Lenten Fast
Is there a difference between fasting and dieting?
Yes, there’s a categorical difference. Dieting has me as agent and focus, and my desire to emerge from the diet and be able to put on clothes I could put on three years ago. Fasting has its object outside myself. I deprive myself of food or some kind of enjoyment, whatever it is.
But fasting is an ecstatic practice in the strict sense of that word: it helps me to step outside myself and toward the other, and to grow in attentiveness. Dieting, I think, can sometimes be doing the opposite and make us excessively focused on ourselves.
