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Dangers of a Full Stomach |

Ancient Christians did not have our modern technology, apps, and calculators for assessing daily energy (calorie) needs, macronutrients, or serving sizes to help prevent overeating. Yet, alongside a clear, unwavering warning of gluttony, there is ample teaching on paying attention to how and how much one eats—gauged by fullness of the stomach. The consensus of the Church Fathers is that if we have eaten until we are “full,” we have likely overeaten.

Feeling of Fullness

We too self-diagnose being “full,” as eating beyond need—feeling stuffed or uncomfortable, having to unbutton our pants after a meal, or saying “my eyes were bigger than my stomach” after loading up too much food at a buffet, during a holiday meal, or at a church celebration.

When researchers and clinicians need more precise measure of fullness, they use hunger-satiety scales to help diagnose and prescribe ways of eating with healthier feelings of fullness following meals. The goal prescription is usually a middle range of satiety (feeling of fullness) following meals, neither hungry or full.

How would you rate your own level of fullness following meals? [1]

https://www.nutrition.va.gov/docs/UpdatedPatientEd/HungerandFullnessScaleJul2023.pdf

Fickleness of Fullness

Satiety is complex with many factors (e.g., cultural influences, tempting environments, food type and quality, emotional coping with food, etc.), [1] and our feelings of being full can be deceptive. For example, the stomach has receptors that sense stretch and communicate back to our brains to regulate food intake, telling us when we are getting full. [2] The more we overeat, these receptors can undergo a drastic shift. In adults with obesity, for example, the receptors that normally tell them to reduce food intake as the stomach fills, can actually promote food intake, telling them to eat more. [3] 

Also, with diets that are high in fat, such as is common to the Standard American Diet (SAD), the receptors that sense stomach stretch become dampened and not as sensitive to the stretching, so the brain does not get the normal signal of fullness, and more easily can lead to overeating beyond need, beyond control, and beyond health.

Fruits of Fullness

The physical consequences of filling the stomach on health and function, which predominate modern discussions around overeating, are not overlooked in ancient Christianity. For example, St John Chrysostom compares the Great Physician’s healing of the sick soul to being like, “a skillful physician noting his patients becoming obese though gluttony and bringing them to health through dieting ...” [4]

To St Basil the Great, “Filling the stomach to satiety, burdening it with food, is an act deserving of malediction ... such excess renders the body unfit for work, prone to sleep, and more susceptible to harm.” Knowing of this physical harm, he concludes that the end goal or aim of taking food should not be pleasure, “but the aim should be the sustaining of life for those who have renounced intemperate delights …” [5]

Futility of Fullness

Yet, there are also important spiritual consequences of fullness.

Lethargy

Overeating to fullness brings lethargy and lack of energy, confirmed by research on maximum eating. [6] Such lethargy then has a direct effect on prayer and following the commandments. For example, St Silouan confessed of a time he was eating his fill and had gained weight, which taught him a valuable lesson:

“A body that is replete hinders pure prayer, and the Spirit of God enters not into a full belly.” [7]

Such an understanding strengthens the common pairing of prayer with fasting, and the Lord’s prayer for “our daily bread.” St Maximus comments that we pray to God, “Give us bread. Not delicacies or riches,” content with what is necessary, [8] “so that we eat for the sake of living, and not be guilty of living for the sake of eating. … to keep it [the body] as far as possible in its natural state of good health, our aim being not just to live but to live for God.” [9]

Blindness

In turn, rather than the nous (intellect, mind) set on things of the Spirit, “...the intellect of a glutton imagines a profusion of foods ...” [10] For example, St Basil also notes that, “when the body enjoys well-being and becomes heavy through much fleshiness, the mind is necessarily inactive and slack in its proper activity. [11] Perhaps most well-known are the words of St Seraphim of Sarov:

 “One should not think about the doings of God when one’s stomach is full;
on a full stomach there can be no vision of the Divine mysteries." [12]

Such words echo earlier words of St Isaac the Syrian, who says that just “as a cloud veils the light of the moon, so the vapors of the belly banish the wisdom of God from the soul.” [13] Further, while warning against the spirit of blasphemy, he teaches:

“And when you fill your stomach, do not shamelessly search out matters and concepts concerning God, lest you later repent of it. Understand what I say: there is no knowledge of the mysteries of God on a full stomach. ... it is just as shameful for lovers of the flesh and the belly to search out spiritual things as it is for a harlot to discourse on chastity.” [14]

Forgetfulness

From lethargy to blindness comes forgetfulness.

“Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’” (Prov 30:8–9)

This wisdom teaches that it is in filling to the full and living beyond our needs, rather than within, that there is risk of forgetting the role of (and subsequently participation in) God’s grace in the most intimate of our daily needs. There is temptation to become satisfied in abundance, but accessibility does not mandate acceptability. In other words, as St Paul teaches, “There is great gain in godliness with contentment,” (1 Tim 6:6–8).

