Lent began about one month ago. For practicing Catholics, these forty days symbolize reflection, sacrifice, and spiritual renewal. But for many people recovering from eating disorders, the language of fasting and self-denial can feel especially complicated and confusing.
Recently, I sat down with one of my former providers from eating disorder treatment, Karalyn Rennie, LMHC, to ask about the ways in which morality is linked to food, fasting, and diet culture. Karalyn was the perfect person to discuss this topic with, as her work bridges both disordered eating treatment and Catholic ministry.
Karalyn’s Story
Karalyn received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Providence College in Rhode Island, and then proceeded to earn a Master’s in Theology and a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling from Boston College. Today, she works as a therapist at the Renfrew Center in Boston and serves as their team lead. But what divine providence led her from calculus to the mental health space?
In an article that Karalyn wrote for Boston College’s School of Theology in 2022 during Mental Health Awareness Month, she tells her story:
During my senior year of college, I was a peer minister. As a thank you gift at the end of the year the student president and vice president of Campus Ministry gave all of the student leaders, including myself, a saint medal. They had hand-picked a saint for each one of us that they felt represented our ministry. I remember being so excited to see who they had picked for me. I quickly unwrapped the small package and found the saint medal for Saint Dymphna. I was initially a little surprised because I felt that everyone else was getting a medal for a saint that matched their ministry and I could not fully understand why I was given the patron saint of those suffering from mental afflictions and nervousness.
You can read the entire piece, “Ministering with Mental Health in Mind,” here.
During her senior year of college, Karalyn experienced what she describes as a “crippling anxiety attack” about graduation and the uncertainty of the future. Entering her final semester, she realized she could not navigate her anxiety alone.
I quickly turned to the chaplains and campus ministers, as I was closest to them. Everyone was supportive of me, but I remember one conversation with a chaplain in particular. I told him that I felt guilty because when my anxiety was bad I would forget to pray or I was unable to focus at Mass, and the list went on and on with ways I felt like I was failing as a Catholic because of my anxiety.
Instead of telling her to pray harder, the chaplain offered a different perspective. He reminded her that she was doing her best, and that God understood her struggles even when she could not articulate them. “I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders as that comment sunk in, and for the first time in months I felt that my mental health was seen within the Church.” That moment would eventually shape her path toward counseling informed by both ministry and faith.
Practicing Lent in Eating Disorder Recovery
I asked Karalyn, what she would say to people in recovery who are also practicing Lent. “I think Lent has become diet culture,” she told me. “But I’ve also found communities that understand what Lent is actually meant to be. Leading up to Ash Wednesday, I have so many friends posting ‘don’t let Lent become diet culture.’ In this self-denial, Lent can become a time of punishment—almost like a form of self-purification through suffering.”
In Catholic settings, Lent, like eating disorders, can become extremely competitive. Karalyn told me that at her very small Catholic college:
It’s like the Catholic Olympics during Lent. I had friends that were like, ‘I gave up my bed,’ ‘I gave up this,’ ‘I gave up that.’ Now, what I will say is I gave up the elevator my senior year. That was truly because for me, I hated the stairs. For me, this was an act of doing something I knew was really difficult. And I lived on the fifth floor. I didn’t give myself permission to use the elevator unless I had to go down to the basement for laundry. There were rules. I told myself, “we’re not doing this all the time,” but it forced me to be much more intentional about when I was going back to my room versus when I was like hanging out with other people. There was a lot more intentionality behind it... I think for people to understand that it’s really about building a deeper connection with yourself and your own faith.
For those with a history of disordered eating, the stakes are much higher when food choices and religious fasting practices are intertwined. According to Karalyn, “If you’re observing Lent through food, okay, great. But if you’re in recovery, there is no reason to be giving up anything right now. That’s where there are so many good alternatives. One year I actually gave up saying the word ‘sorry’ for Lent. It forced me to be more intentional about the language I chose because if I did need to apologize, there were words like, I apologize and things like that versus when I was sorry. And women just say sorry all the time. You might notice that like when I’m running late, if I were running late with you, I’ll be like, ‘thank you for waiting for me’ instead of saying ‘sorry, I’m late.’ So it stops from over apologizing and instead being more intentional about the language, which creates deeper connections with others.”
