Lenten Journal (Mon Feb 27th): Abstain

Dear Lord, 

As you know, I’ve decided to abstain from meat entirely, this Lent. And it’s interesting - it’s teaching me more than I ever thought it would. At the same time that it’s showing me how to take better care of my body, it’s also showing just how much damage I’ve done to it. 

Last year was simultaneously the best and worst of my life, so far. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true - I learned so much about myself, about my friends, about my family and about my faith. The year taught me so much, but it also took a lot away. It was the year when healthy eating turned into dangerous restriction, and I stayed up until three in the morning just to do crunches and leg lifts until I felt like maybe I could function again. I taught my body to whimper only a little bit when I made it live on far fewer calories than it needed, and now I’m seeing what I did. 

You never truly recover from something like that -it always wriggles away in your head. Every time I pick up a fork and plate in the dining hall, it’s there. Whenever I second-guess getting an apple at the end of dinner, it’s there. It’s there in my unwillingness to eat in public outside of the dining hall meal times, and my obsessive need to eat healthily inside of it. But I’ve been doing better, here, maybe because of the surveillance - my friends, who eat with me every day, would immediately notice, after all. That’s what did it, sadly, not out of concern for my own health. While I was eating meat, I didn’t really notice the effect these habits had on my body. While I did notice some weight gain (to be expected, after a year of restricting myself and then returning to normal eating) it was hard to notice anything. But now, my body is being deprived. And even if it is different, it remembers what happened last time…and it doesn’t like it. 

Possibly because of this, my body is constantly craving things, even when I’m not hungry. This is, according to one of my vegan friends, fairly normal when you first start out, due to hormones (?). It’s not fun. I mostly crave carbs and dairy products…believe me, randomly feeling like you desperately need milk is bizarre…as well as peanut butter (possibly for protein) and, occasionally, sweets. I’ve been doing well figuring out what it is my body actually needs, and giving it that rather than what it thinks it wants. And it’s going fairly well - beyond my body freaking out a little bit because of the perceived deprivation, I feel great! I doubt I’ll ever go back to eating as much meat as I had been, though I really do miss chicken. Which is odd, because that is not something I ever realized I liked so much. But it’s teaching me a lot, Lord, about my body, my mind, and the connection between the two. It’s helping me to relearn myself, to keep myself healthy. Thank You so much, Lord, for this decision. I knew it was the right one the moment my mind landed on it, and I’m sure You had something to do with it. Help me to keep abstaining throughout this Lent, and to remember the lessons it teaches me for the rest of my life. 

@3 months ago