Gluttony…Yeah I said it
Did I have to use another Sopranos picture? No, but I did.
Round about the same time drunks became alcoholics, gluttony became a dirty word.
I understand, moralizing has a tendency to have the opposite of its intended effect, and guilt is never pleasant, but the word itself may be the key to an excellent, sustainable long term diet change.
According to Wikipedia, the word gluttony is “…derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow…”, which sounds kind of like wolfing down your food to me. We also describe the unpleasant feeling of having a lot of food in your stomach, as being “glutted”, like the food is all fighting to get into your intestines because there’s not enough room. You know how you typically feel crappy, dull, and sleepy after a really huge meal? Not a new phenomenon. It was describe by Aquinas hundreds of years ago. In modern days, Jim Loehr, a prominent sports psychologist, also talks about quitting the meal before the apathy sets in.
In other words, don’t eat in any way that compromises your energy levels. And I’m not talking long term energy levels either, I mean your energy levels right now. Ideally, you should eat because your energy levels are low, aka “I’m hungry”, and then you proceed to eat until those levels are restored, and try to eat the foods that restore your levels cleanly (without sugar crashes or hungry twenty minutes later syndrome).
It turns out moral philosophers didn’t just want to bag on fat people, but were more interested in the ill effects that attend gluttony almost immediately. We’ve all been there, you eat too much and you get sluggish and dull. It takes time before you really get obese. So basically overeating also makes you prone to being dumb and lazy on the road to being fat.
Now obviously there is more to it than this, because some diets like, low fat diets in particular, seem to encourage gluttony by negating feelings of satiety in spite of being full.
I think its a lot easier to wrap your head around a lifestyle change when the benefits are almost immediate. You don’t have to wait “some day” to start feeling good about wiser eating habits. You also don’t have to whip yourself into some quasi neurotic “motivated” state to just put the fork down. Putting the fork down is a much easier solution when you realize that you get to feel good almost immediately, not only psychologically, but physically as well. It also means that when you get tired, it’s a signal that you really do need to rest, not just that you have an insulin crash, but that’s a topic for another day.