DEPRIVATION

It’s been four years since I’ve eaten pasta.

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If you enjoy a meal with me, you better be ready for me to ask if I can smell what you taste. This is not some passive exercise of casually breathing in from across the table. Oh no. This is full force engagement, me dipping my face to the plate and taking in every seasoning with the rabid appreciation of someone who hasn’t eaten in a very long time.

I eat. Yet it’s surprising how little creativity has emerged in the realm of cooking in all these cancer years. The truth is, my favorite thing in all the world is for someone else to collect the ingredients and assemble a meal that heals.

“Made with love,” have become three of my favorite words strung together, being soulfully aware that nourishment comes as much from the hands of the one preparing as it does from the ingredients themselves.

I’m not certain there is better advice I can impart than this—Never cook when you’re angry.

This is a mantra I’ve lived by since my boys were the ages most likely to exasperate. I was exasperated often in those early mama years. But no matter the circumstance, I refused to allow the state of my spirit to flow through my hands [cooking or otherwise] unless what was flowing was the full intention to nurture and sustain.

Here’s an admission I’m not certain I am prepared to make:
For the first time, the feeling of deprivation arrived upon me this week.

If I have learned anything during this journey it is to challenge my thinking about every big and small thing. No immediate assumptions. No buying into the first thought that comes to mind. The key to living harmoniously with “what is” is to refuse the easy conclusion. The bigger lesson is teaching myself to think again, to see again, to open to the angles often missed.

In this spirit, I am learning to ask a different question:
What does it really mean to be deprived?

I remind myself that I am starving the thing that would starve me.
And I close the pantry on what feeds the story that is counter to a clear mind, a clean body, a long life.

Deprivation, it turns out, is strategy.
The quiet refusal to supply what harms.

It sounds like this:
I do not withhold for punishment but for protection.

This is how I think again when the first conclusion arrives hot and certain:
It’s not that I’m living without,
It’s that I’m choosing who and what gets fed.

I am depriving the uninvited voices of their comforts.
No feast, no welcome, no seat at my table.

It’s a practice of holy scarcity—
I cut off the shallow thinking that makes it easy for trouble to grow.
I stop giving disappointment fresh air.
I refuse to give fear a front-row seat.
I stifle the thinking that gives the cells-that-do-not-belong their rations—
attention, curiosity, anything that helps them build a home from within

This is deprivation re-named: Devotion.
A daily, ordinary liturgy of turning off the tap to what takes,
a pouring out for what gives in return.

When we share a table and I lean in to breathe your meal consider it a prayer. I’m not mourning what I can’t have. I’m honoring what I get to keep.

I’m choosing which hungers get answered.

Deprivation is not a sentence of lack.
It is an opening.
A clearing.
A making-room.

To starve what weakens is to strengthen what holds us up.
To deny the thing that consumes is to nourish the thing that creates.

This is where I ask—
What hungers are you answering?
What receives your daily rations of thought, of energy, of time?
Fear or faith?
Resentment or release?
The noise of comparison,
or the quiet knowing of your own name?

Deprivation, in its truest form, is not the loss of what we can’t have.
It is the space made ready for what we must embrace.
The new thing that calls is born from hunger,
the ache that feels unquenchable is the seed of what is next.

What if we refuse to stock the emptiness, and instead allow ourselves
the privilege of waking into the new day unfilled—
waiting long enough
to develop an appetite
for its offerings.

NOTES:

Even God, in His design of us, stitched this paradox into our very being.
He made the body to need food daily and faithfully,
but He also calls us to fast—
to discover that sustenance comes not only by what we take in,
but by what we withhold.

Fasting is not the deprivation of communion,
but the deepening of it.
the holy reminder that the most essential hunger will always be met.

I am alive because of my willingness to deny myself.
More alive because of the space created in that denial—
a space that has been filled with new ways of seeing the world,
new ways of receiving life.

My mentors like Nasha Winters (The Metabolic Approach to Cancer) remind us that deprivation at the cellular level is not destruction but creation. Cancer cells thrive on easy fuel — sugar, processed foods, chronic stress hormones, cycles of sleeplessness and inflammation. To deprive the body of these inputs is to deprive disease of its feast.

Instead, by shifting the “menu,” we change the terrain in which cells live:

• Lowering glucose and insulin through diet cuts off the primary fuel cancer cells depend on.

• Allowing the body to rest, repair, and detox through fasting or circadian rhythm practices promotes renewal.

• Reducing stress and inflammation deprives malignancy of the signals it uses to grow.

This is the science that undergirds the metaphor. Deprivation is not about going without for its own sake. It is about refusing to feed what harms, and intentionally nourishing what heals — so that, at the most intimate level of our biology and our spirit, life has room to thrive.

Image: It’s impossible to effectively capture an image of me smelling pasta. Don’t think for one minute I didn’t try. After preparing an extravagent spaghetti dinner for my family, this image was the one out of all the others that spoke to what’s been on my heart. Food as nourishment— Simple. Uncomplicated. Sustaining. Sometimes as healing to prepare as it is to ingest.