Eating when you are hungry

This book has spent a lot of pages on not eating, and I'd like to correct the balance, because the other half of the rule is the more important one. When you're hungry, eat. Eat enough. Eat things you like. Sit down. This chapter is about protecting that, and it's my own view throughout.

The visits and the meals have been in a bad arrangement for years. The visits spoiled the meals, and then the meals got shrunk to make up for the visits, and the shrunk meals produced hunger that turned into more visits. Breaking the circle means fixing the meals as well as the visits, and the meals are the easier half.

Three meals, or whatever number suits your day, at roughly regular times. Eaten until you've had enough, which is not the same as until you're stuffed and not the same as until the plate's clean, but is the point where you're no longer hungry and feel comfortable. Nobody leaves the table hungry to make up for the crackers. If the meals are doing their job, the afternoon hunger from chapter 8 disappears, and what's left at ten to four is the pull, on its own, easy to see.

Include the foods the pull wants. If you love cheese, have cheese with lunch. If crisps are the thing, have them with a sandwich, on a plate, sitting down. A food that's allowed at meals loses most of its charge between them. A food that's forbidden everywhere becomes the thing the pull reaches for first, and chapter 12 explained why. This is the opposite of what diets say, and it's the reason diets keep failing on Wednesday afternoons.

Sit down to eat. Not because of manners but because sitting down turns eating into a meal, which is a thing you can notice and remember, and a meal you remember keeps you fed for longer than one you ate standing up while reading. It's also almost impossible to have a visit sitting down. Visits happen at the counter.

Snacks are fine, if you're hungry. A person who eats lunch at twelve and dinner at eight may well be hungry at four, and the answer is to eat something at four, sitting down, and enjoy it. That isn't a visit. It's a small meal. The difference is hunger, and only hunger.

And enjoy it. The point of all this is not to eat less or to be virtuous. It's to separate two things that got tangled. Food, which is one of the reliable pleasures of a day, and feelings, which need other things. Once they're apart, the food gets better, because you're eating it hungry, sitting down, tasting it. That's a gain, and it's a gain you get from the first properly eaten lunch.