How eating like a Catholic can change your life

"The Catholic Table" may just restore some sanity to the way you eat



Zoe Romanowsky
December 9, 2016

Do you eat too much or too little? Do you obsess about calories, worry about food labels, or find yourself wishing you didn’t have to worry about food at all? If so, there’s a new book you should add to your Christmas wish list. In The Catholic Table: Finding Joy Where Food and Faith Meet, award-winning author Emily Stimpson Chapman says that a Catholic approach to eating is the best way to live a full and satisfying life. The wisdom and experience she shares in the book — along with many of her delicious recipes — will make you feel a little bad that you’re not on her dinner guest list. But as a consolation, here’s my conversation with her about what it means to “eat like a Catholic” and why everyone should be doing it.

Emily, were you always interested in food? Where does your love for it come from?

My perspective on food as it is now, and my passion for cooking and feeding people, comes from the six years I spent struggling with an eating disorder. Growing up I suppose I liked food, and I had all sorts of pleasant memories associated with mom’s and grandma’s cooking, but when I was 19, I began struggling with anorexia. The years I spent trying to work my way out of that very dark and confining place forced me to think about food and to understand and appreciate it in a new way. From that came the desire to share what I learned and also to cook for others — to share the love that food represents.

So your healing from anorexia was a gradual process.

It was. No eating disorder is a simple recovery — they have complicated beginnings so working your way to an ending is usually pretty complicated as well. My healing began with an understanding of what was going on with the eating disorder and then realizing that I needed to find a way out of it if I wanted to honor God because He made me and loved me. But my healing wasn’t complete until I came back to the Catholic Church. I finally began to understand what the Eucharist was and the connection it had to food — as well as the understanding the beauty and dignity of the body. So, the Eucharist and the theology of the body were what ultimately healed me of my eating disorder.

http://aleteia.org/2016/12/09/how-eating-like-a-catholic-can-change-your-life/