Lent

I know, Ash Wednesday isn't for another month. However, I'm not actually a Christian so I can run my "Lent" so that it ends on the spring equinox if I want.

I have, however, been reading some Christians in my humanities class, and the focus of my pseudo-Lent is to remove what St. Ignatius of Loyola would call "disordered attachments". As such I'm focusing on three main categories - intoxicants, sugar, and milk - expanded and modified to suit both my own purposes and some of the traditional spirit of Lent.

Intoxicants is primarily targeted at pot. I smoke too much pot and I lean on it too much. So I'm not smoking pot. I'm also excluding alcohol because, although I don't drink very much, it has a similar... draw, shall we say, in terms of its drug effect. Nicotine, though I also rarely smoke tobacco, is implicitly excluded for the same reasons. Either of those could easily replace pot, were I to allow it, and that would defeat the point. I'm also excluding other drugs which do not have the same disordering attractiveness, like psychedelics, because I think general sobriety is a main point of Lent. However, I'm not excluding caffeine because that would be academically irresponsible. One could make a number of arguments that I should, but it's not what I'm choosing to focus on. I think it's okay because it does not have the same potential for abuse. Since I'm excluding sugar and milk, it will not be inordinately a pleasure to seek out, and if you try to abuse coffee like you can with pot or cigarettes, you just feel awful by the end of the day.

Milk specifically includes milk and cheese, and specifically excludes yogurt. I don't know why, but yogurt just doesn't have the same excessive appeal as milk and cheese, and it's a good source of protein and healthy gut flora. Butter doesn't have that much appeal either, but I'm going to exclude it because it's just another really rich thing that I don't need. In the same vein, I'm not eating meat (including fish). I'm still waffling on eggs. On the one hand, it seems in the spirit to go vegan (except for the yogurt). On the other hand, they fall in the same category as yogurt in that I'm not excessively drawn to them and they are nutritious. We're going to eat the eggs that are in our fridge and then make a decision about whether to buy them for the remainder of the time.

Sugar means refined sugar. Naturally occurring sweetness is fine. Honey I will allow. However, crystals of -oses that don't come out of a bee's behind are not allowed. I'm not being a fascist about tracking down every teeny little bit of high fructose corn syrup in who knows what. It's common sense - this isn't a cleanse where if it enters your body it taints, it's a mental purification and disciplinary practice. If it's not obviously sweet and doesn't have a strange draw, I'm not going to worry too much. In this basket, I'm also not eating non-whole grains. No enriched unbleached flour bagels.

Hopefully this will have some beneficial effects on my weight loss, but more so my mind.