Fasting for spiritual enlightenment

Saint Catherine of Siena may have been the world’s first documented case of anorexia. Catherine was a fourteenth century nun from Tuscany, who wrote extensively about her own experiences with fasting, starting from when she was a child. She eventually died, aged 33, of starvation after long periods of eating very little bar herbs and communion wafers. 

Catherine’s writings reveal she regarded her eating problems half as a testament of her self-denial, and half as an illness over which she had little control – just as today’s insights into eating disorders recognise that the compulsion to avoid eating, or to binge eat with or without later vomiting (bulimia), can be overwhelmingly powerful and long-lasting.

Later religious writings document cases of extreme fasting in a number of religious and cultural traditions, sometimes justified as a means of battling worldly desires in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment.  Later, ‘wasting disease’ was documented in medical texts from the middle ages up to Victorian times and beyond, predominantly affecting women. It is likely that some of these cases were what we would now call anorexia. 

In fact, a number of commentators have ‘diagnosed’ anorexia in prominent women, especially writers and poets – notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) who ‘stubbornly’ ate toast and not much else and who weighed just six stone at the time of her marriage, and Emily Bronte (1818-48) whose journals and work have been analysed from this perspective, and whose death was caused by consumption probably aggravated by anorexia. 

Factors now better understood

For the past 100 years or so, eating disorders have become accepted as resulting from emotional, psychological, cultural and social factors. More recent dimensions have been added to the discussion from gender studies in particular: while men do acquire food issues, of all types (see our video Real stories: Male bulimia), their numbers are much smaller. One estimate from b-eat.co.uk [1] is that 9 out of 10 people with eating disorders of all types are female  

The rise in eating disorders since the 1970s and 1980s may be linked with greater recognition but this isn’t going to be the whole story. There’s ample evidence that the fashionable ideal of slimness, even thinness, is part of the cultural context for eating disorders, and the way the ideal has spread round the world along with a rise in incidence is a big clue to this. But there are other personal factors, too, in individual situations. 

Food issues can be long-lasting – and very painful to endure – but they can be resolved successfully with the right kind of therapy.

Reference

1. Some Statistics, by B-eat: Beating eating disorders.

Image credit: Brooklyn Museum