Look at me, I'm skinny
fistfulayen.com
fistfulayen.com
1. Give up all your free time to working out. 2. Eat nothing that is delicious ever again. 3. Statistically, not significantly prolong your life. You could still die of heart disease at 50 because your genes are just not good genes. You could get cancer and keel. You could sleep an hour to long, and throw a clot and die. 4. Some people feel better in general doing the above 3 steps.
I am overweight, by a fair margin. But I'm not especially unhappy, insecure, or immobile. I have plenty of hobbies that involve outdoor things and my lifestyle doesn't inhibit those. My doctor says that losing weight is more for reducing long-term stress on my joints: my cardiovascular system is fine so long as I don't gain more weight.
So why the fuck should I, or the legion of people like me, care or listen to what this exercise freak says? I've got dogs, a girlfriend, and some hobbies taking up all the non-work time in my life. Who actually wants to do what he says, especially when the benefits are so incredibly dubious?
Your argument is "Look at these things that are very unlikely to kill me. That's why I feel justified doing things are likely to kill me."
Trying not to overeat and get more exercise don't have to take up all of your free time.
This goes with something I heard on the radio last week. There was a news segment about how a group was lobbying the American Medical Association (AMA) to classify obesity as a "disability" which would give them free benefits under some government health insurance program. Then they trotted out a sound bite from a poor over weight soul who proclaimed "It isn't my fault I am the way I am".
I find it exceptionally hard to believe that that there is anyone who genuinely follows a healthy diet and is reasonably active and still can't maintain a healthy weight.
Bringing it back to this article it's like a broke business owner looking at a successful one and saying if only I was born with their smile and sense of charisma I could start a successful company too. When, in reality, it probably came down to persistence and hard work as the separating factor.
There's some credit. He sure does work hard at it.
And then he goes off, like everyone who talks about fitness, on how you could be like them. As if we wanted to. Just spend 6 days a week working out, run on the side, and eat like a tibetan monk. PS, listening to LL Cool J can also help.
I will never listen to LL Cool J. That is where I just have to draw the line, so I guess the whole diet isn't for me.
Yes, you can ignore it all and be reassured by a gaggle of paid professionals that you're within the national averages and they'll know how to deal with you when your health fails you.
Or you can say, "Most people are unhealthy. I don't want that." The evidence from prehistoric times strongly indicates that this is our actual situation today. And going from that premise, you start making some changes. Maybe they're small ones, or big ones. Maybe LL Cool J plays a role. But the conclusion always involves working a little bit because society has made it hard to be naturally fit and healthy.
Of course if you spend you entire time to be thin by exercising and eating like a bird you will be skinny.
That's no challenge when that is what you do. The challenge is to do that, work for 10 hours a day, have time with the kids, sex with the misses, hang out with the friends, see the family and so on.
Then it's interesting. But the authors claim is reminiscent to a body building screaming "see me I'm muscular"
6 hours sounds normal to me.
From the tone of your comments it sounds more like you are projecting your negative life experiences onto your reading of the article.
To quote former FDA commissioner David Kessler from the book I just read (and the impetus for this post), The End of Overeating, “People get fat because they eat more than people who are lean…we finally have strong evidence that weight gain is primarily due to overeating.” Period.
This has been conventional wisdom for years now. Everything else is just details, though people love to obsess about the details, because "eat less" doesn't provide the same level of excitement and optimism as "eat this freaky diet." Even the theory behind most of the low carb diets is that avoiding high-glycemic-index foods smooths out your insulin levels, which helps regulate your appetite, which helps you avoid overeating.
Likewise, exercise is a big help for me in eating less, because it improves my mood, which makes it easier for me not to overeat. I've talked to lots of other people who, like me, find that a moderate amount of exercise actually decreases their appetite. (If you burn enough calories, you end up driving your appetite back up, but not many people burn many calories in relation to their intake. I work out about three days a week; averaged over the week, I burn about 150 calories per day, which is helpful but not a big deal.)
And then you still burn a huge chunk of free time accomplishing no tangible thing in exchange for a dubious assurance of a fractionally longer life.
I used to be in much better shape than I am now, but my life was miserable. Exercise did not make me feel better, coming to terms with my life and my environment and having some control over my situation made me feel better. My opinion has been that the "workout high" is more about having control over yourself and your situation than any real lasting benefit.
