Why is hunger our enemy? Why are we, as a culture so afraid of the least little hunger pain? The First sign of it: we are running to the corner store for a burrito and an oversized Coca-Cola. That is not completely necessary.
What if we befriended our hunger, embraced it, even learned how to enjoy it. After all, hunger is a prelude to great pleasure, a satisfying meal.
Why are we so afraid of being hungry? Maybe it's because of those ads you see for diet products: "And you never have to go hungry again!" "Lose weight and never, ever feel hungry!" Or maybe it's because once upon a time, when we were mere infants in swaddling clothes, we were left to cry in our cribs while mother watched her soaps. Or maybe in a past life you were a missionary starved to death in a strange and brutal place and then buried barely alive among heathens. Or maybe I'm incredibly over-imaginative and simply just hate feeling deprived.
We eat even when we are not hungry. We've been told to eat often because it keeps the metabolism revving. And that's true. It can be good. But some of us eat just so we don't ever encounter that very first hunger pain, that initial feeling of deprivation. We've become conditioned to stave off hunger, be offended by it, prevent it, kill it before it kills you... We are eating for all the wrong reasons.
Roasted nuts in nap sacks, bruised bananas in backpacks, M&M's in purses, chicken nuggets in baggies. It's sometimes hard to leave the house without our luggage of food products. We carry around bags of "essentials". It may appear we have no place to rest our head at night, but really we are just carrying around snacks for the next 22 hours.
Sometimes we pack a snack on the way to getting a snack. If we don't pack tuna on rye, and five bags of cheesy puffs for the ride to Six Flags, we might just starve. Do we not have faith in the accessibility of food?
Vulnerable and naked is how we can feel without some sort of reliable edibles on our person. This, generally is not a bad thing and can be apart of a healthy way of eating. What we need to do is change our relationship with hunger. The way we FEEL when we think about being hungry. We should know that it is okay to allow ourselves to be a bit hungry and that our worlds will not come to an end because of it. You see, we've made hunger our enemy. And what you resist persists.
Let's shake things up a little. Allow yourself to accept those first signs of hunger and smile knowing that you are on the right track. Your body is doing what it is supposed to do. Let us allow ourselves to feel that hunger knowing that when we do sit down to eat a meal, it will be all the more delicious.
