Hunger

I have been thinking lately about the sensation of being hungry. Really, truly hungry -- not just craving something sweet or salty or simply eating instinctively because it is mealtime and you haven't put food into your body for the four or five hours we usually allow between "meals".

I read this study that Arch Words posted on her site, and realized, wow, many Americans probably have no idea what it feels like to be hungry.

Should we let ourselves experience hunger before we eat? Do we so load ourselves down with such immense, fat and calorie laden meals to the degree that we have deadened all of our natural, metabolic instincts - including the sensation of hunger (which at some point must have been the signal to a person that they were supposed to eat and not simply because it was 1pm and they had an hour long lunch break from their cubicle)?

I have noticed that many blogs serve as weight-loss digests. They are strewn through the blogging community, and many are the output of people (mostly women) wrestling with their eating habits and self-image and trying any number of the thousands, THOUSANDS, of weight-loss programs out there to try and rediscover the body they were meant to have in order to be healthy and happy and to live in their own skin. These blogs are usually extremely candid, often victorious (just read about a woman who had already lost 100 lbs, and the picture digest revealed this amazing transformation - layers being stripped away to reveal this stunning smile and bright shining gaze). Not to say that someone who is overweight cannot have a stunning smile and bright shining gaze. I don't mean to come across as sizeist, or insensitive.

These are all thoughts that I haven't quite worked out. So bear with me.

It just seems to me that so many people hide under so many layers of, well, stuff, and often that takes the form of extra weight.

On the other end of the spectrum from the "victorious" journals are the ones who seem to struggle each day without "success". Women who, on their blogs at least, beat themselves up every night for eating too much of the wrong things and not getting even fifteen minutes of activity in (I read that on someone's blog - her goal was to walk fifteen minutes a day and often she didn't manage to do it, and I counted my blessings again to live in an urban area where it is not possible to make it through a day without walking for at least thirty minutes).

I don't have answers to America's growing obesity problem (no pun intended). But I do think it is a problem. The body was not meant to handle the physical mass that many of us ask it to deal with.

On the flip side - hunger. Too much hunger can also be debilitating. I did a modified fast on Yom Kippur (yes, a fake fast for a fake jew) where I did drink water and some juice twice in the 24-hours. So yeah - it wasn't a real fast. I did it, I guess, just to see where my mind went when stripped of it's defenses and directed towards reflecting on the past year -- thinking about what kind of a person I have been to myself and to the people around me, and to the world itself.

But I hadn't planned for it well, hadn't had a smart pre-fast meal, and also went to work that day. I know what happens in my head when I don't eat for many hours, so I tried to balance out my work for the day so that I wouldn't be dealing with any higher level thinking by the afternoon, when things started to get really tough.

That was actually when I hit a plateau. By the early afternoon, the sensation of hunger had become comfortable somehow. It was as if my body had figured out just how much energy it could expend to get through one minute to the next and it had ceased to put out any more fuel than absolutely necessary.

The feeling brought me back to my first year of college, which followed my year of barely eating. I don't remember as much from that first year but the follow-up year - when I was learning how to eat again - was filled with many afternoons of riding out the sensation of hunger. At the time, it was something of a power play, being able to endure that feeling of hunger - the lightheadedness, the blurry focus - gave me a sense of control that I wasn't getting elsewhere. It was probably something of a high, actually.

My goodness, the things we do to our bodies.

Being transported back to that place, to that time, was not altogether pleasant, but it all feels so distant now that it is like looking in on someone else's life.

Hunger like that is counter productive.

Never allowing ourselves to experience hunger is also unnatural.

How do we strike a balance?