How to Grow in the Fight Against Gluttony

The word fight may surprise for a subject we now hold to be harmless. Yet it is the vocabulary of the whole spiritual tradition. Understanding why this fight exists, and that it is no trifle, is the first condition for waging it without despising it or growing tense over it.

The first temptation came through the mouth

Tradition has never forgotten that the first sin in history was, in its sensible matter, a sin of the mouth: a fruit looked at, desired, taken and eaten. "The woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good to eat […] she took some and ate it" (Gn 3:6)^[3]. The fundamental disobedience cannot be reduced to gluttony — its root is pride, the desire to be "like gods" — but it was knotted around an act of eating. The Fathers saw in this a warning: man first falls at the humblest and most everyday point of his nature, the appetite. It is no accident that the second Adam, Christ, begins His victory precisely where the first had succumbed — in the desert, in hunger, before the temptation to turn stones into loaves (Mt 4:3-4)^[4]. The fight against gluttony thus belongs to the longest of all stories: that of the mouth through which evil entered and through which faithfulness begins again.

A capital sin we no longer dare name

Gluttony stands in the list of the seven capital sins which the Church received from Saint John Cassian and Saint Gregory the Great. The Catechism names it expressly:

"They are called capital because they engender other sins, other vices. They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, sloth or acedia." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1866^[5]

Capital does not mean "the gravest": gluttony is, in itself, less weighty than pride or hatred. Capital means generative: this vice is a head (caput) from which other sins flow. And that is precisely what our age no longer sees. We laugh at gluttony, we make of it a likeable flaw, almost a quality of the bon vivant. This indulgence is recent and deceptive. Ancient and Christian wisdom knew that the man who does not possess himself at table rarely possesses himself elsewhere, and that mastery of the humblest appetite is the school of all the others. Blessed Thomas à Kempis said it bluntly:

"Restrain intemperance, and you will more easily restrain the other desires of the flesh." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. 19^[6]

What gluttony enslaves

The danger of gluttony is not in pleasure itself, but in the reversal it works: the body, made to serve the soul, becomes its master; the belly, made for life, becomes life's end. Saint Paul forged the harshest formula in all of Scripture on this subject, speaking of those who conduct themselves as enemies of the Cross:

"They are headed for destruction. Their god is their belly, and they glory in what is their shame; their minds are set on earthly things." — Saint Paul, Letter to the Philippians 3:19^[7]

To make one's belly a god is the most material idolatry there is: worshipping what one digests. The fight against gluttony is therefore, at bottom, a fight for the right hierarchy of being: that the body serve the soul, and the soul serve God. That is what is at stake in an act as ordinary as a meal — hence the attention every master of the interior life has given it.

We only fight well an enemy we have clearly identified. Yet gluttony is often misnamed: sometimes confused with the simple pleasure of eating (which wrongly burdens the conscience), sometimes reduced to spectacular gorging alone (which wrongly reassures the dainty). It must therefore be defined rigorously.

The definition: a disordered desire, not the pleasure of eating

Gluttony is not the act of eating, nor even taking pleasure in it. It is a disorder of desire. Saint Thomas states it in so many words:

"Gluttony denotes not every desire for eating and drinking, but a disordered desire. Now a desire is said to be disordered when it departs from the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 148, a. 1^[8]

Everything lies in that "disordered". The criterion is not absolute quantity nor refinement in itself, but the relation to reason and to the end: eating becomes gluttony when pleasure takes first place, when we eat in order to eat and no longer in order to live, when appetite commands instead of obeying. A labourer who eats heartily may be perfectly temperate; a fussy eater who picks at his food while demanding rare dishes may be gravely gluttonous. The vice is not on the plate: it is in the heart.

