How diets hijacked the ancient practice of fasting
Many of you who are Catholic or part of a mainline protestant denomination or Orthodox know we are in Lent right now. For many people…
Those of you who are Roman Catholic, part of a mainline protestant denomination, or Orthodox know we are in Lent right now. For many people around the world, that means fasting. In the ancient world, fasting was a spiritual practice. It was a way of purifying oneself spiritually and developing mastery over the body. In the Christian and Jewish tradition, the body (“flesh”) leads one to sin. Therefore, fasting was an important way to overcome sin.
Our relationship with food today is still deeply connected to Judeo-Christian concepts of sin and fasting. Sweet and salty snacks are guilty pleasures. Diet foods (regardless of their nutritional content) avoid guilt. Yet, God is left out of this equation, and you have to ask: what are we guilty about? If you aren’t in a spiritual practice of fasting, what is there is feel bad about? Food is just food.
Nevertheless, diet culture persists, playing on our culturally conditioned sense that eating less is connected to spiritual well-being. For many, especially women, eating can become an obsession with deadly consequences.
Likewise, exercise has taken on a pseudo-spiritual role. In ancient times athletic prowess was highly valued, particularly in men. Christians, meanwhile, introduced the concept that working hard is a virtue. While in ancient times not having to do manual labor, just as eating to excess, would have been a sign of wealth, now it depends on why. Manual labor is drudgery. Working out is virtuous.
The Rule of St. Benedict, which established one of the first monastic rules in Christian history, considered labor a spiritual essential. You were working for God. Now, God is nowhere to be found. The virtue of exercise is a show put on for others.
Both of these pseudo-spiritual activities, diet and exercise, are connected to an important outward physical sign: being thin (or fit). Celebrities make millions selling fitness solutions they claim work, using their status to keep the $40 billion weight loss industry raking in cash. Meanwhile, endless scientific studies show that being overweight and not exercising literally kill you.
Surely doing something that will kill you must be morally wrong?
Hardly.
We risk death just by stepping out our front doors each day. We risk death by driving cars. We risk death by having children. We admire daredevils and, despite the name, do not consider their actions morally repugnant. None of these things are wrong.
Something more is going on.
It gets more complicated. In ancient spiritual practices eating was just as important as not eating and resting as important as work. Practices like celebration (feasting) and rest (Sabbath) have become minimized in our modern pseudo-spiritual calculus of self-denial but still exist at special times of the year like Christmas. We don’t question the morality of these practices even though they are full of foods that we feel guilty for eating. Hence the explosion in January diets and gym memberships.
The problem that spiritual practices like fasting attempt to solve, however, is not health or long life but the moral problem of temptation. Temptation, in our Judeo-Christian moral reasoning, leads to evil. The Lord’s Prayer literally says “lead us not into temptation/but deliver us from evil”. The Devil tempts Jesus in the desert. That is what Lent is about.
But food is calories in. Exercise calories out. How can a simple math equation have moral connotations?
You don’t worry about your car taking on too much fuel. Nor do you worry about if your car is burning enough of it. You may worry about how expensive that fuel is or how it affects the environment (just as with your own food), but you don’t make a connection between taking on fuel and burning it and their moral connotations irrespective of money, environment, or any other concern.
But the human body is not a calorie in, calorie out system (it is not simple thermodynamics). Your body is a complex, self-regulating mechanism with three fuel sources: carbohydrates, fats, and alcohol. It is also self-adjusting. When you use a muscle repeatedly, that muscle doesn’t stay the same or degrade like a machine part. It improves, gets stronger, and uses more energy.
There is a close connection between eating, hormones, and our mental state that influences how, when, and how much we eat.
If you eat a sugary breakfast, for example, you will experience a period of high blood sugar, followed by a massive release of insulin (especially if you are insulin resistant), then a period of hypoglycemia. That hypoglycemia is a physical temptation, similar to a drug addict’s need for a fix, to eat more sugar to bring your blood sugar back up. If you go and find a sugary snack to bring your body back into alignment, you have just upped your calorie intake when, if you have a normal metabolism, you probably would have been fine doing nothing and letting your body release some glycogen stores.
Glycogen, the 1500 to 2000 max calories of carbohydrates that you store in your body, are like a short term checking account for your body’s immediate needs while stored fat is your savings account. Deplete it, as when running a marathon, and you hit a wall, but, if you never dip into your checking account, eventually you will have quite a bit saved up. Do this all day, everyday and you are on the road to obesity and diabetes.
It is as if each of us has a little devil inside of us, tempting us into doing things that may, in the end, be bad for us. In Hebrew this is called your Yetzer Hara, the will to do evil, not out of a proclivity to do evil, but out of our body’s natural inclinations. For example, we all need to eat but Yetzer Hara makes us cross the line and become gluttonous.
When your sugar eating habits lead your body to demand more sugar, and you give in and eat a doughnut, you are letting your Yetzer Hara call the shots.
The more you let your Yetzer Hara push you over the line, the further the line moves. This is why giving in to a temptation has such high stakes. The more you give in, the more you are willing to do and less it will bother you to do it, until the consequences come crashing down on you.
Evil happens when we fail to exercise control over our natural and necessary impulses so that we end up down a slippery slope and no longer see what we are doing as wrong. Yet, without those impulses, we would never do anything at all. We would starve to death! This is why ridding the world of evil is so difficult. The impulses that lead to it are good in themselves but bad when they cross a line.
And this is what fasting is all about. It has nothing to do with weight loss or looking good. It is about learning how to control that impulse that puts the body, wrongly, in the driver’s seat.
In modern society, another impulse taken to extreme, vanity, has shoved this spiritual need aside, replacing the ancient practice of self-control with coveting of toned bodies and yearning for external validation that the latest celebrity diet is finally turning our lives around. This vanity wears the self-validating guise of health and wellness. But ultimately, health and wellness come from having wisdom and self-control not being thin. Cancer sufferers and smokers are thin too.
Consider all the temptations of this world that, even if they don’t kill us, have the potential to ruin our lives and relationships. There are the old stand-bys of gambling, drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity. There are newer ones like excessive social media use and pornography addiction. Could it be that being obsessed with our own looks is just one more, in the guise of virtue? Could it be that in controlling our eating and behavior to look good we are losing control, not gaining it?