Slavery

“‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be enslaved by anything.” (1 Cor 6:12)

Commenting on St Paul’s teaching, St John Chrysostom emphasizes:

“Here he [Paul] glances at the gluttons. … This is his meaning, ‘You are at liberty to eat,’ says he; ‘well then, remain in liberty, and take heed that you do not become a slave to this appetite: For he who uses it properly, he is master of it; but he that exceeds the proper measure is no longer its master but its slave, since gluttony reigns paramount within him. … It cannot therefore lead us unto Christ, but drags towards these [food, meats]. For it is a strong and brutal passion, and makes us slaves, and puts us upon ministering to the belly.’” [15]

A very important point is being made here: Overeating and filling the belly (the seat of the passions) is not a sign of freedom, but of slavery and servitude.

 “If a voice whispers to you to eat a lot—to eat your fill—and you do eat and eat,” warns St Silouan, “again a devil will have assumed power over you.” [16] St Dimitru Staniloae (quoting St Neilos the Ascetic) writes that “the stomach, by gluttony, becomes a sea impossible to fill—a good description of any passion.” [17] He goes on to teach that the unlimited thirst of the passions turn human nature toward the finite, which can never fill or satisfy our nature's thirst for the infinite.

“The spirit [of man] has no exact limits and is capable of being filled with the infinite and thirsts to receive it; yet instead of looking for the relationship with the infinite Spirit, it seeks to fill itself with finite and passing objects. So it is left with nothing and its thirst is never quenched.” [18]

References

  1. Benelam, Bridget. "Satiation, satiety and their effects on eating behaviour." Nutrition Bulletin 34, no. 2 (2009): 126-173. Garutti, Mattia, Marianna Sirico, Claudia Noto, Lorenzo Foffano, Mark Hopkins, and Fabio Puglisi. "Hallmarks of appetite: a comprehensive review of hunger, appetite, satiation, and satiety." Current Obesity Reports 14, no. 1 (2025): 12.
  2. Brookes, Simon JH, Nick J. Spencer, Marcello Costa, and Vladimir P. Zagorodnyuk. "Extrinsic primary afferent signalling in the gut." Nature reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology 10, no. 5 (2013): 286–296.
  3. Page, Amanda J., and Stephen J. Kentish. "Plasticity of gastrointestinal vagal afferent satiety signals." Neurogastroenterology & Motility 29, no. 5 (2017): e12973.
  4. John Chrysostom. “Homily 40” (12), Homilies on Genesis 18–45 in The Fathers of the Church 82, Robert C. Hill, trans. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 395.
  5. Basil the Great. “The Long Rules” (Q.19), in Saint Basil: Ascetical Works, The Fathers of the Church 9, Sister M. Monica Wagner, trans. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1950), 275.
  6. Hengist, Aaron, Russell G. Davies, Jean-Philippe Walhin, Jariya Buniam, Lewis J. James, Peter J. Rogers, Javier T. Gonzalez, and James A. Betts. "Physiological responses to maximal eating in men." British Journal of Nutrition 124, no. 4 (2020): 407-417.
  7. Sophrony (Sakharov). Saint Silouan the Athonite (19), Rosemary Edmonds, trans. (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021), 415-416.
  8. Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes (Homily 3), H.C. Graef, trans. (Florence, AZ: SAGOM Press, 2021), 47–48.
  9. Maximus the Confessor, On the Lord’s Prayer,
    in The Philokalia 2, G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, ed. (Faber and Faber, 1981), 300.
  10. Maximus the Confessor. “Four Hundred Texts on Love” (Second Century, 68), in The Philokalia 2, G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, ed. (Faber and Faber, 1981), 76.
  11. Basil the Great. Homily on the Words “Be Attentive to Yourself” (3), in On the Human Condition, Popular Patristics Series 30, N.V. Harrison, trans. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 97.
  12. Seraphim of Sarov, Little Russian Philokalia, Vol 1 (LINK)
  13. Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies (Homily 6), in The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian 2, (Boston, MA: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2024), 170.
  14. Isaac the Syrian, The Ascetical Homilies (Homily 4), 146, 150.
  15. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians (17.1), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church 12 (First Series), Philip Schaff, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1956), 96.
  16. Silouan the Athonite. St Silouan the Athonite  (Part 2, 17) by Archimandrite Sophrony, Rosemary Edmonds, trans. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 446.
  17. Dumitru Staniloae. Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar (Part 1.7), Archimandrite Jerome (Newville) and Otilia Kloos, trans. (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2003), 77.
  18. Dumitru Staniloae. Orthodox Spirituality (Part 1.7), 79.