

I've been trying to pick through Richard Baxter's Christian Directory--just a little bite at a time, lest you think that I am making a big boast of intelligence! At the rate I'm going I will finish sometime in the heavenly millennium.

I skipped forward to his section on gluttony and found it to be an excellent treatment of the subject matter. He renders the nature and causes of the sin, and then expounds the greatness of the sin (in other words, we often think it a very small thing, something to even laugh about, but Baxter sobers us up by telling us how heinous it really is). This is a small excerpt that will help you to think about it differently:

Gluttony is self-murder; though it kill not suddenly, it killeth surely; like the dropsy, which killeth as it filleth, by degrees. Very many of the wisest physicians do believe that of those who overlive their childhood, there is scarce one of twenty, yea, or of a hundred that dieth, but gluttony or excess in eating or drinking is a principal cause of their death, though not the most immediate cause. It is though to kill a hundred to one of all that die at age. And it will not let them die easily and quickly, but tormenteth them first with manifold diseases while they live.