Hunger Games: To eat or not to eat, that is the question

Evanston RoundTable, July 11, 2024

Eating is one of the most personal things we do. “You are what you eat” is more than just an empty slogan: What goes in determines what comes out, both in mind and spirit as well as body.

Thus it’s with some hesitation that I “weigh in” with advice on eating. After all, every person is different, every body type is different and every appetite is different.

Further, I’m no expert, and most unsolicited diet advice is either trite, over-hyped or just plain wrong.

So I’ll stick to explaining the simple system that works (most of the time) for me.

Childhood chub

At 5’6” and 154 pounds, I’m reasonably trim. But at age 13, I was more than chubby: By today’s standards, I was obese. (Obesity is defined as having a body mass index greater than 30. According to the World Health Organization, “In 2019, an estimated 5 million noncommunicable disease deaths were caused by higher-than-optimal BMI.”)

I blame my bad childhood eating habits on my father. His dictum to eat everything on our plates, down to the last crumb – and mid-1950s plates, at least in our house, were piled high and wide with mounds of red meat and gravy-laden mashed potatoes followed by a huge serving of pie with ice cream or some other high-carb dessert – was disastrous. It didn’t take long for me to equate over-eating with parental approval and affection. No wonder I was 30 pounds heavier in 1959 than I am today. It took me decades to shed those 30 pounds – and find a better way to determine when and how much to eat.

That way, simply put, is to follow my hunger. Hunger, after all, is the body’s natural signal to eat. The solution (at least for me) has been simple: I try to eat only when I’m hungry.

Duh, you might say. Sure it sounds overly simple. But most folks I know tend to eat by the clock, at designated mealtimes, regardless of hunger: breakfast in the morning, lunch at noon, dinner at 6. Whether one is hungry or not is beside the point.

In fact, hunger is the point. To help me discern how truly hungry I am, I’ve devised a simple three-level system:

Level 1: I’m not hungry.

Level 2: I’m sort of hungry

Level 3: I’m very hungry

Obviously, it’s best to wait for Level 3 to eat.

Pushing breakfast back

This might be a useful corollary to Michael Pollan’s famous guideline in his book In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” To which I would emphatically add: “And only when hungry.”

Following this program over the last several years, I’ve discovered to my surprise that, after seven decades of enjoying breakfast between 7 and 8 a.m., I now have no trouble waiting for full-on Level 3 hunger to arrive hours later before I break the overnight fast. Sometimes that’s not till 10 or 11. Sometimes when I’m busy, I forget to eat at all!

When I wait for empty-stomach hunger, I find I enjoy eating much more than rigid by-the-clock eating. Food tastes better when you’re famished!

There are some downsides and shortfalls to this system, of course. Sometimes I backslide, eating a full meal when I’m not especially hungry because I choose to be sociable and eat with others. The other night, I scarfed down a full dinner well past satiety, even though I was barely at Stage 2. At bedtime, I felt like I had swallowed a medicine ball.

And eating when one is really hungry risks over-eating. It’s hard to push back the plate before you’re stuffed.

Another problem is timing: If I have a late breakfast, I’ll want to snack mid-afternoon to satisfy hunger cravings, and that can interfere with sitting down to eat with my wife at a reasonable dinner hour.

Trickiest of all is a kind of Level 2½, when I’m not really hungry now but I’m tempted to eat anyway, knowing I may be unable to eat later due to a schedule conflict or other issue.

Pre-emptive eating

To those tempted to eat pre-emptively at 2½, I recommend “urge surfing,” which amounts to simply holding off until the urge to eat (or indulge in any bad habit) subsides.

If one must eat, I enjoy having a small and healthy snack like an apple, which is enormously filling and has the added benefit of being almost 90% water, and thus is an excellent way to hydrate, which is especially important in the warm-weather months.

There are, of course, other ways to eat healthy, such as having small portions and nutritious snacks. Chew your food carefully and slowly (which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a health fad called Fletcherism.) Keep fatty, sugary and other unhealthy foods out of the house. Exercise daily. Stay busy.

All good. But No. 1 in my book is follow your hunger. Our bodies know best.