At the start of the holidays the first plates of cookies, treat-laden gift baskets, and big special meals are delicious. Yet by New Year’s Day, with your pants tighter and your body bloated, you find yourself craving . . . a simple salad.
Researchers speculate that the reason we have trouble controlling our consumption of fat- and sugar-laden foods, is that in primitive times, our next meal was never guaranteed, so it paid to overindulge.
That makes sense. Yet it equally makes sense that once a person inflated past a healthy weight, another signal would emerge to put the brakes on their eating; after all, there’s little survival value in being slow, wheezing, and obese. It’s just that this signal is subtler and more easily ignored. (Interesting fact: research shows that exercise encourages weight loss not simply because it burns calories, but because it puts people back in touch with their hunger/satiety signals; moving your body makes you less alienated from it.)
Indeed, it seems all human systems – physical, psychological, mental, emotional – send cues toward wellness and away from sickness; toward balance and away from being saturated with one element to the neglect of others.
You can become satiated on social media: experience indigestion from seeing details that once remained private; feel that if you see one more inspirational message accompanied by the “influencer’s†own posed portrait, you might ralph.
You can feel as if you are choking on isolation and loneliness; glutted with the profane and material; sick of your cowardice and passive inertia; nauseated by the amount of porn in your life. You can feel disgustingly full and yet desperately empty.
There’s likely an area of your life calling out even now: “Basta!†“Enough!â€
Listen. Push back from the table. And move towards what it is you’re really hungry for: relationship, meaning, freedom, action – health.
Submitted by: Chris in Missouri
