Meals should be taken at the same time daily, to establish a routine for the glands which secrete the digestive juices.
Robert Svoboda, The Hidden Secret of Ayurveda
You are at your desk, idly surfing the Internet when you have noticed four hours have passed. You are not hungry, so you keep surfing. One hour later you feel inexplicably exhausted and it is only 7p.m. Or, imagine, you are sitting in traffic on the way home from work, and it has been five hours since your last meal.
Those donuts at the office seemed sufficient but now you are yelling at your husband and kids as you pop through the front door simply because you are irritable and hungry.
The problem with eating when you are hungry is that we wait until the damage
occurs while waiting for the hunger signs, which include anger, fatigue, irritability and cluttered thinking. Having a natural rhythm to eating avoids these emotional upsets that arise from essentially making our body beg for food.
Many women can recall getting easily upset when they were extremely hungry. I met a man named Gunther would complained that his wife could not go for six hours without food when they went hiking, even though he easily could.
I explained that that’s insane, no woman should have to go without food for six hours on a regular basis. Women have busy bodies. Our bodies schedule menstruation, pregnancies, and digestive transits.
These bodily tasks are readily handled when they follow a cycle. This is the beauty of eating meals at a regular time. The body adjusts and optimizes digestion and a series of other daily tasks.
We do not normally wait until we get a signal to wash, brush our teeth or go to bed. We take these self-care measures at predictable, scheduled times during the day. We don’t wait until people faint from the smell of our breath to brush our teeth, nor do we wait until people will no longer come within ten feet of us before we bathe.
Imagine if we fell asleep at the wheel before we decided we needed to go to bed. Such scenarios indicate that we need to brush our teeth, take a bath or go to bed. We do not wait for the signal to do these daily acts of self-care because that would be dangerous. If we waited for the signal, it would be too late. So we wash, brush and sleep on a regular basis for optional health.
The same is true for eating. Eating at planned times removes the possibility that your emotions and energy level will suddenly shift in harmful ways because you are overly hungry. To avoid over-reacting and snapping at people, eat on a regular basis. Don’t wait until everyone starts calling you an impatient, tyrannical cow behind your back.