There she is, right there, walking down the road...leaving. She's mad about it too. You can tell. Look at that face she's got on. Allow me to introduce you to my hunger: she is mean, demanding...she's a bully (or maybe the other b-word is more apt).
Like Siamese twins, I think my hunger and I have been attached at the hip from the day I was born. I was adopted and wouldn't tolerate formulas used in 1962 so at three months the doctor put me on straight cow's milk. That was obviously not the best nutrition for an infant. I howled inconsolably. For my mother and for food. I think I've been hungry all my life and stuffed food into both of those holes in my soul--the holes created by my hunger and my absent mother. (Funny that my hunger and mother are both female figures, in my mind, who hurt me.)
It didn't help that my momma who raised me was the best Cajun cook in the world and genuinely believed good food was the cure for everything that ailed you. She welcomed my hunger into our home with open arms. "Sit down, cher, and eat some more."
My entire life has been spent trying to work around my incessant, irrational hunger: ignore it, feed it small amounts, distract myself from it, trick it, give into it with abandon. None of what I've tried, in dealing with my hunger, has been good for me.
But something is changing. All day today I've kept thinking I should eat, but I just didn't feel like it. I sipped at some water with a splash of unsweetened cranberry. I worked in the yard in the hot sun and sweated like crazy. I still wasn't hungry. Finally, much later than I would normally eat my first meal of the day (I think it was 9 pm) I ate a bowl of pinto beans to which I added TONS of garlic...and that was enough.
Later, when I went to bed, I couldn't sleep. I've got some things on my mind right now that are troubling me. I usually binge when I'm upset. I've known for some time I use food as a sedative at night. I wanted to eat and just go to sleep tonight, but I just wasn't hungry. Hunger had left me. Nothing appealed to me.
That is so unlike me.
At 4 am, though, after tossing and turning all night, I was suddenly ravenous and I wanted tomatoes and pecorino romano. Urgently. (What's with the spaghetti theme in my life lately?) I had a glass jar of my organic pasta sauce, so I got out of bed and heated some of it up like you would tomato soup, ate it in a bowl with a spoon with a chunk of pecorino romano on the side, and now I'm satiated and ready to go back to bed. That was not the hunger I know. That felt like a physical need with no emotional component.
I'm trying to learn to listen to what my body says. Once you start eating healthy, get all the toxins out, and it starts behaving like a healthy body, they say your body knows what it needs. Apparently my body today only needed pinto beans, garlic, tomatoes and a funky little cheese.
I have a theory about what's going on and I think it is a major discovery.
And I think the new supplements I've been taking may be a part of it too: the reishi, the turmeric tincture, the ashwaganda, the schizandra berry and the bitter melon tincture.
Tomorrow I'll do a post on pecorino romano and butyrate as one of my one-minute superfoods. Then in a couple of days, we'll talk about the miracle of resistant starch and our gut biome. Both of these posts are closely tied to my retreating hunger. Pay close attention. I think I'm onto something here.
It's so wonderful to see my hunger leaving me. I'm dancing around the room humming and singing: "Turn out the lights, the party's over..." Let her take her balloons and just go on her merry way. And I want to shout out to her: "Oh and don't let the screen door hit you in..."
Oh, well. Let's just hope she stays gone.
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