Corrections about body image, fasting, spirit

I'm reading a book, "Wisdom from the Monastery," edited by Peter Sewald (who is known as the interviewer of Pope Benedict XVI when he was still a Cardinal). I'm enjoying the book and think it's quite good. But I'm commenting early, even though I'm just part way through the first third, because I see a repeat of a great error that has crept into the whole concept of humankind's body image and the benefits of fasting.

First of all, remember that the human body is made in God's image and that it is the temple for each person's soul as it sojourns in life until returning to God, either in eternal reward or outside of God's salvation and into hell. So the body is fine the way it is; there is no reason to have all of the self loathing that has taken over the sanity of much modern day society. I do not need to go into detail, you are all aware of how many ways Western humans hate their own body images and functions.

I have been boggled by the extremes of this self loathing, with colonic and "toxic cleansers" being one of the most startling modern addictions and distortions that I've observed. This is why I am distressed by what I read in the book; much discussion about the fantasy that fasting and toxic "cleansers" are performing some sort of good or necessary "cleaning" of the body. That's crazy talk!

Um, read the Bible. Who was it who lived for hundreds of years, even as Methuselah? The early fathers and Bible people who were close to God, just as they were, and not using toxic cleansers. The body is fine the way it is, assuming that you are eating a normal unpolluted diet. This stuff about "toxins" "clinging to the intestines" and so forth is crazy talk that is more about human self loathing than biology, nutrition or science. In fact, one of the problems in the 1950's was that people discovered that as food became increasingly refined (white bread instead of whole wheat, for example), that people did not consume enough roughage, which is all that intestines need for good health. So those of you too young to remember, this is why in the 1960's there was a big return to less processed and more natural food, for "roughage." People ate only highly processed white bread, mashed potatoes, pureed vegetables and so forth. They then noticed not only irregularity problems in bowel movements, but also the beginning of so many polyps being discovered. "Rough" food "scours" intestines, and that is the only "cleansing" the body needs.

This is not to say that fasting is not a great and spiritual thing. It is, but it is a spiritual thing, not a health thing. Even modern monks have grown up to lose their perspective. For example, this idea of toxic waste relieved by fasting is pushed very much in this book by the religious practitioners. Just because you are a monk does not mean you are correct! Here is the specific deviation. The monk who is quoted in the book explains that because in medieval times food was unreliable according to harvest, some gorged on food, including supposedly holy people, becoming real gluttons. This is true and shows some sense of history and understanding of culture and life pressures. But by only thinking of fasting in terms of a "too much" or "not enough" quantity and cleansing aid, these same monks are not as well formed in understanding the true roots of the fasting's spirituality. They got tantalizingly close to explaining it a few times, but then veered off into the self loathing/dirty body brainwashing that so much in the past thirty years have absorbed from poor formation and pop culture.

Much of the Old Testament is about how God instructs humans to perform burnt sacrifices to him of animals and food. I've written about this most recently as I educate people about how the Catholic Mass is a continuation of God's requirement for sacrifice. Why did God require food sacrifice to him? Notice he did not say, take one fourth of what you would have eaten today and sacrifice it to me. He's not giving people dietary implications, only spiritual. God required animal and plant sacrifices to him for two reasons. One is that food was the single most important quantity in a human's life, and it is God given. The only way humans can truly remember and appreciate God is to take a percentage of what they rely on for life, and give the finest part of it back to God in acknowledgement and worship. God is not taking food out of someones' mouth, nor is he hinting that fasting or dieting is a good thing. To the contrary, the poor are able to sacrifice just a few grains of wheat, or a bit of oil that they can afford. God does not cause hunger (or dieting) by anything he mandated for the sacrifice. By offering sacrifice humans remained mindful of the proper priorities and order of their life on earth.

The second reason God stipulated sacrifice is that he wanted humans to cultivate the habit of trying for the very best in animals and plants. Remember, God is a gardener in addition to being a carpenter! By stipulating the purity of the hair color, or of the age or bodily health of the animal that would be sacrificed to him, God is subtly also teaching humans to DEVELOP THE BEST out of the best that God has given to humans. By offering the best to God humans pull themselves up in developing the gifts of animals and plants that God has graced humans with. It is a discipline that lifts people up to be good stewards of plants and animals. Everyone benefited from the knowledge and cleanliness that went into breeding or providing the best for sacrifice to God, because this knowledge applied to giving humans the best nutrition too.

