Not eating is an acquired pleasure like drinking coffee. Just like when you first drank a cup of coffee you thought it was bitter but after a while you acquired a taste for it. Well, not eating is a similar acquired taste or feeling rather. All tastes and sensations are feelings, many that we learned to like and dislike. Learning to like the sensation of having nothing in your belly can be a great feeling when you go about it in a way that brings maximum pleasure. It may be hard at first until your stomach shrinks a little then you become quite comfortable with the feeling you get from not having to shove food in all the time.
Another analogy of learning to like something that feels strange at first is working out. Like jogging or lifting weights, the pleasure derived from the excursion is all worth the hard work. Working at a job that takes skill is tough until you have mastered the skill. The same with a challenging subject matter in school, the pleasure derived from pursuing the knowledge outweighs any pain in the effort to attain the goal. All these things I have mentioned come about because doing them brings about greater pleasure than not doing them. And learning how to eat brings about greater pleasure than not knowing how to eat.
Some people might say that by trying to eat healthy you will take all the pleasure out of eating. Well I would have to say to them there are much greater pleasures than eating and sometimes eating too much of the wrong foods at the wrong times can be painful. For example when you are driving long distance and you load up on a lot of greasy heavy fast food you end up fighting off sleep for the next four hours making the trip lousy. Those same people might say that if you eat less your metabolism will slow down and you won’t lose weight anyhow. I would say to them that if you have the time, break your meals into smaller portions and eat more often. What I do for example, is cut a bagel in half put some peanut butter and honey on it and eat the other half later in the morning. The same with a cup of yogurt I will eat half in the morning with grains then the other half later in the day. You’ll be surprised how cutting the size of your portions prevents you from stretching your stomach and it doesn’t take much to fill it after all. And your desire for food will be less. Remember, however, to eat food that is nutritious and filling in the proper portions, and you should never be hungry. I don’t think anybody can lose weight successfully and keep the weight off by starving themselves. If you eat the right foods, and take a passionate interest in anything besides food nobody should have any trouble taking and keeping the weight off. I’ll say it again. There are much greater pleasures out there besides eating. Your job is to find something out there in life that is so interesting that you will forget your belly. Just remember that the things that give us the greatest pleasure can also give us the greatest pain. Learning the right balance of these can empower us over our misery. When we learn about these things and ourselves then we can control the pleasure and eliminate the pain. People may complain to me, how can you worry so much about food and what you eat? You should just do whatever feels good and makes you happy. Then I would have to say to them, that is exactly what small children do. I’m not saying that I have all the answers but you have to simplify at some time in your life to pursue whatever it is that might make you happy. Starting with a simple diet will free yourself up to pursue the infinite possibility of things out there that might make you happy. If somebody asked me what those things might be I would have to say that there are three criteria for the pursuit of happiness. We need to be challenged that’s why sports exist. A job that involves a lot of varied tasks is good . And a job that involves both thinking and muscle is great. Some of my best work experiences involved working on my house or somebody else’s house. The skills you learn can be used over again many times.
The five years I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity were some of the most enjoyable and valuable. I’ve been on worksites with twenty unskilled people and one skilled individual. We still got a lot of work done. Sometimes we learned as we went along. Those who knew something taught those who did not. From this experience I learned to put siding on a house, frame the wooden shell of a new house, wire light fixtures, install a bathtub, hang a screen door, shingle a roof, drop a ceiling and hang cabinets. And all along I worried little about my belly. Many times I just ate a cup of yogurt with grains and skipped the group feeding. However once when asked what I wanted for lunch, Phil Peters, one of the people who organized these workgroup outing’s said, “if it does not craw off the plate you’ll eat it”, when I responded to his question of what I wanted to eat? I said, if you buy it, I’ll eat it. If you have never built a house I must say that this is the right task for forgetting about eating. Many times I worked straight through lunch. Thus learning to nurture activity that helps me forget food completely. And believe me, when you finally get around to eating, it tastes so good. The saying that I heard many times on these work outings was “Work hard play hard is a good rule of thumb.”
So to recap here are some reasons to nurture a good hunger: an empty stomach can feel good, put the fork down and pursue other pleasures that do not include eating, forget spectator sports and participate in something. For instance, rotate the tires on your car. The leaner you are the better you will move. Your gut won’t get in the way when you are bending over. The leaner you are the easier it will be to crawl around in the attic and put the insulation down and help keep those utility bills down. Remember the more house maintenance you do the less time you will have to sit in front of the boob tube and eat. When you slim down you might get that sex appeal back. I’ve seen some sexy mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers. Sex is one of the pleasures that might be better than a bowl of linguine! When we are not eating all the time, we really appreciate the food. Mark Twain said that the best gravy is a good hunger.
