Hunger
Posted: Tue Nov 18, 2014 2:50 am
As I’ve switched over to the one-and-done, 3 meals a day scheme from the No S Diet, I have experienced something I haven’t for a long time: genuine, mouth salivating, uncomfortable pangs of hunger.
I think my snacking habit was more developed than I thought as previously to beginning the No S Plan I seemed to have got myself used to quickly assuaging any small hint of hunger. I rationalized my behavior by thinking I was on my way to intuitive eating, but what I failed to understand about myself is that my answer to the question “Are you hungry?†is the same answer it would always be for my dog -- “YES!†-- which lead me by a short route from snacking to grazing to gorging all day. Counting calories or points in the absence of any other structure was not working for me. I was overwhelming my diet with snacks, healthy and unhealthy alike.
Over the weekend I was reflecting on some of my posts (on another website) about suffering and thinking about how agonizing hunger feels to me and yet how insane it is that I’m labeling as “agony†a little between-meal hunger in a world where almost 900 million people are literally starving and/or are undernourished every single day. It makes me feel like I’ve lost my mind in a really serious way and I get mad at myself for complaining about a very light self-imposed burden when so many others are in real pain, truly suffering and actually dying out of genuine want and by no choice of their own.
I know it’s not really fair to compare suffering because we all struggle within the framework of our own lives no matter how blessed we look to others, and it is true that you can always find someone better off or worse off than oneself, but sometimes I think I need to see the small sacrifices I am making as exactly what they are: miniscule amounts of discomfort to correct a really big problem – my overeating. I’m very good at turning weight loss and its associated phenomena into an Opera, so sometimes I need to remind myself to get a perspective. As my new favorite author says: your mild feeling of hunger is how a lot of people in the world feel after the best meal of their lives.
Besides which, as I continue to go through each 3-meal day, I am training myself NOT to be hungry between meals because my brain will eventually only associate food with mealtimes and will learn not to beg (too much). Reinhard says the first month is as hard as it gets which, given my new perspective, is not that hard.
No failures yet; I've stayed right on plan since I started. I think I'm getting this (but early days yet).
I think my snacking habit was more developed than I thought as previously to beginning the No S Plan I seemed to have got myself used to quickly assuaging any small hint of hunger. I rationalized my behavior by thinking I was on my way to intuitive eating, but what I failed to understand about myself is that my answer to the question “Are you hungry?†is the same answer it would always be for my dog -- “YES!†-- which lead me by a short route from snacking to grazing to gorging all day. Counting calories or points in the absence of any other structure was not working for me. I was overwhelming my diet with snacks, healthy and unhealthy alike.
Over the weekend I was reflecting on some of my posts (on another website) about suffering and thinking about how agonizing hunger feels to me and yet how insane it is that I’m labeling as “agony†a little between-meal hunger in a world where almost 900 million people are literally starving and/or are undernourished every single day. It makes me feel like I’ve lost my mind in a really serious way and I get mad at myself for complaining about a very light self-imposed burden when so many others are in real pain, truly suffering and actually dying out of genuine want and by no choice of their own.
I know it’s not really fair to compare suffering because we all struggle within the framework of our own lives no matter how blessed we look to others, and it is true that you can always find someone better off or worse off than oneself, but sometimes I think I need to see the small sacrifices I am making as exactly what they are: miniscule amounts of discomfort to correct a really big problem – my overeating. I’m very good at turning weight loss and its associated phenomena into an Opera, so sometimes I need to remind myself to get a perspective. As my new favorite author says: your mild feeling of hunger is how a lot of people in the world feel after the best meal of their lives.
Besides which, as I continue to go through each 3-meal day, I am training myself NOT to be hungry between meals because my brain will eventually only associate food with mealtimes and will learn not to beg (too much). Reinhard says the first month is as hard as it gets which, given my new perspective, is not that hard.
No failures yet; I've stayed right on plan since I started. I think I'm getting this (but early days yet).