How St. Augustine Can Help YOU Lose Weight

Feast Day: August 28

I want to introduce you to a saint who understood emotional eating long before anyone had a word for it. And he is on my mind so much lately. Not only did we just celebrate his feast day, but I am gong through St. Michael's Lent with Augustine's Confessions book on Hallow. A must-get app in my opinion.

St. Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a small town in North Africa, and he spent the first thirty-odd years of his life doing exactly what he knew he shouldn't. He was brilliant — a professor of rhetoric who taught in Carthage, Rome, and Milan. He was also restless in a way that no amount of success ever settled. He chased ideas, he chased pleasure, he fathered a son outside of marriage, and he spent nearly a decade in a religious movement he eventually admitted he never really believed. His mother, St. Monica, prayed for his conversion for seventeen years. Seventeen. If you have ever prayed for something so long that you started to feel foolish about it, Monica is your girl, and Augustine is the proof that the prayer wasn't wasted.

Here is the part I can't stop thinking about. In his Confessions, Augustine writes about a night in his teens when he and some friends stripped a neighbor's pear tree bare. They weren't hungry. He says so plainly — the pears weren't even particularly good, and they threw most of them to the pigs. He stole them because they were forbidden, because taking them felt like something, because there was a hole in him and the stealing filled it for about four minutes. Decades later, as a bishop, he was still turning that night over in his mind, trying to understand why a person reaches for what they don't need and doesn't want. He never fully explained it. He just named it, honestly, and brought it to God.

He also gave us the most self-aware prayer in the history of the Church. Before his conversion, he prayed to be made chaste, and then added, but not yet.

He wanted to be free and he wanted to keep the thing that was holding him. Both, at the same time, in the same heart.

Why Augustine Meets You in the Kitchen at 9 PM

Because you already know all of it, don't you.

You know the food isn't the problem. You know you weren't hungry when you opened the pantry after the phone call with your mother, or after the doctor's appointment, or after a Tuesday that was simply too long. You know the crackers didn't taste great, and you ate them anyway, standing up, barely looking at them. And you know that ten minutes later the ache that sent you in there was still sitting exactly where it was, only now it had shame parked next to it.

Augustine knows that ache. He named it in one of the most quoted lines ever written: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Not "our hearts are broken." Not "our hearts are bad." Restless. Looking for a resting place and settling for whatever is closest.

And he knows the other thing too — the not yet. The part of you that genuinely wants to be free and also, quietly, would like to keep the 9 PM ritual, because it's the only twenty minutes of the day that belongs to you. That's not weakness, ladies. That's being a human being with a heart big enough to want two things at once. Augustine was a Doctor of the Church and he could not untangle it on his own either.

What finally moved him wasn't willpower. It was grace, and a mother who kept praying, and a moment when he stopped negotiating and let God have the whole thing.

How to Pause & Pivot with St. Augustine

The next time you find yourself in front of the open refrigerator without quite remembering the walk there, try this.

Pause. Shut the door. Put both hands on the counter. Don't analyze, don't lecture yourself, don't start a whole investigation into your childhood. Just stop moving for the length of three slow breaths.

Name the restlessness. Augustine's whole gift was honesty. So ask his question, not the diet question. Not how many calories is this — instead, "What am I actually hungry for right now?" Rest. Comfort. Company. To be told it's going to be okay. To not be needed by anyone for ten consecutive minutes. Name it out loud if you're alone. Naming it is half the battle, and it is the half nobody teaches you.

Pivot to prayer. Say it exactly as it is, out loud, in your own kitchen: "Lord, my heart is restless. Let it rest in You." You are allowed to add the honest part — and I still want the crackers. Augustine would respect that enormously. God is not surprised by the not yet. He has heard it before, from a saint.

Ask Augustine to pray with you. St. Augustine, you know what it is to want the wrong thing and the right thing at the same time. Pray for me now.

Then pivot your body. Restlessness lives in the body, so give the body somewhere to go. Fill a glass of water and drink the whole thing. Walk out to the mailbox. Put on one worship song and put away three dishes. Call the friend you keep meaning to call. Small, physical, ordinary — the pivot doesn't have to be impressive, it just has to be something else.

If you eat the crackers anyway, you have not failed. Augustine took seventeen years and a whole book to get where he was going, and the Church made him a Doctor. What matters is that you paused long enough to be honest, and you turned toward God in the middle of it instead of after. Do that a hundred times and it stops being a crisis and starts being a habit.

You are not a project to be fixed. You are a beloved daughter of God learning to steward an irreplaceable gift.

Sources: St. Augustine, Confessions (Books II, VIII, and X) for the pear tree, the prayer for chastity, and the restless-heart passage; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (University of California Press) for biographical detail on Thagaste, Carthage, Milan, and Monica's years of prayer; Roman Martyrology for the August 28 feast day.