My own personal favorite is when I go to the beach I make it a point to sun my stomach. Yeah it sounds crazy but I can bake that initial false hunger right out of my thoughts. I concentrate the suns rays directly onto my stomach. Try it, it works. Another thing you can do when you think you are hungry at the beach or pool is get in the water. As soon as you get wet, the hunger you thought you had will be long gone. Most hunger is a state of mind, so keep out of that way of thinking. Get used to going a long time without food. This type of behavior will then become more pleasurable than eating in many ways. A lot of the time I know I mindlessly have eaten for no good reason, I was not really hungry. Most of the time this would occur when I was being a spectator. So my belief is the more we spectate the fatter we get. Do something active when you go to a picnic get away from the keg for a while and play volleyball, softball, horseshoes or whatever. I make it a point to move my ass every day. And when I do, everything goes better throughout the day. The food tastes better. Social interactions are more positive. I get a better grip on my emotions.
I know the workplace is tough when it comes to eating. Sometimes there is stress that makes us want to eat and everybody eats at the same time in a lot of jobs. Also in many jobs this is the only pleasure in the whole day of work. What I recommend for the workplace is to be prepared and bring a lunch. Stock up on the new protein bars that they have come out with. I personally like the Carb Solutions bar. There are a million of them out there ask around and find some that you like. Most of them are fortified with vitamins and that is good. I keep dried fruit like prunes and apricots in my locker at work. I also have a container of freshly ground peanut butter to eat if I need a food fix. I stay away from the commercial brands of peanut butter because they add unhealthy fats and sugar to their product. I keep some ostrich meat sticks and Rolands sardines packed in olive oil. These taste great on an Italian hoagie bun with hot peppers.
I try to nurture the social aspects that exist in most jobs. Humor is a great hunger suppressor. One time right after lunch I took a nap in the office with my ear protection on. It’s noisy because of the machinery where I work. I wear these big earmuffs that keeps most of the sound out. Anyhow, a couple guys set off a roll of firecrackers under my chair and I did not hear a thing but I woke up to the smell of gunpowder. It was not too funny at the time but I got a pretty good laugh out of it later on. Of course I retaliated later on but I won’t get into that because this isn’t a book of humor, at least not yet. The point I want to make and this is important, conversation is a need just like food. So if there are people at work with whom you can nurture good conversation, do so now. Of course there will be people who you cannot relate to and they may even cause you to want to eat as a source of stress. I suggest that you ignore these people. I always try to remind myself about the psychological aspects of eating. That is why there are so many commercials on T.V. and billboards pushing food. If you keep the stimulus out of the picture (food) then the response does not need to follow (eating).
I recently ran into a guy, a friend of mine who has lost 75 pounds in the last year. He went from 300 pounds to 225 by eating a lot of salads in the beginning of his diet and then switching to eating only one meal a day, dinner in the evening. His regime consists of a couple cups of coffee in the morning working 8 hours as an electrician, skipping lunch and then walking briskly for two hours in the evening either before or after whatever he wants to eat for dinner. I think eating only once a day would be extreme for most people but this works for him. I did not ask him but I’ll bet he does not have any trouble sleeping with such a busy schedule. I saw him recently at a picnic and he looks like a totally different person. And he had come to the same conclusion about his present life that I have often thought about while working out. The pleasure that is derived by exercising and taking control of our lives seems to actually slow down time or make us the masters of our own time. We are actually overseeing the chemical processes in our brains that make us happy and cause us to feel good. Another aspect of controlling time is the fact that you are actually turning the clock back by the way you will physically look. And the improved health aspects like cleaning out the body and mind. Many times people who haven’t exercised in a while are surprised how good it feels to sweat again and I do believe sweating is a cleansing process. So by working out we find a community of like minded individuals who we will find while we are out running or walking or working out in the gym. Even if we choose to exercise in the solitude of our basements we will find a union with other individuals who choose to work out alone. I have had an ongoing discussion with a couple of guys at work who lift in their basements and one even welds together his own lifting machines. Just like farmers talk about farming, we talk about all the aspects of lifting.
