Dieting with the Desert Fathers

I've written a few posts here recently about diet, fasting, and trying to follow an ordered rule of life. Today I'm going to share another little tip that I've found helpful. I call this "dieting with the desert fathers," but of course they "dieted" in a much saner way than many of us do now: not focusing with blind intensity on weight, fitness, and sex appeal, like we often do, but giving preeminence to factors like gratitude, prayer, and love for the poor. At the same time, it's instructive to note that the desert fathers' normal form of diet appears to be exactly along the lines of some of the top-recommended practices nowadays. Instead of doing rigorous ascetic fasts as a normal daily practice, they simply ate a bit less than they desired (a calorie-restricted diet); when they did fast, it was often in concert with the whole Christian community, which had the practice of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays (that is, a 5:2 intermittent fasting diet), and they largely subsisted on a broad range of what they could grow and glean, from a few vegetables and herbs to wild grains, fruit, beans (that is, a mostly plant-based diet). It's no wonder that we have a striking number of records of desert fathers and mothers who lived well into their eighties and nineties, even in an age when the average life expectancy was less than half of that.

But, again, they didn't really do it for the health benefits. They did it as part of a whole-life practice of ordering their days and their desires Godward. When we modern Americans "diet," even if we end up doing the same things the desert fathers did in their eating choices, we still often find ourselves a world away from the heart of their practice, because we are doing it with a view to self-improvement, rather than a view of humble submission to God. 

So here's my tip: one of the most winsome practices of dieting with the desert fathers was that they would fast, at least in part, so that they had more to give away to the poor. If you had three loaves and only ate two, you would have one to give away. This was a common practice across early Christianity. For many of us, our food options are not limited in this kind of zero-sum system, so we don't tend to think about it in that way--even if I ate overwhelmingly more than I needed, I could still give to the poor. But I've found it helpful to make a commitment to try to keep this practice, as a sort of vow of daily abstinence from overeating. It requires counting calories--which, I know, is a pain--but I've found that it's less of a pain when I'm doing it for others rather than myself. 

What I do is set a baseline for my daily diet, above which would represent unhealthy indulgence. For me, it's about 2500 calories. Then I count calories throughout the day, and keep a tally of how much of a caloric deficit from that mark I maintain (while still ensuring I'm taking the proper nutrition). So if I eat 2200 calories on a given day, I've tallied 300 calories from my baseline, and then I add that to my riding balance of calorie-tallies from previous days. Once I have about 2500 unspent calories tallied up in that system (about the caloric equivalent of a whole roast duck), I go to a Christian charity and buy a duck for a poor family somewhere around the world (right now, I'm using the charity Food for the Hungry, but there are a lot of them that offer the opportunity to buy a specific gift of food for a needy family). I can also save up those calories longer and buy a bigger gift if I want. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it's remarkably fun, and a lot easier to count calories and deal with a little bit of hunger when you know you're doing it with the intent of blessing others. So there you go: maybe it'll inspire you, or maybe it won't, but it's something that has been working for me. Most importantly, it makes my dieting less about my own pride and more about the kingdom of God, and I think that's a good thing.