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The history of fasting extends far into the past and is powerfully connected to religious ideas about contamination and rituals of devotion and purification (Douglas 2002). Many groups of people today still fast for religious reasons, but fasting is now also used by people to lose weight. There is, even today, a large body of religious literature on the evils of overeating, which suggests that fasting and weight loss will bring an overweight person back into God’s graces. However, secular materials on fasting and diet also express many of the same ideas about contamination, cleansing, and salvation (or at least health). Ritual fasting remains a feature of Judaism (on Yom Kippur and other fast days), Christianity (during Lent), and Islam (during the days of Ramadan). The Enlightenment transformed fasting into dieting as a means of affecting the material body rather than providing some metaphysical relationship between the godhead and human beings. Fasting itself comes to be seen as a form of dieting.