Look, Consider, Close the Tin

I’ve spent so long trying to tell physical hunger apart from just wanting food that I’ve started asking myself the question almost constantly. Am I actually hungry? It’s there most times food crosses my mind now, and I’m not sure that’s an improvement.

Here’s the honest problem. I don’t actually know if I can still recognise physical hunger when it turns up.

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Most days go breakfast, then nothing, then dinner. No rumbling in between. Nothing I’d call a hollow feeling. Then dinner arrives and I demolish it.

So was I hungry, or did I just arrive at dinner time expecting to be? I genuinely can’t tell you. My brain knows I’ve gone hours without food and concludes I must be hungry. Whether that conclusion matches anything my stomach is actually doing, I couldn’t say.

It gets murkier after dinner. I’m not always satisfied, or not for long. I know I must be full. But my brain keeps pecking away at whatever it knows is available in the house.

The useful question turned out not to be “am I hungry,” but “what happens if I can’t have it.” If the food weren’t there, would I keep thinking about it, or just get on with something else? For me, it’s the second one. Which suggests the after-dinner pecking isn’t a persistent need for food. It’s wanting the pleasant feeling eating gives me, available or not.

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What’s actually changed, though, isn’t that I’ve got better at answering the hunger question. It’s what happens at the biscuit tin, or the fridge, regardless of whether I’ve answered it.

It used to be straightforward. Open the tin, see something, eat it. Opening the tin was the start of the process.

Now I’ll open it, look at what’s in there, consider it properly, and close it again. Nothing eaten. The tin survives. I carry on with whatever I was doing.

Opening the tin has somehow become the end of the process instead of the start of it, and treats have become properly rare in this house despite being sat there in plain sight the whole time.

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I don’t think I’ve solved the hunger question. I still can’t reliably tell you whether I’m physically hungry on a given afternoon, and I’m not sure that’s a problem I need to solve.

What I can tell you is that wanting something and having it have come apart. I can look at the chocolate, know I fancy it, and shut the cupboard anyway, and it doesn’t always feel like a fight to do it. Sometimes it’s willpower holding the line. Increasingly, it’s just not mattering enough to bother.

I couldn’t tell you in advance which one it’ll be on any given evening. But either way, the tin closes, and I’m still standing here, and that’s apparently enough to call progress.