Health-Full

Last night I missed out on the chance to have a fancy post theater dessert at Wellington’s.

Thanks to Yelp’s promotional involvement with Proctors and theREP, I attended one of the few remaining performances of Blithe Spirit. It’s an almost eighty-year-old British play that has been performed all over the world, and it’s still quite funny.

But at the end of two and a half hours, I was tired. It was my fault. I’ve been staying up far too late this week. Getting more sleep has been on my to do list for years.

Even though I wasn’t particularly hungry for dessert, that’s never stopped me before. Just Monday, towards the end of Yelp Office Hours, I wasn’t particularly hungry for lemon pepper wings. But when Steve N. thought it would be a good idea to order some for the table, I went with it like a champ.

Going out for dessert after a play is a real treat, and yesterday I had an additional reason to celebrate. In addition to being the blog’s birthday, it was also the date of my annual physical exam. I was on pins and needles about the results of my blood work, because I had been less careful with my eating than I was in the past.

Let me tell you how it worked out, and what I realized about how I eat.

Amazingly, thankfully, my lipid panel came back okay. Maybe you remember the dramatic results in the past when I drastically cut back on the fun foods I was eating. Well, my numbers weren’t quite that good this time around. But they were better than they had been. Most importantly, my doctor was fine with where they were now, which means I don’t have to make any dramatic changes to my eating!

Huzzah!

That’s great news, because even though I’ve been trying to eat sensibly, I’ve been enjoying more bites of chicken skin, pizza, fried cheese, and other fatty deliciousness than I should.

Of course, I’m still about five pounds heavier than where I would like to be, but that’s largely vanity. And now that the weather is getting nicer, I might be more inclined to go out walking. Especially since I’ve been pushing the walkability of the region’s downtown corridors.

One thing that would help is if I only ate when I am hungry.

Every year on Yom Kippur I fast, so I know what hunger feels like. However, for the most part, it’s a feeling that I rarely experience.

Eating isn’t something I do to manage my hunger. Eating is something I do because it’s generally the time of day to be eating, I’ve encountered something delicious that I want to eat, or I’m under stress/bored/in a situation where eating seems like a good idea.

Not eating because I’m not hungry seems ridiculous. We’re surrounded by too much good food!

Additionally, if I were only to eat when I was hungry—and to stop once the hunger subsided—most restaurant meals would consist solely of one appetizer. Even a portion of an appetizer could be sufficiently filling. Do you have any idea how many chicken wings it takes to stave off hunger, once they have been fried and slathered in buffalo sauce?

It depends on where you get them, but if you use Wegman’s nutrition facts, each piece is about 100 calories, and an order of four has half of your days saturated fat.

Would eating only when hungry be a healthier way to eat? I think so. Although I suppose there’s an argument to be made for avoiding hunger, because when you’re hungry you might be more inclined to make bad choices.

My perspective has always been about eating for pleasure. Even in the context of a healthier diet. If I’m eating salad, I’m going to make it a delicious one with farm fresh greens and good olive oil. Plus, I’m only eating salad in salad season.

All I know is that whatever I’ve been doing has been working! And that’s great.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get more exercise and sleep into my life. I feel like the exercise has to come first. Because trying add activities to an already busy schedule while reducing the number of hours in the day to get things done sounds like an impossible situation. But maybe the sleep should come first, and I should try to create a new rhythm of life that includes at least seven hours of sleep during weeknights. Then once that’s done I can try to squeeze in some more active time during the remaining seventeen hours.

This is why I don’t have a sleep blog. At least I’ve got the food thing mostly figured out.