“He who eats a great deal, and is still hungry, will receive a greater reward than the man who eats little and is satiated.”
–St. Jerome
Can you leave room for later after finishing your meals? Can you avail yourself of prayer immediately thereafter? I hope so since it is so essential for avoiding the powerful rip tides of lustful temptations.
We neglect the mortification of our appetites only to our eternal peril. Overeating, filling our stomachs to their maximums, contributes to a multitude of vices and vulnerabilities, including sins of impurity. It is much easier to reduce the volume of temptations (involving sins against the Sixth/Ninth Commandments) by ceasing to consume food to satiety.
How often, however, do you hear anyone broach this component when discussing today’s ubiquitous pandemic of sexual deviances?
It amazes me how many modern geniuses, who attempt to uncover the secrets behind porn addiction and deviance, fail to mention anything about mortifying one’s appetite for food/drink. What was once well-known wisdom, can scarcely be heard from the popular and well-financed Catholic commentators, who profess to know everything about lust and marital infidelity.
As usual, I suggest we ignore the grifter commentators, of whom there are many, and return to the basics. If you stop eating, all the way to “feeling full,” you’ll enjoy a much better fight against Asmodeus and the various devils of lust, tempting you into sins of impurity.
Am I alone in this opinion? No, the saints precede me in acknowledging this connection, consistently recommending temperate meals.
“All should make it a general rule to eat sparingly at supper, even when there is some apparent necessity for a plentiful meal; for in the evening all are subject to a false appetite, and therefore a slight excess will occasion, on the following morning, headaches, fulness of the stomach, and, as a consequence, repugnance and incapacity for all spiritual exercises.”
-St. Alphonsus Liguori
Perhaps This Explains the Greater Impurity Problems Among Men
It’s no coincidence that the same men who struggle to control the onset of their “beer bellies” also succumb to every other pleasure of the flesh. These same men possess a weak capability for averting their eyes from immodest women.
They often eat to their limits, hyper energize their lower faculties, making them more prone to sins they would otherwise not commit. Excessive food intake contributes to greater impurity temptations, much like higher anger leads blasphemers to emit further blasphemies.
Again, I remind the reader that the saints have been clear about the connection between gluttony and lust. The former contributes to the latter, making mental prayer nay on impossible. Then, as we ought to know, without either mental prayer or short prayers, we become “sitting ducks” for demonic trickery.
The Two Most Common Occasions for the Sin of Lust
I contend there are two common culprits behind the preponderance of sins against purity. Leaving aside intrusive thoughts, memories of past sins, and nightly phantasms (lustful dreams), these are the two things that ensnare us the fastest.
- Lazy Glances at the Opposite Sex
- Overeating
The first one is obvious, the most dangerous near occasion for men in particular. The latter is also abundant, though, and spares neither men nor women, nowadays. Every time you overeat (or consume too much alcohol), you open the floodgates, sometimes wider than others, for influence by the demonic.
Heavy meals overpower us physically, and since physical issues spill over into mental and spiritual matters, all bouts of overeating cascade into spiritual trouble. As soon as we rational beings choose to eat like irrational creatures (i.e., animals), God withdraws His grace, and the demons feast on us, proportionately to our gluttonous excesses.
One Other Problem for Men
Aside from poor custody of the eyes and low eating while feasting, there’s a third minor instigator, increasing impure thoughts. For men especially, the other severe catalyst for lust might be high-intensity, hypertrophic exercise (weightlifting), at least whenever it’s stupidly done with women nearby.
While men should seek to maximize testosterone (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), we must also prepare ourselves for the negative side effect of inadvertently triggering temptations for lust (and aggression). Common sense should inform us NOT to workout around those women at the gym, most insistent on performing their exercises while wearing next to nothing.
Next, what about the effects of eating to satiety for women?
Women Are Fatter & Less Pure Than Ever
Today, it is quite licit for anyone to comment on the piggish eating habits of men. God help you, however, if you notice the obvious trend of women engaging in similar behavior: drinking, smoking, and devouring food as much as adult males. How dare any of us draw attention to how “daddy’s little princess” tears through her “comfort foods” faster than a sow?
This is not so much a problem for my Filipino or other Asian readers, but in the U.S., modern women weigh more than men did 60 years ago. Such weight gain came not from heavy training (they still bench press maybe half their weight). It’s all extra fat, brought about from “inhaling” bags of chips, drinking entire bottles of crummy wine, and other ineffective anxiety-reduction measures.
Many women have abandoned God, preferring to make gods out of their bellies instead. Rather than rely on Jesus and Mary for help against anxiety/depression, they turn to ice cream, seed-oil-laced chocolates, and other harmful foods. Just like men, they eat/drink to satiety, saying, with the Pringle Man, “once you pop, you can’t . . . you can’t . . . you can’t stop.”
No, they do not stop, leading to an array of deteriorations: mind, body, and soul.
American women even lust after other women like men, now. Among younger gals, many of them well overweight, more than 20% embrace some strain of sodomy. While the trend of rampant female sodomy has a lot to do with media propaganda, we shouldn’t ignore all the horrible food women consume, soaked in hormone-altering chemicals.
Women are eating like male ogres, yielding predictable results.
Conclusion – Better Strategies for Fasting
Does the prospect of reducing your food consumption invite terror into your heart? Would it seem impossible to avoid the problem of eating to fullness?
Well, take solace because we DO NOT need to practice extreme mortification of the appetites, or imitate the precise methods of the Desert Fathers. All we must do is eat our food to approximately the 80% level (give or take), leaving some space in the proverbial human gas tank.
Like most machines, our bodies do not operate well when we push them to 100% capacity. Furthermore, if we overwhelm our physical framework, we can expect deleterious consequences for our eternal souls.
What are ways to fast better without killing ourselves?
- Do not attempt extreme fasts without permission from a spiritual director.
- Take vitamins to offset nutritional shortcomings (if applicable). This would include the greatest essentials: Vitamin D3, Magnesium Glycinate, Zinc, B12, B6, B1 (Benfotamine version), and so forth.
- NOTE: Familiarize yourself with which of these ought to be taken in tandem.
- Consume lemon or sea salt water to limit “phantom cravings,” indicative of low electrolytes and/or dehydration.
- Returning to the opening quotation (by St. Jerome), remember that we do not require excessive fasting to mortify our flesh. This also means we don’t need to eliminate all meat for every minute of Lent, particularly if that presents us with nutrient deficiencies. This is an important consideration for active people (those who work laborious jobs and/or participate in resistance training). Catholics aren’t Zombies, nor are they mindless rigorists who “go hard” as if it were an intrinsic value.
- Pray the Rosary every day (all 15 decades), asking the Blessed Virgin to mediate the grace to not be a slave to your passions and appetites.
May God bless you with a fruitful Lent.
Catholics Aren't Zombies! 