Her visions are typified as distinctive to high medieval devotionalism and used “familiar teaching techniques such as enumerating twelve glories of the Virgin, five types of confessors, and four ways of receiving the eucharist, made memorable through vivid color symbolism and animal imagery," though marked by the eroticism ingrained in them. Blannbekin’s contemporaries were quick to show contempt for her, and she carried the reputation of being “odd” even when she held respect. In one story, she was derided for compulsively bowing toward a basement window as she walked through town, but regained respectability after a stolen Eucharist was discovered in that said basement; however, occasions like these led to her feeling “wrongly accused and defamed." At the age of seven or eight, Blannbekin began secretly giving her meals to the poor; she would continue performing acts of both charity and self-starvation throughout her life. By the age of ten or eleven, she began craving the sacramental bread. In around 1260, she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis in Vienna, and for the rest of her life she refused to eat meat, claiming the body of Christ was enough meat for her; this led to her joining the legacy of mystics who used food and consumption (or lack thereof) as a vehicle for the soul to express its desire for God, because food was “a central metaphor [and] the most direct way of encountering God.” Caroline Bynum writes:…to eat Christ is to become Christ. The Christ one becomes, in the reception of communion and in the "imitation" of asceticism, is the bleeding and suffering Christ of the cross. The flesh of Jesus—both flesh as body and flesh as food—is at the very center of female piety. And this flesh is simultaneously pleasure and pain.Blannbekin also joined the ranks of spiritual women who often fasted for long periods to induce a “suffering” as an offering to Christ. Gluttony (“the major form of lust”) is sinful in the Christian faith, and as it is the binary opposite of fasting (“the most painful renunciation”), the church is predisposed to indulge fasting as a saintly act—however, this opens a channel for extremism that has been renounced in recent decades. Like saints receiving stigmata, spiritual women who practiced extreme fasting “felt that [their] suffering was service—that it was one with Christ’s suffering and that it therefore substituted for the suffering of others, both their bodily ills and their time in purgatory,” and viewed the physicality of their starvation as their bodies “quite literally [becoming] Christ’s macerated and saving flesh.”