Oct. 4 Dinner

No breakfast
No lunch
Since I ate late last night, I was not interested in food this morning at all, and when lunch time came, I could have eaten, but was still not too interested.  I started feeling hungry around 3 p.m., but at that point decided to wait until dinner, which was at 7 pm.  I was not suffering or anything.



Dinner
By now, readers may be bored.  They have seen it before.  Dinner started with the large bowl of greens (salad and spinach).  A scoop of brown rice on top.  Then a typical salad of beans and raw vegetables.  I also had a Japanese Sweet Potato and almost an punch of walnuts on top.  I added some blueberries and strawberries for sweetness.  It tasted great and I'm very satisfied.  Does this type of eating seem fairly simple?  It is, and the unavoidable consequence of such simplicity is health and good appearance.  Sure, cake, ice cream, chips, soda, hot dogs, etc. seem appealing.  But are they worth the price tag that comes with them.  Not just for your personal health and appearance - but for the common good.  Diabetes and heart disease etc. are going to bankrupt this nation if we do not do something.

Teaser for tomorrow
We are having a guest for dinner tomorrow.  Farley is making her curried Chickpea dish.  Actually, I think it is already in this blog elsewhere.  But it is delicious, and we will get some good pics.

Hunger
When I was fat and sick, the thought of missing breakfast and lunch would have been fearful.  Now it is no big deal.  I have talked a bit about Dr. Fuhrman's topic of toxic hunger in his revised "Eat To Live," and find it a very enlightening discussion.  I like it because it goes beyond the theoretical and has a lot of useful ways in which you can recognize and overcome toxic hunger.

But an interest of mine is seeing how great minds approach the same idea from different angles.  Jeff Novick and Dr. Lisle describe the same idea.  Jeff Novick explained it well in one of his posts in his forum on the McDougall Discussion Board:

In response to some comments.. 1) ... 2) Most of what we call hunger, is not true hunger. Like true thirst, true hunger is not an uncomfortable gnawing feeling but a mild pleasant feeling. 3) While I know of no formal name for what this other feeling/experience is, or exact science about it, the experience of 10s of 1000s of people have showed me the same thing that I see being stated here, the cleaner your diet and the more you avoid SAD foods, the less you experience this uncomfortable gnawing feeling. I think Doug gives a great explanation of it in one of his talks and relates to the Pleasure Trap. While not completely part of this discussion, but it was the point of another earlier discussion recently, I do want to point out that this is a problem with many of the foods that may be "approved" but not "recommended". Some of them can be higher in salt, sugar and fat and can keep someone in the Pleasure Trap. As Doug explains, these "symptoms" are similar to those of an addicts withdrawal, and so the best solution is to keep these to a minimum or eliminate them. There is no one answer as to how much of any of them will elicit the Pleasure Trap in anyone, so it is something everyone has to experiment with. 4) . . . In Health Jeff