Patron Saints to Help You Improve Your Exercise and Eating Habits

We've been looking at how exercise, along with a health diet, can improve our work. It should come as no surprise that our Catholic tradition has identified various patron saints in this area to whom we can turn to help us in our efforts to get exercise, eat better, and thereby get more physically fit. Let's start with patron saints to help us eat a healthy diet.

You can do your own search to find many patron saints related to food, purveyors of various kinds of food, food servers, etc. Here's just a quick list:

• St. Lawrence, patron of cooks
• St. Martha, patron of cooks, wait staff, housewives
• St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Honore, patron saints of bakers and pastry chefs
• St. John, St. Bartholomew, St. Andres, St. Anthony of Egypt, all patron saints of butchers - Why so many for butchers? I don't know. You could say it argues against begin a vegan, but I won't go there. Then again, if you happen to be so inclined, there's always...
• St. Nicholas of Tolentino, unofficially patron saint of vegans, because he made a vow never to eat meat.
• St. Drogo, patron of coffee and coffee makers (and who doesn't appreciate the health benefits of a good cup of coffee?)

And, of course, what good diet doesn't include a glass or two of beer or wine?

• St. Nicholas, St. Luke, St. Augustine, patron saints of beer
• St. Vincent, St. Urban, patron saints of wine

I couldn't find any patron saints of any of the harder liquors (whiskey, vodka, gin, etc.), but, as you probably know, dating back to their beginning, monasteries have specialized in various liqueurs, Benedictine and Chartreuse being perhaps the most famous. But there are many more. That makes St. Benedict a patron in this area, I suppose.

As for exercise, try these two:

• St. Raphael, patron saint of healing. Remember he healed Tobias's blindness. If you're in really bad shape, maybe you start with St. Raphael, since your exercise will be a kind of healing.
• St. Sebastian, patron or athletes and soldiers. You can read about how he was shot through with arrows but recovered.
• St. Hyacinth, patron of weightlifters - designated so because of his unusual strength. He was a monk. Monks were called upon to defend their monasteries at times, and some of them were pretty - excuse the language - bad-ass. St. Hyacinth falls into that category.

With the internet, you can probably ferret out more patrons with a little effort, but these should get you started with picking a saint or two to intercede for you in your endeavor to get physically fit. We Catholics have a long history of calling on saints to intercede for us and there's no reason to skip over, or skimp when it comes to getting our temples of the Holy Spirit in proper shape.

Let's finish up by tying everything we've been discussing together with this from Church Militant Field Manual - Special Forces Training for the Life in Christ by Father Richard M. Heilman:

We have a tendency to disconnect the pieces of our life - work, exercise, prayer - but it is usually true that if we are flabby, our faith tends to be flabby. God has a real purpose for our lives, and it certainly is not true that God wills that it be hindered by frequent illnesses and fatigue.

Our "will" is that spiritual power of the soul by which we choose to do something. While fasting and abstinence are traditional forms of mortification of the flesh, why not add the challenge of a fitness regimen as an excellent way to, as we say in the Catholic world, "offer it up"? Certainly the discipline of diet and exercise will accomplish the goals of mortification, which is to die to the control worldly desires have over our lives. This is the true goal when we talk about "loving the Lord your God with all your strength."

That does sum it up rather neatly, don't you think. Now, time to work out!