Starving Saints
Naturally, I had to ask about my old intellectual muse, St. Catherine of Siena, the infamous “starving saint” examined in works like Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia, Caroline Walker-Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and Walter van Deth and Ron Vanderycken’s From Starving Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation. Karalyn shared that she has a special connection to St. Catherine that goes well beyond the saint’s infamous self-deprivation and her own work in the eating disorder field. Reflecting on her college years, she told me that “the undergrad hall that the theology department was in at my undergrad was St. Catherine of Siena Hall. I really love her. She’s so powerful. I mean, she got the Pope to move the Vatican back to Rome. She is also one of the only women to ever receive the stigmata, which is the holes in your hands and feet, like where Jesus had them on the cross. And then she didn’t want the recognition of it, so she prayed to God to hide them so that she didn’t get recognition as thankful for it and he hid them for her so no one else knew until after her death.”
St. Catherine’s story raises a larger historical question: how did food restriction become associated with spiritual virtue in the first place? While there is no single etiology of disordered eating, there are numerous religious and historical antecedents that can be studied to theorize an answer to this question. As I have mentioned in some of my other posts and academic work, if we look at the Book of Genesis, many religious scholars and historians of the body have described Eve as the first “disorderly eater,” as she committed original sin by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. To understand how food became entangled with morality in Christian thought, many scholars return to the opening chapters of Genesis:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” (3:1)
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” (3:2-3)
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (3:4-5)
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. (3:6)
Thus, the narrative that women are the weaker sex and that their bodies are vessels of gluttony and disgust was born. Women must atone for Eve’s unholy indulgence through the opposite act of starvation.
In the Middle Ages, women practiced self-starvation in an effort to achieve sanctification and to be closer to God, even outside of the forty days of Lent. Known in Latin as anorexia mirabilis (holy anorexia or miraculous anorexia), this was an ascetic practice among medieval laywomen who fasted to serve a higher calling and to exercise self-control. One of the few domains women historically exercised control over was the gathering, preparation, and serving of food and providing for others.
Likewise, anorexia nervosa shrinks women’s roles in society, and the control of the female body has not always been to counteract the male gaze. So, why didn’t medieval women “just eat” instead of fasting to seemingly improve their relationship to God? According to Bell, “holy anorexia involves a need to establish a sense of oneself, a contest of wills, [and] a quest for autonomy” (Bell 8). Put differently, women seeking sanctity would sometimes restrict their food intake to the Eucharist alone, placing them closer to God while simultaneously feeding those around them as an act of religious service. It was not about vanity.
To promote religious obedience and the “need” to be perfect—for oneself, for God, and for men—deprivation’s counterpart, gluttony, was viewed as a cardinal sin in Christianity, and thus, food asceticism was preached to laywomen to be righteous. Bynum emphasizes the circulation of moral fables of holy anorexia, e.g., hymns and hagiographies that “express abhorrence of stealing or hoarding food, see fasting as inducing miracles, or connect holiness and food multiplication” (Bynum 46-7). Bell also defines overindulgence not as sin but as constitutional and ethical crises, and in return, self-control exhibits sensible and spiritual nourishment of both the body and soul (Bell 119-20). In the same vein, such ascetic practices should remain private between the individual and God, “and truly holy people should not let their abstinence become known to others lest they fall into vainglory” (120). In terms of Lent and other religious fasting practices, many have taken a disordered approach to asceticism, which can pave the way for a slippery slope to a full-blown eating disorder.
These historical connections between food restriction, morality, and spiritual discipline are not merely relics of the medieval past. Contemporary writers have noted how similar moral frameworks continue to shape modern relationships to food and the body. My conversation with Karalyn and these academic sources reminded me of Anna Rollins’s excellent new book, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Being a Good Girl (2025).
I got to chat with Anna about how her lived experience fits the topic of this post. I asked, in Famished, you write about the moral language surrounding food and control. Do you see parallels between religious fasting and modern diet culture?
I don’t think that religious fasting always has to parallel diet culture. In some ways, I find the liturgical calendar—one that makes room for feasting and fasting, the highs and lows of life—very compelling. It’s an acknowledgment that our spiritual life exists in the midst of joy and sorrow, in plenty and in want, and that God is present in all of it. That, I believe, is the healthy perspective with which to approach religious fasting.
