Reply To This Post         Return to Posts Index           VegSource Home

From:	Claudia (conpx06.cms.hhs.gov)
Subject:	Re: 6-Week plan and Snacking ??
Date:	July 31, 2007 at 6:53 am PST

In Reply to: 6-Week plan and Snacking ?? posted by Blue on July 26, 2007 at 7:29 am:

Part of the reason for avoiding snacking, and eating fewer meals is so that you will actually be hungry when it is time to eat, and so that you will not be constantly eating when you aren't even hungry. Ideally, we want to gain the ability to eat when we are hungry, and stop when we are full. When you are truly hungry you enjoy your food more, and it is a signal that your body is truly ready to digest your food. It takes a lot of the body's energy to digest food, and the system needs to rest sometimes, and by constantly eating all the time, the digestive system stays revved up and never gets a rest. It is when the digestive system is at rest that the body's ability to detoxify and heal itself goes into action. This is why people are sometimes able to fast in order to promote self-healing of various ailments.

Believe it or not, when you eat such a perfect diet for a prolonged period of time, you just don't get hungry as often. You can comfortably go without food for longer periods of time, and you do not even experience hunger in the same manner anymore. Once upon a time I used to eat 3 meals plus snacks, but now I only eat twice a day, with no snacks, and I have no problem with this. One of the things I have learned on ETL is that the symptoms that most people associate with hunger are not really "true hunger". I am talking about symptoms such as headaches, shakiness, and a growling stomach. I used to experience all of these things, and used to feel panicked when I was hungry, or even about the possibility of getting hungry. In actuality, these are detox symptoms. When the body is no longer busy with the activity of digesting food, it tries to do some house cleaning and rid itself of toxins (this could be from food or from medications). The discomfort experienced is from the detox, but is experienced as hunger because as soon as a person starts eating again the detox symptoms come to a halt while the body is busy digesting food. Actually, you do not experience "true hunger" every waking moment that you aren't actively digesting food. In other words, it really isn't "normal" to feel like you are hungry and have to eat something every few hours. It might be common in our society, but I do not think it is the optimal state to be in. It is much better to escape from such a bondage to food. The idea of eating frequent meals has become a very popular idea in our society. Partially, I think it is because it plays into peoples food addictions, and partly due to the concept of revving up the metabolism by keeping the digestive system working all the time. People want to speed up their metabolisms so that they can eat more food without gaining weight. Actually, it is not necessarily such a good idea to speed up your metabolism by overworking the body in this way. Its sort of like your body is a machine that will wear out quicker if you overuse it and never allow for any maintenance (i.e. the rest needed for healing and repair).

In terms of longevity, recent studies on primates have shown that given the same number of total daily calories, eating larger meals at longer intervals promotes a longer life span than eating smaller meals at frequent intervals.

Last but not least, one of the dangers of snacking is that for many people, if they eat more frequently, they honestly just plain end up eating more food than if they were to eat less frequently.

Okay, so now you can see where the whole no snacking thing comes from. That said, I continued with the snacking for a while on ETL before giving it up, due to my ingrained habits, and my fear of becoming hungry if I didn't eat my regularly scheduled snack. After some time, I simply realized that my behavior had become habitual and no longer really served a purpose. I had become capable of going for longer periods without food, without any discomfort. I now realize that I only need to eat a couple of times a day. They are large satisfying meals, and the simplicity of skipping breakfast and focussing on only two meals really simplifies my life.

The rationale for telling people to eat 3 meals a day is that you really shouldn't experience true hunger more than 3 times a day, and shouldn't need to eat more often than that. As I mentioned before, "true hunger" has nothing to do with those uncomfortable symptoms where you are climbing the walls wanting food and feeling like you are starving to death because you went for more than 4 hours or so without any food. True hunger is experienced in a more relaxed manner. You anticpate how good the food is going to taste because you waited until you were really hungry, and sometimes you might even want to wait longer so that you will enjoy it even more! Physically, you experience a subtle sensation in the throat, sort of like a thirst, for lack of a better comparison. You don't feel it in your stomach at all. You do not feel uncomfortable, sick, or weak, or have a headache, or a horrible growling empty feeling in your stomach driving you nuts.

Reply To This Post         Return to Posts Index           VegSource Home