Another thing about life in general and eating in particular are the habits that we go through every day without even giving them much thought. Where the concept that we should eat three big meals a day is really kind of crazy in these modern times. Many people I know skip breakfast and when you combine the time sleeping the night before until lunch, this turns into a fairly long period without food. When you count the time that you have gone without food after skipping breakfast, depending on the time you last ate before you went to bed, you can comfortably go 18 hours without food. This amount of time qualifies as a pretty decent fast. Say you eat dinner around 6:oo p.m. and then go to bed at midnight, skip breakfast and eat lunch around noon. Depending what kind of work you are doing this can be easily achieved if you work in front of a computer all day. I myself do this a lot with the exception of a few light beers in the evening before bed sometimes.
I broke away from the conventional three meals a day routine as soon as I left high school. Because the life I was living did not leave much opportunity for that kind of lifestyle. I went to a community college and worked full time as a security guard for three years and was always eating on the run and sleeping less and less. I even read a book around this time that proclaimed that sleep was unnecessary and I experimented with this idea. I even lived by a theory back then that I could just sleep every other night. What I got out of this time was that I was slowly becoming addicted to pushing myself more and more. The same thing that I think motivates all workaholics and myself at the time was the feeling you get when you push yourself harder and harder. This feeling might be the same thing when they say, “It’s like beating your head off the wall it feels good when you stop.”
I think this kind of behavior might be a result of people who are in the wrong profession. For instance, somebody might be too smart for the job they are in, and always angry at the others around them for their lack of productivity. So they might work another job or even start a side business to forget the anger they feel in the job they have chosen.
Somebody at this point might be wondering what this has to do with eating and I would have to say everything! The work or lifestyle we choose will dictate our behavior for at least 40 hours of the week. The circumstances that we put ourselves into earn a living will determine many other aspects of our behavior.
Right after I left the community college I went to a school believe it or not called California State College, 50 miles south of Pittsburgh. I only went there for one semester but I realized my defiance of living and eating like the rest of the students. I never got a dorm room because I still went home every weekend to work. So I ended up sleeping in the dorm’s lobby or in the basement of the library. I guess I was frugal with not paying for room and board because the tuition was a lot more than the community college. I guess I never felt that confident in my academic ability. This led to a pretty interesting eating situation also. Since I did not have a meal plan to eat at the dorm cafeteria, I had to fend for myself in the town of California, Pennsylvania. This actually was not so bad because there was a deli that had pretty good lentil soup and sandwiches. The cafeteria food actually was not too bad because I did eat there occasionally, where I paid at the door. Everybody who ate there all the time bitched about it because they had a meal plan and were obligated to eat there all the time. I think the reason they bitched was not that the food was so bad but they were eating when they weren’t hungry and this led them to hate the whole experience around the cafeteria. They were paying for their meal plan so they felt they had to get their money’s worth. Also the cafeteria had a policy of unlimited portions and seconds for whoever wanted them. So if you pigged out on breakfast who wants lunch? Anyhow I’m not saying I was any better off because I went hungry a lot. Sometimes I even snuck into the cafeteria through the exit to get even for paying the big tuition. But since I ate infrequently I never complained about the food wherever it came from. Before I get off this subject I just want to mention that there was another individual who was also living on the fringe of college life and he did not get invited to any frat parties. His name was Sid and he lived in an abandoned shack alongside the river that meandered next to the college. He was from New York and he was kind of a hippie. I guess he was kind of an outlaw geek because he got accused of stealing some of the audiovisual equipment from the school. I just wanted to mention him because he was living on a shoestring budget and he seemed to be having a pretty good time. And he never bitched about food. I don’t know why but I have always been drawn to those outside of the mainstream circle. This may be where real happiness exists. Life on our own terms not on society’s or other people’s ideas, but our own. I think our peak moments in life depend on the right amount of food, sleep, companionship, goals, work, leisure, education, solitude, friends and play. This was my first stint away from home at this school. But I think this is a very important experiment for all people, especially young people getting away from everything and everyone we know and seeing what happens. I am almost certain that people who never get away from their parents end up just like their parents and this results in a limited outlook on life. Being like your parents is not a bad thing but we might be denying ourselves something better if we don’t take a good look around. If we all stayed put, we would be under the illusion that we all have to compete for a limited amount of resources but in reality our resources are only limited by our own lack of experimentation with the world around us. In life you do not have to go away to college to learn how to dislike food. These opportunities exist everywhere. I work with a guy who went on a Caribbean cruise and looked at a whole new part of the world and the only thing that he could talk about was how much food he ate. He admitted doing damage to his body. I asked how the snorkeling was down there and he said he did not know because he never got off the ship. I think he was afraid he might miss a meal!