Eating is good, and willed by God

It must be said forcefully, against every deviation: food is a good, the pleasure of eating is willed by God, and the fellowship of the table is a figure of Heaven. Christ multiplied the loaves, changed water into wine at Cana, ate with sinners, instituted the Eucharist in the course of a meal, shared broiled fish after His Resurrection. Far from despising the table, He sanctified it — so much so that His adversaries, scandalized by His freedom, accused Him: "Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Mt 11:19)^[9]. The fight against gluttony is therefore never a hatred of food or of the body: it is the pursuit of a freedom — to use the good without being enslaved by it, to enjoy it with gratitude without making an idol of it. Whoever despises food as such does not fight gluttony: he falls into another excess, which we shall meet again.

The five forms of gluttony according to Saint Gregory

Tradition has finely analysed the concrete ways of sinning by gluttony. Saint Gregory the Great, taken up by Saint Thomas, distinguishes five, which medieval memory fixed in a Latin verse: praepropere, laute, nimis, ardenter, studiose^[10]. The vice therefore does not lie only in quantity: it has five faces, four of which have nothing to do with gorging.

Reading the table: only one of these five excesses concerns quantity ("too much"). The other four target the manner — impatience, refinement, eagerness, fussiness. That is why a man sparing in quantity may be gluttonous in daintiness, and why the fight is waged in the detail of the heart's dispositions, not in the mere measure of the plate.

This analysis delivers us from a false reassurance. Many believe themselves safe from gluttony because they eat little; but fussy exactingness, perpetual dissatisfaction with what is served, the pursuit of refinement as though it were owed, are forms of gluttony subtler and sometimes more deep-rooted than excess of quantity.

The grave case: drunkenness

Among disorders of the table, drunkenness (ebrietas) holds a place apart, for it does not merely unbalance the appetite but deprives man of the use of reason — which is his dignity. Scripture condemns it steadily: "Be not among those who get drunk on wine […] for the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty" (Pr 23:20-21)^[11]. The Catechism explicitly ranges the abuse of alcohol — and more broadly every excess — under the failure of temperance:

"The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2290^[12]

Deliberate and complete intoxication, which takes away the use of reason, can be a grave sin; habitual abuse of drink ruins body, family and soul. But here again the condemnation does not target wine itself — "wine gladdens the heart of man" (Ps 104:15) — but its disordered use. The fight is always the same: to remain free.

To fight a vice, we must know both where it comes from and what it begets. Gluttony is formidable less by its own gravity than by its strategic position: it is the first door through which the enemy enters, and the mother of a numerous offspring.

The first of the eight "thoughts": the gateway of the vices

The Desert Fathers, the first great strategists of the interior fight, drew up the list of the eight generic "thoughts" (logismoi) that assail the monk. Evagrius Ponticus places gluttony (gastrimargia) at the head of the list, before fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride^[13]. Saint John Cassian, who hands this doctrine on to the West, devotes to "the spirit of gluttony" the first book of his treatise on monastic combat^[14]. This rank is no accident: the Fathers teach that we cannot conquer the higher passions — and notably lust — if we have not first mastered the lowest and most everyday one, that of the belly. Gluttony is the first rampart to be taken: while it holds, the rest of the stronghold stays exposed. That is why the whole ascetic edifice begins at the table.

The "daughters" of gluttony according to Saint Thomas

A capital vice is known by its offspring: the sins it gives birth to. Saint Thomas, following Saint Gregory, lists the "daughters" of gluttony, and the list is enlightening:

"From gluttony are born unbridled mirth, buffoonery, impurity, idle talk and dulling of the mind as regards the intelligence." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 148, a. 6^[15]

The sated belly dulls the mind: the last of these daughters, the dulling of the mind (hebetudo mentis circa intelligentiam), is the gravest for the spiritual life. The overfed body weighs down the intelligence and blunts prayer; the heavy man becomes incapable of the things of God. Christ Himself warns of it, binding heaviness of heart to excess at table:

"Beware that your hearts do not become heavy with feasting, drunkenness and the anxieties of life." — Jesus, according to Saint Luke 21:34^[16]

From belly to flesh: gluttony and lust

The best known of gluttony's daughters is impurity. The unanimous tradition, from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas, observes the physical and spiritual link between the two neighbouring appetites: a sated belly heats the flesh. "Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus grows cold," said an ancient proverb the monks made their own — without bread and wine in excess, lust dies down of itself. This is one of the decisive reasons for fasting: we mortify the mouth to defend the heart. This united fight is developed in the article How to Grow in the Fight Against Lust, where sobriety at table figures among the weapons of purity. Whoever wishes to grow in chastity often begins by growing in temperance at table.