So if you want to have an enormous, 1500 calorie meal at a casual dining restaurant, go for it, just keep it light for the rest of the day.
Yeah, I'm also a 6'3'' and I was 220 in March so I'm probably grossly undereating but after a week of hunger and headrushes you get used to burning fat (I also drink coffee) for energy and feel great while losing weight.
The only reason you'd have to give up certain delicious things is if you were a strict vegetarian -- eating a low-calorie vegetarian diet and getting enough protein isn't rocket science, but it doesn't leave any room for splurging on empty calories.
You already said you enjoy outdoor activities. Isn't that exercise? If you limit the definition of exercise to joyless and repetitive activities with no intrinsic interest, then I have to agree with you that exercise is not worth it.
I agree with this statement, but I'm responding to the article's specific brand of exercise, not exercise in general. Personally, I am on a slow downward trend in weight because I'm making an effort to do things I like and pick and choose my foods more carefully.
I am just tired of people like the poster, who literally play both sides of the fence in one article ("I demand credit for the effort I make to make my body look this way" vs. "I am not a health freak.") I also find it funny how inevitable the course of those posts are. It would have a been a good article if he hadn't made the transition from descriptive to prescriptive, but he did and here we are asking, "Why on earth would I inflict LL Cool J on my ears in 2009?"
I sympathize with the poster. I'm tired of people treating me like a freak just because I care about my weight and have actually accomplished something in that direction. I used to be a mess (5'9" and over 200 lbs, on a relatively small frame) and now I'm much better -- still overweight, but in better shape than some of my friends. That creates some resentment for people around me who are self-conscious about their weight. I'm expected to completely avoid talking about my efforts to get in better shape. It's not a matter of demanding credit; they simply don't want to hear that I have to work at it! When I have a beer with them and they ask me how I'm feeling, they don't want to hear that I had a good run this morning, or that I feel bad because I had a bad run. Okay, fine, I get it, I won't mention it.
But what can you really do? You can't do a Jedi mind trick when you wheel your bike into work. "This isn't a bike. This is just something I found in the parking lot, after I parked my car." What do you say when somebody asks what you were doing when they left you a voice mail earlier? "Uh... stuff. Yeah, I was doing stuff." When somebody asks you why you didn't eat all the fries that came with your burger, are you supposed to lie and say you didn't like them? There's no way to completely hide the fact that yes, you are trying to do something a little different.
Plus, the same people who get annoyed when I talk about my struggles with my weight feel free to talk about their own. They want to talk about their efforts at diet and exercise as if it's normal, but we have to pretend that mine are beyond reasonable. Never mind that the only difference between us is that I'm twenty pounds overweight and they're fifty pounds overweight. I'm supposed to remember that if my lifestyle were normal, then that would reflect poorly on them, so we have to pretend that their lifestyle is just one or two small tweaks away from being totally healthy, and my lifestyle is the product of an eccentric, overenthusiastic, probably unhealthy interest in fitness. What? I'm still freakin' twenty pounds overweight!
I'm not trying to be a freak. I'm just trying to be NORMAL, trying to live a lifestyle within the bounds my body is engineered to tolerate. I'm just trying not to eat so much food that it harms me. I'm trying not to live a lifestyle so sedentary that my body doesn't know how to cope with it. That's all.
I now bike about 50 miles per week and my appetite is enormous. I start getting hungry about 3 hours after eating, and if I have lunch at 12:30 I can actively seeking food around 5:00, walking to other buildings just to get a handful of chips, i.e. I don't eat just because it's there. I'm also pretty tired in the evenings after the ride sometimes. I sometimes wonder if it's worth it.
It's also wrong. At least, it's not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I was watching a video of a Gary Taubes lecture which I can't find where he addresses this, and cites many examples from history of societies and situations where groups of people were fat despite eating very few calories, where groups of people grew fat as their diet changed despite the calorie count not increasing, and vice-versa.
