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Joe’s Journal: Day 14 – Why “3 Meals a Day”?

It’s super exciting for me to reflect on my 60 Day Reboot. I get to relive my experience and it’s fascinating to recall those moments where I really started to feel different. I’m sharing these entries as part of the 2nd Anniversary celebration of Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead.

Now let’s take a look at Day 14 of my 60 Day Reboot…

October 25, 2007

Day 14:
At this point I was two weeks into my Reboot. My thought processes were clearer than ever before. As much as I’d struggled with the Reboot at the beginning, now I was feeling great and loving the effects it was having on me. As I began to relax and really get into it, I had some fun pondering food myths I had always taken for granted…

The whole idea of eating three times a day for example…says who? Who made it mandatory that we eat three square meals a day, or else?

It just so happens that the three-meal-a-day custom is really a modern idea for rich, industrialized countries. For more than a thousand years the one-meal system was the rule, and that one meal, which occurred toward the evening, was considered the reward for the arduous labors of the day. Some speculate that as cultures got richer and more powerful they began to indulge in eating a lot more, and this over-consumption might have had a hand in leading to their eventual declines.

It eventually became more common, at least in the Western World, to eat two meals per day; breakfast and supper. There’s an English proverb from the sixteenth century that says “To rise at six, dine at ten, sup at six, and go to bed at then, makes a man live ten times ten.” But as England became more industrialized and prosperous, people increasingly began to eat three meals a day, more as a convention reflecting social status than as something necessary from a nutritional or physiological point of view.

Anyway, long ponderous walks in Central Park will do that to you, and I liked that idea that my Reboot was prompting me to ask questions about our most basic assumptions. What I loved even more was the sense of clarity and my vastly increased level of energy. Optimism was oozing from me and I didn’t feel tired or lethargic. I was making sure to stay hydrated, drinking lots of water, which also helped me to control many of the food cravings I was having. I purposely said “cravings” and not “hunger”. I was getting the nutrition I needed and filling my stomach with juice and water, but that didn’t mean I didn’t crave the things I wasn’t indulging in anymore.

Read my previous entries.