Scripture has not treated gluttony as a minor failing. On the contrary, it has made it the mainspring of several of its gravest narratives, as if to show that the sin of the mouth, harmless as it looks, can entail the heaviest consequences.

Esau: a birthright for a dish of lentils

The most striking case is that of Esau, who comes home exhausted from the hunt and sells his brother Jacob his birthright — with all the blessing and promise it carries — for a mere dish of lentils: "Let me swallow some of that red stuff, for I am exhausted." And the text concludes, tersely: "So Esau despised his birthright" (Gn 25:30-34)^[17]. The whole drama lies in the disproportion: an eternal good traded for a moment's satisfaction. The Letter to the Hebrews makes it a solemn warning, calling Esau a "profane" man who "for a single meal sold his birthright" (Heb 12:16)^[18]. Gluttony is exactly this: preferring the immediate to the definitive, the sensible to the eternal, the dish of lentils to the blessing. Every time we yield to appetite against a higher good — prayer put off for a snack, mortification betrayed for a treat — we replay, in miniature, Esau's bargain.

The "graves of craving": the quails in the desert

In the desert, the people freed from Egypt grow weary of the manna and demand meat, longing for "the fleshpots" of slavery (Ex 16:3)^[19]. "They were seized with craving," says the text (Nb 11:4). God sends them quails in abundance — but this sated craving turns to punishment: "While the meat was still between their teeth […] the anger of the Lord blazed out." The place will keep the name: Kibroth-hattaavah, "Graves-of-craving" (Nb 11:33-34)^[20]. The narrative is terrible and luminous: the carnal desire for food, preferred to trust in God, digs graves. The psalm draws the lesson: God "gave them what they asked, but sent a wasting disease upon them" (Ps 106:15, in the Hebrew "leanness into their soul"). The people wanted to fill their bellies; they lost their lives in it. Gluttony that supplants faith is never innocent.

"Whether you eat or drink"

Faced with these warnings, Scripture yet preaches neither hatred of food nor its transfiguration. Saint Paul relativizes belly and food in a word — "Food is for the belly, and the belly for food: God will destroy both the one and the other" (1 Cor 6:13)^[21] — the better to raise eating itself to the rank of a spiritual act:

"So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God." — Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 10:31^[22]

Here is the secret that turns the whole fight around: not to cease eating, but to eat for God. The same apostle urges us to "conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness" (Rm 13:13)^[23], not from contempt for the body, but because the baptized has "put on Christ" and no longer belongs to himself. The fight against gluttony is, in the New Testament, the reverse side of a grace: the body has become "the temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 6:19), and we do not make an idol of a temple.

Doctrine is not enough: we need means. The spiritual tradition has tested a small number of them — simple and sure — which matter less to understand than to practise with constancy. None is spectacular; it is their repeated faithfulness that transforms.

Eating to live, and all for the glory of God

The first means is not an effort but an intention. It consists in putting eating back in its place: a means at the service of life, and life at the service of God. Concretely, this passes through very ancient and very simple gestures: the grace before meals and the thanksgiving that frame the meal, the habit of receiving each dish as a gift rather than as a due, the inward refusal to make the meal the summit of the day. Whoever prays before eating has already disarmed gluttony by half: he has acknowledged that food comes from Another and returns to Another. "Do everything for the glory of God" (1 Cor 10:31) is not a pious formula added to the meal: it is the conversion of the meal itself into an act of love.