However, one could also approach it with a spirit of penance, or by clinging to deprivation and restriction as a means of gaining the favor of God. I do think that mindset mirrors much of diet culture. Diet culture sells us on the idea that the more controlled we are, the more we discipline the body, the more we will be rewarded in other ways. And when that logic shows up in religious fasting, I think it is very unhealthy—not just physically, but spiritually.
Anna’s experiences with dieting and purity culture illustrate just how easily the language of spiritual discipline can merge with the moral logic of diet culture and disordered eating. In this sense, eating disorders often dovetail with broader traditions of purity culture across Catholicism, Christianity, and other religions, as well as food morality.
Orthorexia as Contemporary anorexia mirabilis
While medieval fasting was interpreted as a spiritual practice, certain modern forms of disordered eating adopt similar moral codes surrounding food, diet, and purity of the self and spirit. One contemporary manifestation of this dynamic is orthorexia.
Orthorexia nervosa (sometimes described as otherwise specified eating and feeding disorder [OSFED]) can be defined as having a preoccupation with excluding foods from their diet that they deem “impure,” as well as a reliance on exercise to control the body, for self-punishment, and willpower. According to contemporary eating disorder specialist Tom Wooldridge, this nuanced distinction of orthorexia from other types of disordered eating is “an unhealthy focus on eating in a healthy way—may use seemingly healthy exercise regimes, including a rigidly controlled diet and obsessive self-care rituals, to maintain a false body” (Wooldridge 65).
Applying modern diagnostic categories such as orthorexia nervosa or anorexia nervosa (literally meaning a “nervous disorder”) to religious asceticism can be complicated and potentially anachronistic. Medieval women who engaged in extreme fasting were not primarily pursuing thinness or conforming to beauty standards. Rather, their food restriction often functioned as a form of spiritual discipline shaped by perfectionism, devotion, and a desire for control within a world that offered women little autonomy. Through this lens, starving saints exercised an intense willpower around food, neglecting physical hunger in pursuit of purification and closeness to God. Accounts of these women frequently describe states of sleeplessness and heightened energy that observers interpreted as miraculous.
One key distinction between miraculous self-starvation and present-day eating disorders lies in the framework used to interpret these behaviors. Today, clinicians understand disordered eating as deeply connected to the nervous system and to psychological coping mechanisms related to trauma, anxiety, or control (thanks to nineteenth-century France!). Medieval observers, by contrast, interpreted such bodily extremes as signs of spiritual devotion rather than neurological or psychological processes. The religious motivations of these starving women were not viewed as neurological processes; they were praised and veiled as pious pursuits.
While these dynamics may seem distant from modern life, echoes of this moralized restriction still appear today. Karalyn and I also talked about the ways in which food restriction gets praised within society today, especially on college campuses, where I happen to work and where Karalyn’s favorite population of clients lives.
On college campuses it’s like, oh, ‘I didn’t eat all day because I have a study’ and the response is ‘oh my gosh good for you, that you were studying all day’. They might not actually intentionally be seeing that not eating all day is good for you, but it’s still in that piece of life, it is praised to study all day instead of eating or nourishing your body. It is praised to lose weight. It is praised to do all of these different pieces of, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so amazing that you’ve reached a certain level of productivity,’ so praise in our society is so rampant that you’re at a point where you seemingly no longer ‘need to eat.’ (Reader, to be clear, we both insist you must eat).
These casual remarks about productivity and appetite reveal how deeply moralized restriction remains embedded in everyday life. A gentle reminder that Karalyn wishes pastoral leaders understood is that fasting, in Catholicism, does not necessitate an entire day of food abstinence.
I think of the Catholic tradition and the ways that purification of the soul can sometimes get tied to restriction. But even within Catholicism, fasting on a day of fasting actually means one meal and two smaller meals—it’s not no food. That’s something people often misunderstand. They see the word fasting and think they’re supposed to eat nothing that day. But the Church’s guidance is one main meal and two smaller ones, and you’re simply not supposed to eat meat. You’re still getting protein and nutrients even in the face of fasting and abstinence. There’s just a misunderstanding in general of what fasting actually entails. And going back to the role of church leaders, it would be helpful for them to review with people what fasting really means. Sometimes fasting can even be about other things, like taking a break from social media or your phone, rather than food.
