Manufacturing Obesity

I have no idea when I’m actually hungry. As in the old joke where a woman tells her partner, “Honey, bad news: what we thought was orgasm turned out to be asthma,” I tend to confuse all kinds of things with hunger and vice versa.

I’m now using a machine to tell me when I actually want to eat and then connect the readings with the physical symptoms I experience, and every time it’s like “Ah, so that’s what it is!”

I never has any control over my eating schedule when I was growing up, and this is the result. All these ridiculous beliefs that in “proper” families everybody has got to sit at the table at the same time and eat the same things produce obese people with health problems.

The tradition originates from the times when the entire family would work in the same field and then come home at the same time and eat the same things for lack of options. Our reality has changed but we still cling to the same regimen even though people who spend the day on different schedules and with different expenditure of energy can’t be hungry at the same time. And what’s worse, once you break the habit of self-regulation, it’s crazy hard to restore it.

By the way, there have been experiments conducted since the hoary 1926 that if you give toddlers a choice, they will instinctively choose a nutrition regimen that will be perfect for their own individual needs. In the meanwhile, there are very few adults who have this sort of instinct.