The school of fasting and abstinence

The proper weapon of the fight against gluttony is fasting, with its brother abstinence. Deliberately hollowing out a hunger is teaching the body that it is not the master, and teaching desire that it can wait. Fasting does not starve man: it frees him, by giving him back mastery of his appetite. But — the golden rule of the whole tradition — fasting is never an end in itself. Saint John Cassian said it once for all:

"We gain less by a fast than we lose by a movement of anger […] Secondary things — fasts, vigils, withdrawal and meditation on the Scriptures — should be referred to our principal end, that is, to purity of heart, which is charity." — Saint John Cassian, Conferences, I^[24]

Fasting is therefore a means subordinated to charity, never a performance from which to draw vanity. On its ordered practice, its ends, its degrees and its pitfalls, see the dedicated article How to Grow in Fasting. Whoever wishes to grow in the fight against gluttony will find there the principal weapon, and the way to use it without wounding himself.

Mortification of the palate: small renunciations at table

Between ordered fasting and ordinary life lies a vast field of daily small mortifications, almost invisible, and formidably effective against gluttony. The spiritual masters recommend them unanimously, for they require neither robust health nor exceptional circumstances: going without a second helping, leaving a little of what we like, not taking more of the favourite dish, giving up a seasoning, waiting for mealtime without snacking, sometimes choosing the less good piece. These nothings, offered without ostentation, break day after day the tyranny of appetite where it truly lodges: not in great excesses, but in the multitude of small indulgences. "Whoever is faithful in small things" (Lk 16:10) learns freedom in great ones. The secret is modest regularity, not exploits. On this art of detachment from sensible goods, see How to Grow in Detachment.

Taking food "as remedies"

Saint Augustine left, in the Confessions, the most penetrating analysis of the daily fight at table. He confesses his difficulty in discerning, in the act of eating, the share of need from the share of pleasure, so mingled are the two. His discovery is a golden rule: to receive food as a remedy, aiming at health and not at delight.

"You have taught me to approach food as I would medicines. But while I pass from the discomfort of need to the repose of satiety, in that very passage the snare of concupiscence lies in wait for me." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, book X, ch. 31^[25]

Augustine admits that we do not always know "whether it is still the necessary care of the body asking for support, or the deceitful delight of concupiscence seeking to be served". Pleasure attaches itself to need "like a dangerous handmaid", and often tries to take the lead. The practical rule is therefore to eat with a view to the end — to nourish ourselves in order to live and to serve — and to hold pleasure for a fellow traveller, good but secondary, welcomed without being pursued. This simple intention, renewed at each meal, orders all the rest.

Discretion: neither gluttony nor rigorism

The fight against gluttony has its own trap: the reverse excess. From ill-enlightened generosity or proud disgust of the body, some impose on themselves boundless privations that ruin health, make them irritable, unable to work or to serve — in short, that wound charity. Tradition calls this failing indiscretion, and all the masters, from Cassian to Saint Francis de Sales, are unanimous: asceticism must be ruled by prudence and discretion. A regime that makes you unbearable to others, or unfit for your duty of state, is not a virtue but a fault disguised as virtue. Saint Catherine of Siena taught that penance is an instrument, not the end, and that it must be adapted without making a counter-idol of it. The golden rule: when in doubt, and above all in case of fragile health or scrupulosity, ask for counsel from a priest or a guide — see How to Grow in Spiritual Direction and How to Grow in Prudence. The right measure is neither gorging nor hatred of the body, but the freedom of a son.

Vigilance, prayer and the sacraments

Like every spiritual fight, this one is won first by grace, asked for and received. Gluttony, the vice of the first movement, is foiled by vigilance over first desires, before they swell — "Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation" (Mt 26:41). It is uprooted by prayer, which makes the soul light and weans it from base satisfactions; by regular confession, which raises us from the ordinary falls at table; and by the Eucharist, that bread which satiates the soul and makes us hunger for another food than the one that perishes. Christ said it after the multiplication of the loaves: "Do not labour for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life" (Jn 6:27). On these springs, see How to Grow in Spiritual Vigilance, How to Grow in Regular Confession and How to Grow in Frequent Communion.

