I just finished reading Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I would understand if you assumed that it was a food related book, since I am mentioning it on this site and it has a GREAT name for such a thing. But it actually had nothing to do with that. (It's a young adult thriller about a dystopian society. Good book.) There is a lot of food references in it. But it mainly is to show the differences between areas of the society. The main character often thinks about food, because it is one of the elements she needs to survive - which is frequently not guaranteed.
Anyway, in the course of the story, the girl talked about how one day was a "hollow day." That was a day where, no matter how much you ate, you just still felt hungry. It didn't happen often, but it did happen once in a while. In her case, days like that were a big problem because they didn't have much food. So hollow days were a big inconvenience. Have you ever had a day like that? I'm not talking about a day of the munchies caused by boredom or some, um, chemical introduced into your system. That isn't really the same thing. This is a day where you just feel hungry all day. It doesn't matter what you do, your stomach growls and complains.
Today has actually been one of those days for me. I ate my usual breakfast - a Fage blueberry Greek yogurt and a handful of cashews. A little later, still feeling hungry, I had a banana. Then I had some more cashews. About an hour later, I had an apple. By 11:00, though, I was ravenous. I don't mean bored. I don't mean a little hungry. I meant, my stomach was hurting and growling. I was starting to feel a little ill. It made no sense. I managed to put off eating lunch until I picked Heather up at 12:30. We had Panera and I had a BBQ chicken salad and cup of chili. By the time I got home, I felt like I hadn't eaten at all. So I had another Fage yogurt. It didn't help much. I've been doing my best to avoid the kitchen, only grabbing a few cashews here and there.
Hollow days are hard. I think everyone has them. To a person who isn't watching their weight (or who doesn't need to), it can be a minor inconvenience. But it is manageable. Sneak a candy bar here; eat a bag of chips there. But, to a person who is trying to be careful with their food decisions, a hollow day can be catastrophic. How do you fight it off? There aren't that many foods that can actually be snarfed down without consequence. Nuts have a lot of calories. Chips, crackers, mini rice cakes all have their share of calories and carbs. Even fruit packs a wallop of sugar.
The problem is that it is easy to find something destructive when you are trying to get rid of that edge. I can walk into the pantry right now and grab a bag of Goldfish crackers, a handful of cookies, a pack of peanut butter crackers. Those would all help my hunger - for a while. But they would hurt me in the long run. And, even worse, it would make me feel like a failure. That would almost secure a real mistake at a later meal. I remember many times where snacking and picking all day would leave me so upset by dinner that I would just forget my usual game plan and go off the deep end. Fortunately, that is not really an option any longer. But the feeling of a hollow day is certainly still unsettling.
The human body is strange. What we actually need each day is different. There are some days where we could get by with just a small meal here or there. And then there are those days when it is like our body is calling out for more than we think is healthy. I remember having one of these hollow days a few months back. I was sure that I had done a number on my weight loss. But the next day was one of my weigh in days and I had lost two pounds. That is one of those cases where we need to actually learn to listen to our bodies and learn what it is asking for. And then we need to answer it. Is it actually thirsty and not hungry? Is it just needing more calories that day for some reason? If our body is asking, I don't think it is bad to answer that - even if it is outside of our pre-ordained diet plan. The trick is to know when it is really necessary. When is that just boredom? When is it our body trying to trick us into getting more sugar or carbs? That is an important and difficult lesson. In the mean time, I need to try to manage the hollow days so that they don't end up being a pitfall instead.
