Hunger ... for the overfed

I’m fortunate that I've never confronted Hunger – the gnawing lack of sustenance and the fear of not knowing when the next meal will be. That's convinced me that I should at least understand what it means to be a bit hungry – and why this can be a good thing.

Modern society has taught us that we should respond to any rumbling of the stomach by rushing to shove something in our mouths. This is the backbone of office snacking. Strolling over to the office coffee maker for another cup, stopping by the vending machine with the fake-me-out healthy snacks. Or walking down to the convenience store to grab a Coke and some chips while chatting with coworkers. It provides an immediate change of environment and often a jolt to our system that can shake us out of the doldrums.

This has made us not only more likely to be overweight and diabetic, it has also made us lose a simple biological rhythm that involves us sometimes feeling a little hungry. Being constantly surrounded by food has made us forget how to interpret signals that come from the body and the brain. It was strange for me, after having the newsroom snacking culture so well ingrained into my routine, to remember how different it was in highschool.

Back then we were not (fortunately) allowed to snack in class or much less leave class for a quick trip to the corner hotdog vender. I’d sit in Spanish class doubled over from hunger cramps at around 11:15, counting the minutes until 12:30 when I could tear into my lunch. Those were moments when I felt like I could have eaten an entire lasagna, and probably would have. By 11:30 or so I was no longer really pay attention to it, and by the time the bell rang I had forgotten about being hungry.

I’ve had afternoons when I’ve eaten two slices of cake, a couples pieces of a sandwich, and an orange at 4: 30, only to sit down to eat a full dinner at 7:30 as if I’d not had a crumb since noon. It’s not surprising that I end up feeling queasy and have trouble sleeping on those days. It’s easy to forget that snacking is in fact eating, just like any other time we put food in our mouths, chew, and swallow. But we’re less likely to forget to eat dinner, even if we’ve had its caloric equivalent in snacks only a few hours before.

Exercise is obviously part of striking the right balance when it comes to hunger. But the funny thing about it is that exercising not only makes us hungrier, it makes us feel like we deserve to eat more, which we generally do. I find as soon as I get back from a run I end up munching absent-mindedly about whatever happens to be in front of me. I get this weird buzzing in my head, a psychological fuzz that drags me in the direction of food without my even being conscious of it. I do eat more when I exercise because I need to, but I also try to be aware that it should be more balancing act than an all-you-can-eat gorging.

Of course, the fact that we eat too much is widely studied and understood, but what’s less discussed is that we eat too fast. These two things are not unrelated.

Some combination of our hectic schedules, culture of fast-food and the rise of dinner in front of the TV has left us shoveling food into our mouths with no regard to the quantity and no real perception of the quality. The stomach can’t digest as well when we eat this way, and can’t make as efficient use of the food.

Noticing this I made a conscious effort to slow down when eating and to really think about the food as I was chewing and swallowing. It won’t surprise you to learn that you can actually enjoy the food more that way because you actually stop to taste it. What did surprise me is that I really felt more full when I ate slower, so I ended up eating less. I remember once my wife and I picked up sandwiches for us and two friends. They each ate one in the same time that Isa and I ate half. We ate half as much as they did and we were fine – possibly because we were more focused on the fact that all four of us had spent the afternoon eating chocolate and Brazilian cheese bread.

When I was a kid people made frequent reference to the biological curiosity of how fish eat themselves to death, something that would pop up in the iconic 1980s Gary Larsen Far Side comics. Twenty years later it’s hard to avoid hearing about how people are doing the same thing. Maybe we could avoid the fate of our piscine brethren by thinking a bit more about what it means to eat – and to be hungry.