Aug 4, 2026 · 8 min · 10 segments
Most Catholics fast twice a year and wonder why the same sin is still sitting there untouched. Fasting isn't a diet or a once-a-year obligation, it's a weapon most of us have never picked up. In this…
The early church fasted twice a week every week, Wednesdays and Fridays, as a baseline rhythm of life.
Somewhere between then and now, fasting got kind of demoted to a once-a-year obligation that you can check off a list, and I think that's a big reason why so many of us can feel spiritually stuck.
We are trying to fight real spiritual battles with a body that's never been trained to say no to anything.
When you feed your body whatever it wants, whenever it wants, you're training your will to fold every single time, and that training doesn't stay contained to food.
It bleeds into everything else, your temper, your purity, your prayer life, your ability to sit in silence for 10 minutes without reaching for your phone.
A body that has never been told no doesn't have the muscle to say no anywhere else.
Every time that you feel hunger pull at you at 3:00 in the afternoon and you don't answer it, you're not just skipping a meal and maybe skipping a few calories.
You are proving to yourself in your body that your appetite doesn't get to run your life, and that proof will carry over.
St. John Vianney lived on a couple of potatoes a day for most of his priesthood, and people thought that he was insane, but he was also the same priest who sat in a confessional 16 hours a day pulling souls out of decades of sin, standing face to face with demonic harassment in his own rectory nightly and never breaking.
He built it the same way that you would build any muscle, repetition, resistance, refusal.
Now, you don't need to live on potatoes, [laughs] but you do need to do something.
The early church fasted twice a week every week, Wednesdays and Fridays, as a baseline rhythm of life.
Somewhere between then and now, fasting got kind of demoted to a once-a-year obligation that you can check off a list, and I think that's a big reason why so many of us can feel spiritually stuck.
We are trying to fight real spiritual battles with a body that's never been trained to say no to anything.
When you feed your body whatever it wants, whenever it wants, you're training your will to fold every single time, and that training doesn't stay contained to food.
It bleeds into everything else, your temper, your purity, your prayer life, your ability to sit in silence for 10 minutes without reaching for your phone.
A body that has never been told no doesn't have the muscle to say no anywhere else.
Every time that you feel hunger pull at you at 3:00 in the afternoon and you don't answer it, you're not just skipping a meal and maybe skipping a few calories.
You are proving to yourself in your body that your appetite doesn't get to run your life, and that proof will carry over.
St. John Vianney lived on a couple of potatoes a day for most of his priesthood, and people thought that he was insane, but he was also the same priest who sat in a confessional 16 hours a day pulling souls out of decades of sin, standing face to face with demonic harassment in his own rectory nightly and never breaking.
He built it the same way that you would build any muscle, repetition, resistance, refusal.
Now, you don't need to live on potatoes, [laughs] but you do need to do something.
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