Riding the Edge

Over the past 3 days, I have eaten only enough in a sitting to make me feel not hungry. By only enough I mean precisely enough. No more, no less. Just to the point where I don't need food anymore. Sure I might still want food, but my body is basing this craving on old habits.

The result is I spend most of the day with almost that feeling you get when you've just worked for several hours and suddenly you remember that you haven't eaten in a while. You weren't hungry until that moment, but man food sounds good. It's a good feeling, because you are already feeling the anticipation of how good that first bite of a sandwich is going to taste, and then there's many bites after that. Normally when I feel this is when I sit down and inhale half my meal before I even know what I'm doing. Then I slow down and fill up.

What I have discovered is that knowing that I will not fill up changes the way that I eat, or at least changes my mental approach to eating. I've been more or less a practicer of active mindfulness for a while now. This was something new. As I bit into my half a tuna sandwich at lunch today, I consciously slowed down because I knew there was no more. If I just leapt to it I would be done eating in just a couple of minutes.

So I stopped, and bit down slowly. I carefully chewed the morsel of food, tasting the creamy mayonnaise, the sweet relish, and the oh so faint metallic taste of the fish. I swallowed. The feeling of that food sliding down my throat was so satisfying. I felt it all the way down. As corny as it sounds, riding this edge of hunger where I know that I have eaten enough, but my body with it's old habits craves more, it is not unlike riding the edge of an orgasm. The sensations were the same, if not equally intense. But I have that same longing to just finish it, I just want to eat until I am full! At the same time, the feeling of getting there is so delicious that I don't want it to end. Before the finish I am so beautifully aware of everything. Afterwards I know that I will not care about any of this anymore.

I may be eating less, but I think that I am really enjoying my food a lot more. This heightened mindfulness of eating is exactly the sort of awakening experience I love. It happened so many times over the course of my Peace Corps experience that I got hooked. I was expecting the PCP to be a similar experience, but I did not expect it this soon. It makes the hard moments (like resisting the bag of oreos at my friends house last night) feel all the better. This is life worth living!