Virtue stands in the middle of two opposite faults. The fight against gluttony does not escape this law: we can miss it by excess as by defect, and the second failing, rarer, is no less dangerous than the first.

By excess: the flesh in command

The first failing is gluttony itself, in its five forms: man delivered over to his appetite, eating too much, too soon, too eagerly, too daintily, too elaborately. At its root, a reversal: the flesh commands, the mind obeys, and the belly becomes "god" (Phil 3:19). This failing today wears a thousand faces the Fathers never knew — permanent abundance, continual snacking, food-as-entertainment, drink-as-anaesthetic — but the mechanism is unchanged: desire seeks its satisfaction for its own sake, and the soul grows heavy. It is the common failing, and the most visible.

By defect: false rigorism and contempt for the body

The second failing is subtler and prouder: it is insensibility, the refusal on principle of every legitimate pleasure, contempt for food as though the body were evil. Saint Thomas ranges it among the sins "against nature", for God made the body and gave it to take pleasure in what keeps it alive; to reject that pleasure from disdain, or to ruin one's health through false fervour, is to miss virtue from below. This failing has sometimes worn the mask of holiness — it lies in wait for fervent souls and generous beginners — but it often betrays a spiritual pride: distinguishing oneself by austerities, despising those who eat simply, believing oneself advanced because one is hard on oneself. The Church has always condemned, under the name of angelism or encratism, contempt for created goods. True temperance uses everything with gratitude and nothing with avidity: it does not hate food, it frees itself from it.

Like every spiritual victory, the fight against gluttony is measured not by the privation it costs, but by the freedom it gives. Its fruits are the proof that it is never a mutilation, but a liberation.

Freedom and lightness of heart

The first fruit is a recovered lightness. The man who no longer depends on his appetite walks more freely through life: he can fast or feast according to the hour, without his peace being troubled by it. He is no longer tyrannized by craving, habit, lack; he possesses his desires instead of being possessed by them. This freedom is a joy: not the gloomy joy of one who deprives himself, but the sovereign joy of one who no longer depends. "All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything" (1 Cor 6:12)^[26].

Clarity of mind for prayer

Where gluttony "dulled the mind", sobriety makes it clear. The lightened body prays better: thought is livelier, attention steadier, the heart more available. The Desert Fathers had observed it from experience: a full stomach weighs down the soul, a sober belly keeps it vigilant. It is one of the great motives of fasting: we hollow out within ourselves an emptiness that God comes to fill. Sobriety at table is thus a handmaid of prayer: see How to Grow in Prayer.

Compassion for those who hunger

The last fruit opens the heart towards others. Whoever learns to deprive himself voluntarily understands, from within, what the involuntary hunger of the poor is. Sobriety makes us one in solidarity: it frees resources to share, and above all it attunes the heart to those who lack. Tradition has always bound fasting to almsgiving — what I do not eat, I give. Thus the fight against gluttony, begun as a private affair of the belly, ends in charity: it makes us both free before God and brothers to the hungry. On this prolongation, see How to Grow in Almsgiving.

The spirituality of the Divine Will, handed down to Luisa Piccarreta (1865–1947), gives this fight its final accent. It removes neither effort nor its value, but reveals its term: where the Will of God reigns fully, mastery of appetite ceases to be an exhausting struggle and becomes the peaceful overflow of a divine life in the soul.

Jesus explains to Luisa that, in the Divine Will, the soul no longer needs to battle its passions without respite: they die out of themselves, for lack of air to live on.