Karalyn’s clarification highlights how easily religious language and scripture surrounding food can be misinterpreted. While historically fasting became synonymous with total deprivation, spiritual discipline risks collapsing into the same moral framework that has historically governed disordered eating: virtue through restriction, purity through self-denial. As both the historians I mention above and clinicians like Karalyn have observed, the language of “cleanliness,” discipline, and sacrifice has long shaped how individuals interpret their relationship to food.
Speaking with Anna and her own lived experience, I noted how many eating disorder narratives include ideas of “clean” or “pure” eating. I asked, how did moral language around food shape your experience?
So much of what I was taught about religion had to do with controlling the body. This was something I saw in my religious community with regard to hard work, the Protestant work ethic, and frugality—not becoming too indulgent with material goods. This was also how we approached sexuality: too much desire was suspect, especially acting upon those desires.
And I mapped all of that onto my relationship with my own body. The idolization of restraint, discipline, and taming desire was manifest in the most visible way in what I believed was an ideal body.
Diet culture has roots in religion. In the 19th century, there was an idea that a fit body was a sign of a fit soul—an external symbol of internal regeneration. And so the virtues I was taught to value and pursue, when mapped onto the body, overlapped significantly with diet culture’s language of clean or pure eating.
Rollins’s reflection illustrates how easily religious virtues—discipline, restraint, and control—can migrate from spiritual life to the regulation of the body. As a dix-neuvièmiste by training, I also cannot help but hear how the nineteenth century anticipates modern-day orthorexia: how les mœurs du siècle have been mapped onto “good” versus “bad” foods, and even brands that use words like “evil,” “skinny,” and “clean” in their name.
I also asked Anna, did the idea of “healthy eating” ever blur into restriction or self-discipline in ways that felt spiritually or morally framed?
Healthy eating has always been a very complicated thing for me, in part because I have such a tendency toward fundamentalist, black-and-white thinking that whatever I do in an attempt to be healthy never feels quite good enough. I always feel like I could have done it a little bit better.
I’m lucky in that I don’t have food allergies or diseases where I absolutely have to restrict certain types of food. But I’ve found that I’m healthiest when I try to think less about performing well with eating and instead pay attention to what my body is telling me it needs. Even though intuitive eating has its criticisms and it isn’t a perfect approach, it’s something that has been really beneficial for me.
If the language of fasting has historically been used to moralize restriction, the question then becomes whether it can be reclaimed differently…
Reclaiming fasting
How may we as scholars and clinicians flip the scripture in a non self-depriving fashion during expected periods of religious fasting? How might we reappraise fasting in a new light today than we have for millennia?
In terms of lenten practices, Karalyn shared with me a list of alternatives to fasting, reminding us that Lent is also a time to do things like Almsgiving. Karalyn told me that this year, she is writing a letter every single day to different people. “For me, I find connectivity to faith through others and like seeing God in others, so for me, this is a much bigger growth in faith than denying myself of some sort of food item or forcing myself to do some form of movement, get all these different things.” Likewise, “in the Catholic faith, if there’s any reason why you shouldn’t be fasting, you just don’t fast. God will forgive you. People oftentimes think it’s a bigger deal to not engage in fasting, but if you start to feel like you have low blood sugar, even, it’s just like you’re supposed to care for your body ultimately, and that is also still a way that you care. Like, most religions believe that God is within your body, so you have to take care of the embodied flesh.”
Karalyn’s comment echoes a familiar biblical metaphor: the body as a temple. Within Christian traditions, the body is often described as a dwelling place of the divine, a site to be cared for rather than punished. In recent years, this phrase has taken on a humorous life of its among online platforms. One popular meme reads: “Me at 7 a.m.: my body is a temple. Me at 7 p.m.: the temple is closed.”
Beneath the humor of mornings riddled with vitamins, greens powder, juices, and pilates, to a diametrically opposed evening laced with wine, candy, and ice cream, lies an important truth: caring for the body often means acknowledging its limits rather than attempting to transcend them. The mindset behind this meme also triggers other disordered patterns, such as the binge-restrict cycle. I digress.
Lent—and recovery—can also be reclaimed when motivation comes from within.
Karalyn shared many more alternatives to food-laden ascetic practices. For example, “you can do things like read in the Bible using a devotional, a devotional that’s more important to you, think of a new type of prayer. And it doesn’t have to be something you do every day, it could be something where it’s just like my goal for this, like, I made a goal one year of like, I really wanted to at least pray Novena once and figure out if I liked it. Okay. It was like one Novena in the 40 days was my goal. Novena is a certain number of days where you pray the rosary each day for a certain purpose. So it’s normally a different saint that you can pick, saints you know, St. Dymphna, who’s the patron saint of mental health. So if you want mental health, you can engage her in Novena.”
