Everybody Worships
Hermits, heretics, and the faith structure that extreme diets have in common.
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Miraculous absence
The woman who came to be known as Saint Catherine of Siena — co-patron with Francis of Assisi for all of Italy, a Doctor of the Church of equal intellectual rank as Thomas Aquinas, radical political activist, prolific author, consultant to Kings and Popes and common people — was born Catherine Benicasa, along with her twin Giovanna, in 1347, to a family of upper-middle-class textile merchants. She died on April 29th, 1380. Her official cause of death is a massive stroke — brought on by her real cause of death, which was self-imposed starvation.1 Catherine had an eating disorder — anorexia mirabilis, or miraculous lack of appetite.
Anorexia mirabilis is a disease of the past. The diagnosis required a kind of worldview that excludes it from diagnostics — the fundamentally religious idea that someone could be miraculously cured of their desire for food, and by extension their worldly attachment to sinful pleasures, by way of a profound spiritual connection with the divine. The historical records of the disease, however, provide another dimension to essentially faith-based food behaviours. For the purposes of this article, I’m not talking about religious eating rules like kosher or halal laws, or Catholic fasting rules, or anything like that — what I’m more interested in is apparently secular structures of eating which are similarly committed to the concept of natural design, the pursuit of purity, and the reification of a set of ethics, as based on the eater’s worldview or metaphysics.2
Too much of anything is a bad thing. That is actually what “too much” means.
In the late 90s, physician Steven Bratman proposed a definition for a new kind of eating disorder: orthorexia — from “ortho-”, like orthodox, meaning “upright,” or “correct” (essentially, virtuous) and “-rexia,” meaning appetite.3 He has since clarified that his position is not that adhering to a theory-based diet necessarily means someone has an eating disorder, even if the diet ends up very far away from mainstream food culture — orthorexia is meant to describe an eating disorder, as such, as it arises around a theory-based approach to health or nutrition.4 The disease, which remains unrecognized by the American Psychiatric Association, has developed a popular meaning — a paradoxically-unhealthy commitment to healthy eating, or a healthy lifestyle. There are many extreme and highly restrictive lifestyle commitments that seem to follow this pattern — and while they can differ greatly in content, I’m interested in the ways their essential conceptual structures are not only similar, but map onto the kind of scrupulous or religious anorexia suffered by historical saints like Catherine.
As Rudolph M. Bell points out in Holy Anorexia, there are similarities between the psychological profile of a person with anorexia nervosa and a person with anorexia mirabilis.5 He suggests that in many cases, food rituals can be a methodology for determining and expressing autonomy and a sense of self in a person who, for whatever reason, feels their sense of self suppressed or subjugated by the wills of others (be it through trauma, abuse, societal structures they do not agree with, or just the normal way that children kind of cannot express autonomy completely, and there is no solution for this).
Helpless rage
The subjugation identified by ED sufferers causes them to feel extreme helplessness and rage. In the mind of the patient, the illness represents a kind of mastery — and to give up the illness would be to abandon mastery for subjugation. In the case of anorexia mirabilis, it would mean abandoning the laws of their God in favour of the flawed and human laws of men and Kings. Usually, actual men — and, of course, I understand that anorexia can affect people of any gender, but it is still overwhelmingly a disease suffered by women. Framed like this, it makes sense why so few anorexics have any interest in recovering.6
People who suffer from anorexia have all kinds of psychological profiles, but a common trend is a tendency away from a rigid sense of self and self-identity and a heavy identification with peer- or culturally-approved ideas of how they should or should not look or behave. As one resource puts it, anorexics are more concerned with how others will think of them than what they think of themselves.7
The self as subject versus the self as object
The same source distinguishes this kind of eating disorder from that suffered by athletes, who can have all kinds of eating disorders, but who typically fit the profile of the orthorexic: someone whose impossible-to-uphold standard is the sufferer’s personal ideal of health. A human being is always both subject and object, and orthorexia can be distinguished as being a disease of self-concept, or the patient's understanding of the self as subject (I have to be good/I must be pure/I have to be healthy) rather than a disease of self-image, or the patient's understanding of the self as object (I cannot be recognized as fat/I must fit in/I must be desired).8 Orthorexia can apparently have adaptive permutations — there is a line between very health-conscious, still normal person and person with an eating disorder, but as the disease is a newly-theorized one and studies about it are limited, it’s pretty up in the air where that line is.9
Relating this back to Catherine, fasting to commune with a God she knew in her heart was there, but was not seen by millions of other equally wise and intelligent people sharing her planet and time period, I see a parallel. “Healthy” is a functionally meaningless term, a definition for which highly-specialized experts cannot agree — and yet it’s used very often as if everyone shares a common understanding. It’s like “love,” or “freedom,” in this way. A person’s understanding of “healthy” is personal — dependent on their temperament, education, culture, and life experience. It depends on their access to information, and what information they do or do not consider legitimate. I don’t mean to say that there is no such thing as more- or less-nutritious food, food that is more or less appropriate to someone’s energy needs, exercise more or less suited to certain goals or health outcomes, or that there are no measureable states of disease or applicable treatments — I’m talking about the word, “healthy,” and how it’s a construct — a construct each of us ascribe to, based on a radically different set of standards. It’s made of personal values, not hard data. It’s a faith position.