I think this is the same talk:
It just turns out to be really, really, really freakin' hard to do that, and there are any number of fascinating little details you can explore to avoid facing up to that basic truth. Really, I think we're just too hard on ourselves. I think we'd make a lot of progress if we'd just admit that we have a problem saying no. I'll be honest about my problem with food: right now I'm almost ten pounds heavier than when I was in my best shape, which probably means twenty pounds over my ideal weight. I got injured playing sports, couldn't exercise much for two months, got depressed, and gained ten pounds. Now I'm in the process of taking it off. How much I eat is roughly a function of how optimistic I feel about my life, so my weight wanders up and down within a fifteen pound range. (However, the top of this range is 25 pounds less than I weighed ten years ago, so it's not like I haven't made any progress.)
I know exactly what I need to do to get in the best shape of my life by October, without taking any time away from my other priorities. Maybe it will happen, but the smart money says no. This isn't a problem of nutrition or exercise physiology -- those problems are solved. It's a problem of psychology. The only reason people deny it is because they're ashamed that they aren't in complete control of themselves.
Watch the video I linked.
That there are people who can die of starvation while still being obese, people who can be eating 1200-1400 calories per day and still not be losing weight, modified rats that can be starved while growing up and end up with smaller internal organs and still large fat deposits - that's not a "detail". That's not eating too much and gaining fat, (but with a couple of minor exceptions). That's a fundamental problem with the idea that eating too much leads to being fat, and eating less leads to losing fat, the end.
The equation, energy delta equals energy in minus energy out doesn't change, but the causal relationship and the whole perception of it changes. It's not energy in that's driving the equation.
As Gary Taubes says - when a child is growing and eating voraciously, we don't say they are growing because they are eating more.
"To explain obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an 'explanation' of alcoholism by chronic overdrinking."
Then he attacks the idea that behavior is unrelated to physiology -- where did he get that straw man? As far as I know, everyone who blames obesity on overeating also believes that the amount we eat is affected by many factors, including physiology. So please tell me, before I watch the rest of the video, does he really disagree with the idea that obesity is caused by overeating, or does he merely believe that saying so doesn't do justice to the fact that overeating has complex causes of its own?
I don't want to get into a miscommunicated argument of language here, but he's more pushing for the idea that it's caused by overeating high glycemic load foods, and that this overeating can happen even within a diet where someone is eating a total amount food that would be called undereating or normal.
He's going to go on to say that it's not simply eating food -> storing fat, it's dependent on insulin causing cells to take glucose from the bloodstream, and the result of fat cells doing this is an increase in availability of {some_chemical} which increases the drive to store free fats in fat cells, rather than not doing so. As you eat foods that raise blood insulin levels, your fat storage grows and is prioritised, and you want to eat more.
But even if you don't eat more, food is being stored as fat as a priority instead of doing other useful things with it, so you can undereat and be both obese and malnourished, by eating the wrong types of food. Or you can eat more and have ordinary "eats too much, is too fat" obesity.
He's not arguing for a cause by aliens or bacteria or anything very different, but I think this model is a useful enough distinction from the model of "more food calories in than you use everyday -> fat storage, less food calories in than you use everyday -> fat burning" to say that he really does disagree.
You can induce all kinds of freakish pathologies by eating the wrong types of food; that's nothing new. Simultaneous obesity and malnourishment is common in poor communities in the U.S. because of diets that are high in calories but deficient in other ways. I seriously doubt anyone could be obese and calorie-malnourished in the absence of serious medical issues or radical inconsistency in food availability. The existence of odd pathologies like Taubes' lipodystrophy cases doesn't say anything about the vast majority of people.
Taubes acts like the mere existence of these pathologies is mind-blowing. But it's just common sense: the process of storing and metabolizing body fat isn't physically inevitable. It's complicated. There are all kinds of ways it could be suppressed, and you expect that as with any other biological process, there's going to be natural variation in the population, including people where the process goes wrong in an odd way. That isn't a daring supposition. That's just the way any ordinary doctor or biologist would think. The question is dealt with every time a new drug is studied -- how will different people respond to it? Vioxx was a scandal because detecting rare harmful side effects of treatments that work well in most people is routine. The idea that a "healthy" diet might harm some people, especially people already suffering from a metabolic disorder, would not blow anyone's mind. Look at all the research into nutrition for diabetics!