As I discuss with most clinicians who I interview, I asked Karalyn, from your clinical perspective, is there a particular moment or stage in a patient’s trajectory that tends to stand out as especially significant or transformative in their recovery?
The thing that comes to mind isn’t necessarily a specific moment in recovery. It’s more of a pivotal shift—when someone begins wanting recovery for themselves rather than relying on external motivations. External motivators can get people really far, especially early in treatment, when we’re still learning how to fight against the eating disorder. But the people who are most successful in recovery eventually reach a point where something changes internally. Suddenly it’s no longer about outside pressure. It becomes: I actually want this for myself. I want to live more in alignment with my values. That shift—from external pressure to internal motivation—is often the pivotal moment in recovery.
Personally speaking, when I found the motivation to recover from anorexia internally, I found the path to recovery to be much more enticing than having external voices telling me I had to recover. I made a list of motivators, and when I realized how interested I was in eating disorders and French literature, I knew that I had to recover for myself. A therapist once asked me, “how would it feel to defend a dissertation on eating disorders when you are not recovered yourself.” That cut me like a knife. Later, a different provider asked me, “what is it like to be so confident in the universe that you can freely share about your experience with anorexia,” something I hid and was ashamed of for so many years. In many ways, academia became my answer.
Karalyn describes this shift from external-to-internal motivations as being a key turning point in recovery. In my own experience, that realization opened the door to a different question altogether: not simply how to stop restricting, but how to nourish the body in ways that feel sustaining rather than punitive?
I asked Anna what nourishing the body means to her now, especially during times when cultural or religious traditions emphasize restraint?
Nourishing my body now involves paying a lot of attention to my limits and not trying to transcend them. It means respecting that I am in a body that has needs and desires, and that it is neither whole nor good to act as if my flesh is something I simply have to deal with rather than honor.
So nourishing my body now means giving it what it needs, not just focusing on taking away what it doesn’t need. It means paying attention to making sure I give it lots of good, rather than fixating on restricting things I might categorize as bad.
It involves a lot of sleep and water, eating regularly, and having dessert with friends so that I can have more dynamic relationships.
In today’s society that idolizes diet culture, thinspiration, and #skinnytok, to reclaim fasting is not to abandon spirituality, but to reject the old equation of virtue with restriction. Holiness is not measured by how little we eat, how well we suppress desire and appetite, or how neatly we discipline the body into silence and exercise. If the body is a temple, it is not one we honor by emptying it out, it is one we care for through nourishment, rest, limits, and the ordinary intimacy of sharing food with others. For those in recovery, the challenge is not simply to resist diet culture’s distortions, but to imagine forms of faith that make room for embodiment rather than punishment. Flipping the scripture, then, means learning to see care itself as devotion.
Works Cited
Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Bynum, Caroline Walter. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press, 1987.
Rennie, Karalyn. “Ministering with Mental Health in Mind.” https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/stm/news-notes/2023-encounter-archive/ministering-with-mental-health-in-mind.html
Rollins, Anna. Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing up as a Good Girl. Eerdmans, 2025.
Vandereycken, Ron, van Deth, Walter. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation. Athlone Press, 1994.
Wooldridge, Tom. Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge, 2023.
Further Reading Suggestions
Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Anorexia, Obesity, and The Person Within. Routledge, 1973.
Bohannon, Cat. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Knopf, 2023.
Clein, Emmeline. Dead Weight: On Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating. Picador, 2024.
Fraterrigo, Melissa. The Perils of Girlhood. University of Nebraska Press, 2025.
Hussian, Amber. Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live. Simon and Schuster, 2026.
Tenore Tarpley, Mallary. SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Treatment. Simon and Schuster, 2025.
White, Emma. The Spirituality of Anorexia: A Goddess Feminist Thealogy. Routledge, 2019.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. Harper Perennial, 2002.
Resources
https://renfrewcenter.com/
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/
https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/
https://anad.org/
https://www.theprojectheal.org/
This is such a smart, deep engagement with the season of Lent, and religion’s connection to diet culture. Thank you for such a kind and thoughtful discussion of Famished, too! I’m so grateful!