"By being in My Will, you will no longer need to fight your passions and be always at war with them. […] When one lives in My holy Will, the passions die gently, without struggle and without noise. They lose life by themselves. For, before the holiness of My Will, the passions dare not show themselves." — The Book of Heaven, vol. 4, 23 December 1900^[27]

It is the very surpassing of ascetic effort: not its abandonment, but its fulfilment. Sobriety, in this light, is no longer a bridle pulled tighter, but the air breathed by a healthy soul. Jesus says so elsewhere in so many words:

"Mortification must be the air of the soul. By the air the soul breathes, one knows whether it is healthy or sick. If a person breathes the air of mortification, everything will be purified in him; all his senses will ring with one harmonious sound." — The Book of Heaven, vol. 3, 16 February 1900^[28]

Growing in the fight against gluttony, in this perspective, is not only tightening the bridle on appetite a little more: it is letting the Will of God reorder desire from within, until renunciation is no longer a struggle but a peaceful gift. Human sobriety, grafted onto the divine Will, ceases to be a wrested privation and becomes the calm of a heart no disordered thing weighs down any more. On this new life, see How to Grow in Abandonment to God.

We do not grow in a virtue by staring at it as an abstract ideal, but by contemplating those who lived it. And the fight against gluttony has its sovereign master: Christ, who holds together, in perfect freedom, both sides of temperance.

He fasted forty days in the desert and repelled the first temptation, that of bread: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Mt 4:4)^[29]. But He also changed water into wine at Cana, multiplied the loaves, shared so many meals that He was called "a glutton and a drunkard" (Mt 11:19)^[30], and made a meal the sacrament of His love. Christ is neither the ascetic who despises created goods, nor the man delivered over to pleasures: He uses them in sovereign freedom, sanctifying them when He takes them, surpassing them when He renounces them. His freedom at table — fasting or feasting according to the Father's hour — is the measure of ours.

Behind Him, a cloud of witnesses: Moses and Elijah fasting forty days; the Desert Fathers, for whom sobriety was the first rule; Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, heroic beggar, who willed to "chastise the body by fasting and abstinence"^[31]; Saint Catherine of Siena, whose austerity at table was ruled by the highest charity; and so many saints who, without ever hating food, made of it a path towards God. None of them fasted in order to fast: all sought, through mastery of the humblest appetite, the freedom of the heart. It is to this company that the fight against gluttony unites us.

The fight against gluttony is not won by great heroic resolutions, but by a modest and repeated faithfulness. This whole strategy can be summed up in a simple programme, graded from the most fundamental to the most everyday.

Reading the table: none of these gestures is spectacular; it is their faithful repetition that transforms. Hold to one or two, keep them, then add more. Freedom is won at every meal.

What matters is not to fight gluttony "in general" — an abstract and discouraging fight — but to posit, today, the concrete act that presents itself: this remainder to leave, this hour to wait for, this glass to refuse, this meal to offer, this grace to ask for. For temperance at table is "a long and exacting work" (CCC § 2342), and long breath is made of nothing but instants held. To whoever fights thus, day after day, without rigorism and without indulgence, is promised the freedom of sober hearts — a body made servant, a mind made clear, and a soul free enough to prefer God to all, even in the humblest of appetites.

• How to Grow in Temperance — the positive way, complementary to this article: the cardinal virtue that moderates the attraction of every pleasure of the senses and of which sobriety at table is a part. The fight against the vice makes room for the virtue.
• How to Grow in Fasting — the principal weapon of the fight against gluttony: its ends, its degrees, what the Church asks, and the art of fasting without wounding oneself.
• How to Grow in the Fight Against Lust — the brother vice, daughter of gluttony: the sated belly heats the flesh, and we mortify the mouth to defend the heart.
• How to Grow in Detachment — the broader art of holding the heart free with regard to sensible goods, of which food is the most everyday.
• How to Grow in Spiritual Vigilance — watching over the first movements of desire, the nerve of the daily fight at table.
• How to Grow in Regular Confession and How to Grow in Frequent Communion — the sacramental springs that raise us from ordinary falls and satiate the soul with another bread.
• How to Grow in Almsgiving — the prolongation of the fight: sobriety turned sharing, fasting turned charity.