At this moment, I'm munching bit by bit on sunflower seeds (pre-shelled, roasted, salted). Why am I doing this? Is it out of genuine hunger, or something else?

The following musings are motivated in part by gaijin's recent comments about his eating habits. I've also been following with great interest Michael Plank's ongoing experiment with paleolithic dieting and exercise patterns. Gaijin writes:

The secret to not being fat consists of two very simple rules: Don't eat unless you're hungry and only eat until you are sated.

He then goes on to elaborate, suggesting that most of us have been conditioned to eat until we are full, which by itself causes us all sorts of problems if we do it all the time, in addition to the issue of what we are eating.

Before I proceed into my own personal experiences, I'll add this: We Americans, at least from the middle class on up, have scarcely any idea what hunger even is. At all. This may be a blessing, or it may be a curse. Regardless, it is our lot.

On various occassions, I have tried gaijin's philosophy of only eating when I am hungry. Typically, this occurs when I actually become aware enough of my body's signals to know whether I am hungry or not, which often seems to happen when I get a moderate (but not excessive) amount of aerobic exercise.

The result, at least in the short term (spanning days), is that I have surprised myself with how little I actually eat, and/or if there's anybody else around who's paying attention to my eating patterns, they might start to get a little freaked out. One bagel and perhaps an apple during each 24-hour period have carried me many days in a row at times (and that's with the physical activity of exercise). Longer term? Unknown, because I don't think I've ever really carried it on consistently for more than a week.

It doesn't end because of what I would classify as real hunger, but typically because somebody has either cooked a big meal, or I find myself at a restaurant with other people, and, well... When you're in the presence of food, especially good food, even if you're not truly hungry, it's very hard not to eat, for many reasons.

Then, something funny happens. A few hours after I've eaten a bunch of food that my body really wasn't asking for in the first place, I start to get cravings for more. (Cravings can easily be misclassified as "hunger", but they are not truly the same thing.) At this point, I either follow my cravings right away and eat again by myself in the absence of any external pressure, or if I don't, someone or something (a parent, a friend, or simply the clock telling me it's supper time) will come along with another little nudge, which will be more than enough to return me to the pattern of always eating far ahead of any true hunger signals, numbing and obscuring my fleeting awareness of what type of nourishment (if any) my body wants or needs. Back to "normal" again.

Though I wouldn't classify myself as obese, I do think I have more fat around the waistline than would be optimal. (In both the sense of what would "feel" best, and in terms of attractiveness.) I loathe the notion of "dieting", at least in the way our culture tends to conceive of it -- heavy doses of self-hatred, guilt, and adding up calories on the back of packages. Given the choice between the "dieter" mentality, and eating up at McDonald's, I'll take the McDonald's any day, complete with a thousand cow parts, fatness, and strange sicknesses. But this, of course, is a false dichotomy.

Today, I ate:

• Nothing in the morning. I had, however, already snacked fairly heavily late last night on peanuts, sunflower seeds, wasabi peas, and other goodies obtained obtained from the yum store, so my stomach was far from empty.
• Around noon, a piece of leftover breakfast pizza at work. It's the best stuff they make, crammed full of deliciously evil goodies as mentioned in a previous post. I could have had two pieces, but decided one was enough. (And no, it was not from hunger. If I had listened to that, I wouldn't have eaten any. But my taste buds / craving would have preferred to keep eating until my stomach actively rejected anything further, so I compromised between them.)
• Several more handfuls of nuts and seeds after work. Again, not hunger. In fact, I was still more than sated from the pizza. But when I sat down at the computer, and they were just sitting there next to it, the urge to eat just a few became overwhelming. Then a few more.
• On the way to the movie, we stopped at Taco Bell. Two tacos from there. Nothing to do with hunger, but a desire to particpate, plus it had been a good number of months since I had those tacos. They tasted good again. (#include <tacobellisevil.h>)
• A few more nuts and seeds before I began typing this. Guess why.

All of these instances were successful in that I avoided eating until I was full, in the gaijin-described sense. I was never, however, hungry at any point during all this.

The other little component to all this is that food, healthy style or not, is altogether too easy to use as a would-be placeholder for other areas in life which lack fulfillment. The dirty little not-so-secret is that it can work to ward off ailments of a mental or emotional nature pretty damn well a lot of the time. It's not just fuel; it's comfort, satisfaction, feeling good.

As to whether it's the best remedy, the "right" answer that we "should" give is obvious: Of course not! You should go to the true source of the problem to solve it, not dodge it with food.

Right. I'll make a quick call to the Garden of Eden and get back to you. I'm sure if we talk to someone there, they'll be able to clear this up by tomorrow.

Bah. Up too late again. At least I don't have another early shift tomorrow. Still, some sleep would be advisable. (And let's not even start on the one about listening to the body's true signals with regard to sleep patterns. In the context of this civilization, there are so many factors screwing with our somatic impulses that it makes the food situation look like a piece of cake. Bad pun. Enough. I'm done with this.)