We’re training our bodies to obey our souls instead of the other way around.
That’s the short answer. Fasting from meat and dairy isn’t about those foods being evil or unclean. God made them good. But they’re rich, they’re satisfying, and they make the body content in a way that can distract us from spiritual hunger. When we fast, we’re practicing a kind of gentle rebellion against our appetites. We’re reminding our bodies who’s in charge.
The Orthodox Church has fasted this way since the beginning. It’s not something we invented in the Middle Ages or borrowed from vegetarian trends. The early Christians fasted. The Desert Fathers fasted. The Apostles fasted. Christ himself assumed his followers would fast when he said “when you fast,” not “if you fast.” The Church received this practice as part of Holy Tradition and has kept it for two thousand years.
Fasting and the Passions
Here’s what happens when you eat a big steak dinner with butter and cheese and cream. Your body feels satisfied. Comfortable. A little sleepy, maybe. That’s not a bad thing on a feast day or a Sunday. But it’s not the state you want when you’re trying to pray, to repent, to pay attention to God.
The Fathers noticed that rich foods stimulate other appetites too. A full stomach can lead to laziness, to irritability when that comfort is threatened, to lust. The passions feed each other. Gluttony isn’t just about food. It’s about the soul’s habit of reaching for comfort and pleasure instead of reaching for God.
So we fast from meat and dairy (and on strict fast days, from fish and oil and wine) to quiet those appetites. Not to kill them. We’re not Gnostics who think the body is evil. But to train them, the way you’d train a good dog to sit and wait instead of jumping on every guest who walks through the door.
Not a Diet
People in Southeast Texas understand discipline. If you’ve worked a turnaround at the refinery, you know what it means to push through discomfort for a purpose. Fasting is like that. It’s not about losing weight or lowering your cholesterol, though those might happen. It’s about learning self-control in the service of something greater.
A diet is about you and your body. Fasting is about you and God.
The Church gives us a rhythm: Wednesdays and Fridays every week (remembering Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion), plus four major fasting seasons throughout the year. Great Lent is the big one, but there’s also the Nativity Fast before Christmas, the Apostles’ Fast before the feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, and the Dormition Fast before the Theotokos falls asleep. These aren’t arbitrary rules. They’re the Church’s wisdom, tested over centuries, for how to prepare our hearts for the great feasts.
The Body Matters
Some of your Baptist relatives might think Orthodoxy sounds too physical, too concerned with what you eat and when you stand and when you bow. But we believe the body matters because Christ took on a body. The Incarnation means flesh is redeemable. Your body isn’t just a shell for your soul. It’s part of who you are, and it’s being saved right along with your soul.
That’s why we fast with our bodies. We’re not trying to escape the physical world. We’re trying to heal the relationship between body and soul that got broken in the Fall. Before sin, Adam and Eve’s appetites were ordered rightly. They wanted what they should want. After sin, everything got scrambled. Now we want things that hurt us, and we don’t want things that would heal us.
Fasting helps unscramble that. It’s part of the process the Church calls theosis, being united with God and transformed into his likeness. You can’t think your way into theosis. You have to live it, practice it, train for it. Fasting is part of that training.
Grace, Not Law
Here’s what fasting isn’t: a way to earn God’s love. You can’t impress God by eating lentils for forty days. The Pharisees fasted twice a week and Christ called them whitewashed tombs. If you fast but stay proud, judgmental, and cold-hearted, you’ve missed the point entirely.
St. John Chrysostom said the real fast is from sin. Giving up meat is just the beginning. The goal is to give up gossip, anger, grudges, lust. To become gentler, kinder, more patient. If fasting makes you irritable and superior, you’re doing it wrong.
That’s why the Church builds in flexibility. Talk to your priest. If you’re pregnant, nursing, ill, traveling, or dealing with unusual circumstances, the fasting rule can be adjusted. This isn’t legalism. It’s medicine, and medicine gets prescribed differently for different patients.
But don’t use that flexibility as an excuse to avoid the struggle entirely. Most of us can fast more than we think we can. We’re just not used to being uncomfortable. In a culture that worships comfort and convenience, fasting is a quiet form of resistance. It says that something matters more than how I feel right now.
When you sit down to a Lenten meal of beans and rice while your coworkers are eating barbecue, you’re doing something small and strange and old. You’re participating in a practice that connects you to Christians in every century, in every place. And you’re making a little space in your life for God to work.