The heavy weight of perfection
Bratman developed his theory witnessing the fanatical devotion and subsequent personality changes of people dedicated to things like raw foodism, veganism, and macrobiotics — all fad diets in full swing in the 1990s. Most of these started as fringe beliefs promoted by religious or intellectual radicals — raw foodism having its origins in ascetic monastic traditions, Egyptian and Jian religious movements and ancient Greek intellectuals all advocating vegetarianism at around the same time, and Zen Buddhism inspiring macrobiotics. The religious values which initially inspired these disciplines were replaced by secular justifications — some scientific, and some pseudoscientific — as they gained appeal with a wider audience. What remained was a set of ideological rules for healthy or value-aligned food consumption — often, in their most extreme permutations, coming along with antisocial personality changes: disgust in the presence of disallowed foods, the judgement of others for partaking in them, and the derivation of a sense of purity from adhering to these ideological rules.10
To the last point, inversely, sufferers might also develop a sense of impurity or dirtiness from succumbing to the desire to break their self-imposed rules. Methods of eating like this almost always contain language about what the human body is or is not “supposed to” or “designed to” eat. Ignoring for a moment the idea that nutrition is one-size-fits-all, which is either debunked or at least highly controversial depending on who you speak to, this assertion also leaves the hanging question of, designed by who, or what? I don’t mean to imply that belief in intelligent design, or its influence on nutrition, is complete poppycock — but it also isn’t a scientific or evidence-based justification, by definition (nor should it have to be), and as such isn’t convincing to anyone who doesn’t already hold the same beliefs.
As much sameness as difference
This ideological or moral methodology of eating isn’t unique to vegetarian or vegan nutrition theories, either. So-called “ancestral” dieting, including the carnivore diet, seems to me to be a radical offshoot of the otherwise-mostly-reasonable low-carbohydrate ideology — the idea that obesity and diabetes are less the result of an energy imbalance as they are the result of the hormone dysregulation that leads to the energy imbalance. In this view, as many as a third of the population has an insulin-resistant genetic profile, and so a high body weight is not a failure of willpower, but the normal result of an insulin-resistant body’s response to the presence of easily-digestible carbohydrates.11
The solution, in this view, is to treat sugar and other easily-digestible carbohydrates as the cause of diabetes and obesity the same way we treat cigarette smoking as the cause of lung cancer — it’s probably more accurate to say that each substance causes cancer in many people and at certain quantities, which would make moderation the most reasonable approach. However (again, I’m paraphrasing this view, I’m not necessarily advocating for it), tobacco and sugar (in the form of sweetener, but also either many or all grain products, depending on the branch of this philosophy) are both highly addictive, so it’s more useful messaging to just say that adults can do what they want but since these substances are both objectively disease-promoting, there is no healthy amount to consume.12 Proponents of this philosophy differ in their approach — some are more or less radical, for whatever reason. I might be wrong, but I personally see a direct line between this mindset and the carnivore diet — which, for the uninitiated, is basically veganism but for animal flesh. No plants of any kind. Just meat.
Humans are an ape who tells stories
What I think has happened is that people have taken this scientific data set, and done the oldest thing that it is possible for nonscientists to do with scientific data sets — wildly misinterpret it in the weirdest possible way. People construct a story, from this data set, about what people are — what all people are — and what we’ve always been like. The stories carnivores are into are specific interpretations of the concept of evolutionary biology – which, depending on the branch of the philosophy, ranges from scientifically-minded fables to prescriptive legend about the so-called science of racial hierarchy and why women love being housewives and hate thinking. They’re all stories which rely on information to which no one could possibly have access — because that is how all history works, before a certain time period. We just find stuff and then tell ourselves stories about it. Until we find something else, and then have to tell ourselves different stories.
