• “She ate unconsciously. She ate to go unconscious.”

    —Jan Chozen Bays MD, Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food

  • “If I’m not going to pay full attention to it, I’m not going to eat it.”

    —David Cain on mindful eating

  • Intemperance and a full stomach cloud the mind, distract it and disperse it among fantasies and passions. The knowledge of God cannot be found in a body that loves pleasure. It is from the seed of fasting that the blade of a healthy understanding grows—and it is from satiety that debauchery comes, and impurity from excess.

    —Saint Isaac the Syrian

  • “He who has died to all things remembers death, but who ever is still tied to the world does not cease plotting against himself.”

    —St. John Climacus

  • “A vivid remembrance of death cuts down food; and when in humility food is cut, the passions are cut out too.”

    —St. John Climacus

  • Total abstinence is easier than moderate control.

    —St. Augustine

  • “When I fast I feel fine and I actually don’t even think about food that much. But when I allow myself food I literally can’t function because I keep thinking about food and what I’m gonna eat in the day.”

    —Guest_Slender Man_*

  • There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat.

    —Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

  • Dear Father, I have no intention of making a peace pact between my body and my soul, and neither do I intend to hold back. Therefore, allow me to tame my body by not altering my diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more life left. You should not think that my body is so mortified and weak as it seems; it acts this way so that I should not demand the debt it contracted in the world, when it liked pleasure…Oh my body, why do you not help me to serve my creator and redeemer? Why are you not as quick to obey as you were to disobey His commands? Do not lament, do not cry; do not pretend to be half dead.  You will bear the weight that I place on your shoulders, all of it…I not only wish to abstain from bodily food but I wish to die a thousand times a day, were it possible, in this mortal life of mine.

    SAINT MARGARET OF CORTONA, IN A LETTER TO HER CONFESSOR ORDERING HER TO EAT. FEBRUARY 22,1297, OF STARVATION

  • Fasting is about much more than food. In fact, you might even say that food is merely the icon: in fasting from food we learn to fast from needless speaking, from coarse jesting, from time-wasting and often sin-enticing entertainments. Abstaining from food manifests outwardly an inner abstention from selfish thoughts, fantasies, self pity, and the judging of others.

    —Archpriest Michael Gillis, Spiritual Disciplines