So, think about it. Food is the greatest gift to humans from God because it is the day to day source of life. (Air is really something that is taken for granted, and you can't control having air or not. The same with water, which is either drinkable and available or not). But food is something that is extraordinary in grace. It has to be sought out, yet it is given by God freely.

God points out that because of original sin, humans are cast out of the Garden and have to "toil" for their food. But at the same time, Jesus reminds people that the lilies of the field do not spin flax, and the birds on the wing do not toil for their food. Food is the great gift and mystery of God, because it is freely given, but also must be toiled for and sought by humans.

Therefore fasting was understood by the earliest practitioners to be the willful giving up of God's greatest gift. It was viewed as "one step beyond offering food sacrifice to God," in a manner of speaking. Fasting was viewed by the earliest practitioners as the ultimate act of faith in God, because they are forgoing in total, for the fasting period of time, the very thing that they must, through human's own disobedience, toil to obtain, but also, through God's grace, have available in abundance through the natural order of life. It was this that drove the first who fasted to do so as a spiritual statement. It was later that practitioners noticed general health benefits from fasting along with the spiritual. They discovered real benefits (for example, soothing the system by having, for example, easy to digest bread or water fasts... I like rice fast days myself). But they also developed "theories" as they speculated, through their lack of understanding of the biology of the body, about purities and impurities.

When the body suffers during a fast it is not because of the "toxins." It is because the body is saying, "Hey, stupid, you haven't eaten."

The body has what scientists today well understand as an kind of "emergency plan" that it puts into effect when people stop eating. First it sends all the signals that you should eat (stomach growls, cravings, pain, etc.) The body fully expects you to respond by eating. When you don't eat the body goes into a mini crisis mode. That's when your failure to consume the calories that you need starts to affect your ability to move, think, and be at ease. You've cut off your calorie supply. So once the body "realizes" that you are "seriously" not getting enough food calories, it goes into what it thinks of as "starvation mode." To the regret of dieters scientists have in the past few years measured how rather than dieting have immediate effects, the body falls back on the ancient primitive ability that all animals share, which is to go into a "starvation" plan, meant to keep them alive on what little they are consuming. It varies from person to person and animal to animal, but some people can stick in "starvation mode" for quite a while and actually not lose weight if they are not exercising. Eventually the body must keep you alive by going into your fat reserves. So this is when the body starts to burn fat, even if you are not exercising, to keep you alive. If you still do not eat, then the body goes into it's last ditch plan, which is to burn your actual muscles when it has run out of fat to use. This is when people, and animals, reach the point of no return and starve. So the unpleasantness that you feel through a fast is nothing to do with "eliminating toxins," duh. It is the pain of the body increasing the severity of its survival mode response over time.

Repeat fasters do not experience ease because they've "gotten rid of the toxins." They experience subsequent ease because the body has adjusted to the types of fast you do and "knows what to expect." The only way "toxins" come into the picture is that if you have eliminated your varied sources of food in order to fast on one food, you can give your body a break from more complicated processing of varied foods (which is not a bad thing unless you have been ingesting a food with pollution). But remember that bodies evolved over millions of years to DO "hard work" of "digesting" a wide variety of food. This is why humans are called "omnivores." Humans eat both plants and animals. "Herbivores" are animals that eat only plants. (No, "herb" does not mean weed, for all you dope heads). "Carnivores" are animals that eat other animals. Being an omnivore is considered a great survival and evolutionary gift because it means that a wide variety of foods will sustain you. It's not an example of poor poor little old tum tum and poo poo being strained by the awful hard work of digesting all those big mean old complicated yum yums. *Sigh* In fact, to get serious for a moment again, one of the things that the nutritionists who discovered the starvation mode that frustrates dieters also determined was that eating "hard to digest" food like celery is a good thing to do, because it actually is a form of beneficial calorie burning exercise, just this act of digesting. That was pretty common knowledge in my college days, but I guess it took until recently for people to find some way to measure its effect and therefore consider it to be real.

Who would have thought that "modern" society would demonize the body, its functions, its self image and also apply "magical thinking" to the eating of food? God got people off to such a good start and they just don't seem to want to keep things simple and good.

I hope this helps.