To watch me eat a meal of something I particularly like, you would think me an Ethiopian kid who hadn’t seen food in weeks. The behavior I exhibit when it comes to the actual consumption of food is strange, and seemingly baseless in its reason for existing. I can’t think of time when we didn’t have enough food, or I had to go hungry, but I have always eaten like that is the case. My eyes being perpetually to big for my stomach I guess.
One of the best examples of this beast rearing its head is whenever pizza was involved. Kaje and I would get pizza from somewhere and usually breadsticks, or cheesy bread, or a side of some kind. I would get it all back home and proceed to eat it as fast as I could get the food shoved into my mouth. Not pausing to enjoy the taste, not slowing to savor the food, just trying to top of the tank as fast I as possibly could. The problems you run into when you eat like this are as follows.
1. You get full long before your brain realizes it.
a. This is almost common knowledge these days, but your brain has lag time. So if you for example, let your wife it two pieces of a large pizza then proceed to shove the entirety of the remainder down your own throat, by the time your brain starts shouting at you to slow down you’re full, you’ve left that marker way behind you, and you are so filled up that you feel sick.
2. Do the first one enough times and your body will start to compensate.
a. Our bodies are meant to adapt to a huge range of situations regarding available food sources and nutrition. So when you constantly let your body know you are going to pack away enough calories of grease, bread, meats, cheese, and tomato based products to make it sick, it is going to start finding ways to alleviate the discomfort you put it through. So your body goes about converting all those extra calories into fat stores for a rainy day whilst making sure it lets that stomach expand to handle the high volume you truck to it daily. So what would once have made you sick now only makes you full, and that point at which you stopped eating previously now adds about 500 calories to the total needed to reach it. This isn’t something you want to be leveling up.
This is one strangest things I have ever done to myself. It’s something I still don’t really understand. Like I said there was never a time when food was scarce in my life or I had to compete to get it. The fact remains that when I had something I like in front of me I would wolf the stuff down with gleeful abandon until I felt full to bursting, then would tack on one more breadstick just to make sure. If anything remained an hour or two later when things had a chance to settle down I would gladly make sure the fridge wasn’t hindered with pesky leftovers.
Now adays I still deal with this. Not so much overeating, but eating way, way to fast. It happened to me at an Ihop, I ate the entire meal in less than 5 minutes. It happened at dinner at home twice, once with a pizza, and once with Chinese food. I think Kaje could think of a few more instances. However the difference now is that while I eat way to fast the food is well within my portion allotment for the day and I am not passing my calorie goals. An interesting side effect of all this weight loss though is the inability to eat this way and keep it down. I don’t know if its because my stomach has shrunk, and by the time my speed eating catches up to me I am already overfull, or whether my body is so accustomed to the new dietary habits that greasy, starchy, empty calorie rich foods just don’t sit in my stomach anymore. All I really know for sure on that score is that in fact they do not stay in my stomach long.
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