Anyway, I still don't see anything new here. Theoretical speculation is fine and dandy, but the question is, what actually happens? If you practice reasonable calorie restriction on a reasonable diet, your body will adjust. It will not kill you or permanently harm you. It will certainly threaten you and try to convince you that you're dying. Everybody knows that when you decrease your food intake, your body complains. It tries to make you eat more. It makes you feel tired. It makes you feel like exercising would be a bigger mistake than drunk-dialing your boss's teenage daughter. But if you go against those feelings, your body's doomsday predictions don't come true. If the situation described by Taubes actually prevented healthy weight loss -- your body starving certain systems of calories in order to spare body fat -- you would expect that people following reasonable diets and exercise could end up unhealthy. And it doesn't happen.
That isn't just an assumption. There are some seriously strong-willed people out there who are pathologically devoted to low body fat and/or suffer from body dysmorphic disorders. There are also some seriously strong-willed people who are dedicated to athletic performance but rather dumb about how they pursue it. We know people can persist in unhealthy habits to the point of breakdown -- it happens all the time. It's not like there's a great uncharted domain out there of freakish consequences that could result from weird practices. Crazy, stupid, and/or mentally ill people have explored the weirdo options pretty thoroughly, sometimes with gruesome results. So why haven't we seen any gruesome outcomes from the diets that are considered healthy according to the conventional wisdom? The only possible conclusion is that whatever pathological responses our bodies might have to healthy diets -- such as starving important systems to spare body fat -- don't persist over the long term in people with an overabundance of body fat.
In any case, from an overweight person's point of view rather than a public policy standpoint, the only practical question is what will happen if you eat a reasonable diet and exercise. The answer is that if you follow any one of a bunch of reasonable diets, from Ornish to Atkins, you will lose weight and be healthier, and if you exercise, you will be even healthier. I get annoyed when people like Taubes, knowing how eager people are to believe otherwise, go through a complex song and dance that encourages people to believe otherwise even though he doesn't seem to believe otherwise himself.
However, I think what the article is talking about is skinniness as opposed to being "chubby" or "soft," not flat out obese. If you're somewhere in the region between "skinny" and "chubby," but not near being under- or overweight, then what you eat and how you exercise is important; even subtle changes to your routine can have noticeable effects.
But you are very aggressive and defensive about it. What makes you think that healthy thin people devote "all" their free time to working out? Or that a "healthy weight" involves never eating delicious food?
Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?
So why the fuck should I, or the legion of people like me, care
I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?
> "But you are very aggressive and defensive about it"
> Is it really fair to call him a "freak"? He's the unusual stand-out fairground attraction? A thin person who eats vegetables and bikes to work, excuse me, what?
Sorry dude, working out 6 times a week means that you're exceptionally into it. I am a compsci and photography "freak", I didn't mean it as a pejorative, I meant it as a clear descriptor of someone who devotes nearly all his time to one specific task. My contempt for his article stems from the disdain for the same formulaic structure I see on all health posts.
> I take it you are this aggressive and defensive when someone writes a blog post about Java or Flower arranging or anything else you're not interested in?
I am not afraid to give my opinion. Check my twitter. Better yet, ask me about Python if you run into me. I'll see if I can achieve barfight status.
I've seen a lot of "I love my startup and I'm pretty sure it's great, and I feel I deserve credit for it. PS, this is how you can do a startup like me" stories posted on HN, never bothered me any. You can find lots of these stories in blogs everywhere in different fields, like photography and music and writing. I'd hate for these to disappear.
Working out 6 days a week may not take as long as you think. I worked out every other day for a while when I had my home gym, and I only do half an hour every workout.
Imagine an artist who draws well and writes a post about how he gets annoyed when people talk about how lucky he is to have that talent and how they "can't draw a straight line." Then goes on to explain how much work he went through to develop that ability, and that anyone can improve their drawing ability. Sure the guy has a chip on his shoulder, but who would be offended by that? It would have to be someone who had an even bigger chip on their shoulder.
Now if you're associating this with society projecting unrealistic body image expectations, then I agree that that's very annoying. However it's not fair to bite someone's head off over fitness advice. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to be proud of their achievements. It doesn't automatically make them a smug a-hole anymore than being annoyed by it makes you an oversensitive jerk.
But there are other bigger societal issues at play here.
