You can just be hungry

You know how you occasionally have an idea pop into your head that seems life changingly revelatory and completely dull and obvious at the same time?

Not long ago I had one of those ideas. And it was this:

"You can just be hungry."

I don't know where or how I got sucked into this idea - I suspect it's a result of living in an affluent Western society - but I somehow became convinced that if I feel hungry I should do something about it.

If it's 2.30pm and I feel like I need something salty, I must now undertake some quest to find a salty thing to eat in order to end this "eternal hunger"*.

If it's an hour after lunch and I feel like I'm craving a particular foodstuff, or half an hour before afternoon tea and I start feeling like I'm hungry now, I switch over to this idea that I need to "listen to my body" and go find something to eat now. I start getting thoroughly distracted by this sense of hunger as if I truly must do something about it as soon as humanly possible.

But... I don't.

You know, people all over the world are hungry most of the day, every day, and yet they miraculously manage to get on with whatever it is they're doing without going on a quest for salted peanuts. They eat whatever food they have at the time when they can eat it, and they live.

If they are hungry, they are just... hungry. And it's not the end of the world.

I, too, can just be hungry.

I mean, it's not like it's going to be forever.

I do live in an affluent Western society, so I know I'm not actually going to go hungry if I wait an hour to eat something I planned to eat instead of rushing to find something to eat right now that will match what I'm craving at the moment. And, should it turn out that I'm constantly craving salty things at a certain time of day, I can just take note of that and plan to eat something salty within the bounds of a reasonably balanced food allocation.

Listening to your body is a stupid thing to do. Your body wants to prepare for "winter", but we've managed to create a world where "winter" never comes - there's never a point (for people living in my society and socio-economic environment) where there will be a time of less, so I have to prepare for it by eating as much as I can during a time of plenty. But my body was designed for such seasonal periods of glut and famine.

I *do* need to listen to it telling me that I'm running short of salt and things like that, but I don't need to do anything about it this very second. For the next half hour or so I can just be hungry.

Except tea. If I need a cup of tea I should do something about that ASAP.

*In the Disney movie Frozen (known as The Snow Queen and the Eternal Winter in some overseas markets), the winter had been going on for all of 5 minutes before someone declared it to be "eternal" and declared that some drastic measure must be undertaken to stop it.