The stories many carnivore types tell themselves are also transparent power fantasies — all war and fertility. It’s so obviously a kind of role play — blood of the lamb included, no true sacrifice demanded — that I can’t even make a joke about it, because it’s too obvious. Often, they have no God to exalt, so they must construct one, because we all worship — but the language is all the same. Not in content, necessarily. But in structure. The same as the monks, who were alone, but not lonely, with their sense of what was right. The Zen Buddhists trying to yoke harmony on a planet constantly threatening to spin into oblivion. Catherine.
Distance as safety; safety as power
Catherine communed with her bridegroom, Jesus Christ, by refusing to eat food, which she saw as a transcendence of the laws and conventions of a world she wanted to change. People with eating disorders often feel a profound sense of alienation, a helpless rage at a world to which they do not want to kneel — even if they aren’t really sure if that desire comes after the injustices of the world, or before it. I don’t think people on heavy restrictive diets like extreme forms of veganism or the carnivore diet are doing it in spite of the antisocial side effects — I think creating that distance between themselves and the world is one of the things they enjoy about it. They derive a massive amount of personal power from their illness. Some of them use this personal power to exert measurable material change on the world in which they live. Some of them lead exceptional lives. Of course, there are other ways to do this — ways that would require completely deconstructing their entire understanding of how the world works, giving up all of the glory and wisdom and riches their worldview has afforded them, and accepting a life of subjugation to something else they did not choose. Of course they don’t want to. Would you?
I remember reading advice somewhere, I have no idea where, which urged engaging with people who were heavily invested in conspiracy theories with the same care with which one would engage with someone heavily invested in an abusive relationship. In this approach, facilitating the cult deprogramming, or the divestment from an abusive relationship, or the return to the realm of the true, requires a slow and nuanced approach — one where it is understood that the person in the grip of some ideological belief is getting something profoundly meaningful out of their relationship to this thing, one heavily tied up with how they think about themselves and how the world works more broadly, and that letting go will be a long process, full of grieving, for which it is just as important to have compassion as it is to model normalcy and have firm boundaries. I am learning this is as true of food as it is anything else. Catherine of Siena had two options, it seemed — people who did not believe her, whose rejection only steeled her resolve and drove her closer to her belief system, and people who believed her to be genuinely engaging in mysticism by way of starvation and validated the choices that lead to her death. I wish some other option was available to her, but I don’t pity her. She was much braver than me.
Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
The word “metaphysics” has been hijacked, recently, by New Age losers, to mean “magic.” Word definitions of course depend on usage, but I ascribe to the (correct) OG philosophical definition. “Metaphysics,” in the original greek, just means “after physics,” and was the stuff Aristotle wrote (or was arranged by an editor, I can’t remember) after the “physics.” He called it first philosophy, which, because I am a poet, is still the easiest way for me to understand it — it is a notoriously difficult thing to define, as the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy explains better than I can. I find that the longer I try to explain it, the less sense I make. But it’s how stuff works, in the primary and most basic sense, in someone’s worldview. So, magic can be part of someone’s metaphysics, but the study is much wider, New Age losers.
Bratman S (October 1997). "Health Food Junkie". Yoga Journal. No. 136. pp. 42–50. Archived from the original on 2012-03-13
Bratman S (2015). "Healthy Eating vs. Orthorexia". orthorexia.com. Retrieved 1 January 2016.
ibid.
ibid.
“Causes of Eating Disorders - Personality Traits and Skill Deficits.” MentalHelp.net, March 18, 2019. https://www.mentalhelp.net/eating-disorders/causes-personality-traits-and-skill-deficits/.
ibid.
Awad, Emmanuelle, Pascale Salameh, Hala Sacre, Diana Malaeb, Souheil Hallit, and Sahar Obeid. “Association between Impulsivity and Orthorexia Nervosa / Healthy Orthorexia: Any Mediating Effect of Depression, Anxiety, and Stress?” BMC psychiatry. U.S. National Library of Medicine, December 3, 2021. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8640965/.
ibid.
Bornstein, David. “If Sugar Is Harmless, Prove It.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 25, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/opinion/if-sugar-is-harmless-prove-it.html?searchResultPosition=1.
ibid.