> Sorry dude, working out 6 times a week means that you're exceptionally into it. I am a compsci and photography "freak", I didn't mean it as a pejorative, I meant it as a clear descriptor of someone who devotes nearly all his time to one specific task.
Okay working out 6 days a week is not "devoting all nearly all your time". The average American watches 4 hours of TV a day, and we don't call everyone TV freaks. It's perfectly reasonable to go the gym for 30-60 mins a week without having your life be devoted to it. Someone who simply works out regularly is not a freak. Go to the gym (especially one with a silhouette of bodybuilder on the sign) and you'll be able to see the freaks first hand.
I agree that the gym is a bit unnatural in that it's a contrived form of exercise, but as human beings we are evolved to get a reasonable amount of exercise. Sure in the short term we are programmed for laziness because it's more efficient, but our bodies aren't really made for the life of leisure we enjoy. Regular people all over work out because it makes them feel better in general. It's not because they are freaks, or gluttons for punishment, or love breaking a sweat.
Is it someone's fault that we live a sedentary lifestyle? Not really, it's just the natural course of progress, but I don't think it's right to jump down someone's throat just because they happen to expend some effort to keep healthy and they want to share. If you don't like it don't read it.
The other side of the coin is nutrition. And in this case I think the food industry and farm subsidies really are to blame. The grain-based diet advocated in the food pyramid is a scam, and people who want to eat healthy are forced to pay more for fresh vegetables and free range/grass-fed meats because of the powerful grain lobby. With the type of food available to us today, it takes real willpower (almost to the point of "freakishness" as you say) to eat what would be considered a very average diet at any point more than 60 years ago.
I think nutrition science is still in the dark ages, and the general advice given is not going to be a good fit for everyone. At best it's a partial picture, and at worst it's explicitly corrupt. I think the only reasonable way to eat healthy is to avoid processed foods as much as possible, and even go for locally and sustainably grown produce to avoid nutrient-depleted genetically-engineered-and-identical monocrops grown using nitrogen-based fertilizer.
I guess it makes me angry that the food industry promotes bogus science in order to increase profits at the expense of all our health, then people turn around and get angry at anyone who advocates a healthy diet simply so they can feel better about themselves. It's like being complicit in our destruction.
Sorry to go off on a rant, but getting some exercise and eating right does not have to be this huge ordeal, and we shouldn't lash out at people who want to do it and talk about it just because we have our own issues or guilt around the subject.
Come on, almost no one here at HN is in the demographic that watches 4 hours of tv a day. I might hit 2 if I miss yesterday's dailyshow/colbert and watch both in a night. And even if I do, that is time I can also spend with my girlfriend or my dogs. And again, we're not talking about someone who works out "30-60 min a week" going 6 times a week, unless you're at the gym for 5-10 min at a time?
Personally, I was thrilled I had half an hour to myself the other night to go out photographing a local cemetery 2 blocks away. I then went inside, spent some time with my family, called relatives, and then immediately had to call up some PDFs on current topics I'm studying to keep current for my profession.
" Regular people all over work out because it makes them feel better in general. It's not because they are freaks, or gluttons for punishment, or love breaking a sweat."
I already explained to you what I meant by "freak", you just cruised right by it. You're hell bent on reading persecution here, when what I'm saying is that the post was a vacuous example of how someone with a lot of free time works out a lot more than any 9-5 family man has time for, and then starts saying, "This is how you too can be like me." If it were just a plea for credit where credit was due, that'd be the end of it. But it's not, and given my experience with fitness junkies and their blog posts, it was almost inevitable that it wouldn't be.
> I already explained to you what I meant by "freak", you just cruised right by it.
I'm just saying it's an unreasonable definition to say that someone who works out 6 days a week is automatically a freak or a fitness junkie. As in anything, there is a line where the freaks are, and you've chosen to draw it awfully close to someone who never gets any exercise at all.
The mere fact that you can claim what you do in your first paragraph means you have never seriously had to deal with these problems. Some people are genetically predisposed to being heavy. When I was 16 and swimming over a mile every day, I weighed 220 ("BMI" claims that the maximum permissible weight at my height with a "heavy" build is 180, FYI). Trying to be 180 would do me far, far more harm than being heavy would, or will; this, too, has been backed up by medical studies (see: miserable effectiveness of dieting. See: health complications from losing and gaining weight.).
I'd wager to say that fast food/chain restaurant food is not only less healthy, but is also less delicious. E.g. Thai Green Curry chicken with brown rice seems to be a lot more delicious than a meal at Denny's (and is actually cheaper).
(I'll address the exercise issue -- including the original authors' mistakes in a separate -- in a separate comment).
Flipping it around, I could just as well say that fresh vegetables (kale, spinach, cabbage) are far healthier than animal products (bacon, beef tallow, chicken fat).
So much of the equation is in the specific foods you pick - a vegan could eat the foods you listed and be deeply unhealthy, while an omnivore could eat large portions of fresh vegetables with a bit of free-range meat and be quite healthy.
Eh? You’ve never had delicious veggies? Or fruits?
Sorry, but I eat delicious & healthy food regularly. All you need to do is learn to cook.
( I also eat horribly on a regular basis, when I’m too lazy to cook. )
If you want to gain weight and are interested in a food hack, buy lots of milk. Over here it's about $1/1000 calories. You can't beat that. I drink half a gallon a day and it's done wonders for me. You probably want to be weight lifting if you do this though.
I call it the Tortilla Abomination.
You'll find that most commercial peanut butters only have 2g or so more of sugar per serving then their natural counterparts.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_daily_recommended_inta...
Pre-workout: Protein power, Glutamine, and Lecithin mixed w/water
Breakfast: Whole grain non-instant oatmeal w/ Oat Bran, Raisins, Almonds, Skim Milk (no sugar), plus a multivitamin and some omega 3 pills
Lunch: Small salad w/protein (lettuce, broccoli, tuna, tofu, garbonzos, black beans, salsa, flax seed oil)
Afternoon snack: Cottage cheese
Dinner: Some lean protein (fish, eggs, etc) w/veggies, ideally
Bedtime snack: Plain yogurt w/berries and maybe some protein powder
¹Based on a calorie counter and normal serving sizes.
Your body is a two-port function - it's not rocket science.
What comes in must come out, and if your body doesn't use up all that food energy then... (you get the idea)
Ultimately I think the biggest problem with obesity in the US is how out of proportion calories are to the amount of food ingested. It's probably something that the brain has trouble dealing with. Visually it's hard to imagine this little candy bar being more calories than a gigantic salad. And as Americans have proven time and time again they are found of not accepting logic and reality in favor of house wife superstitions and slack jawed common sense. Of course on the other extreme I've met (grossly) overweight nurses and doctors who obviously know better but cannot deal with it. That's also hard to explain given. If it were so simple I would think these smart people with first hand experience (everyday) of the health risks of obesity would be among the most capable group to deal with the problem. To me this suggests there is a very real mental or chemical cause for obesity that isn't as simple as "eat less, lose weight"
Brad's post is here: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/06/how-to-be-skinnier.h...
As far as I know, oat is a cereal.
> I stopped eating meat
What's with this anti-meat movement? I'm not saying that we should eat a lot of meat, but still a steak (barbecue) tastes very good. I don't eat a lot of meat compared to other persons, I tend to eat the vegetables, but I sure like some steak once in a while, especially when it's pork. In case someone wonders, I'm thin.
In America, "boxed cereals" conjures up images of Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes, which are full of sugar, and usually eaten cold with cold milk. Oatmeal, while it may be a cereal and may come in a box, is usually not placed in the same group as it is usually eaten hot.
This is bad advice. You want to eat two large meals and a light one to minimize total insulin exposure. If you eat and snack all the time you keep insulin spiked up too much.
Working out six days a week to stay thin is completely ridiculous. Once or twice should be sufficient if you're eating right.
Longer fasting periods train your body to switch to running off fat reserves quickly. Metabolism does not slow.
I do agree, though, that if you're eating, say, nothing but pasta and sugar for all of your meals, your insulin will stay high. But that's because of the food you're eating, not the frequency.
Fasting periods raise growth hormone levels, snacking and insulin suppress growth hormone. You should fast an hour after lifting for this reason. If you eat immediately after lifting you shut down a large surge of growth hormone. (Bet your exercise articles didn't mention this either.)
No culture has ever done six meals a day. It's not going out on a limb to suppose we're made to eat two or three times a day.