Steve Pavlina wrote this after having nothing but juice for the last ten days:
With each passing day, I can see more clearly how cooked food is used as a drug to create a certain kind of feeling in our bodies. We keep eating it because we’re addicted to it, not because it’s healthy for us. We confuse those addictive cravings for the experience of genuine hunger. Instead of making conscious food choices, we let our addictions dictate what we eat, how much, and how often.
I experienced a glimpse of this during day two of my own short live foods fast:
I feel fine, and didn’t feel too hungry during the day actually. There were times I wanted to eat, but not because I was hungry - I was just craving for taste and the feeling of having a full stomach. There were times I walked past the fridge too and just wanted to open it and pick something up out of habit. Makes you think how much a person eats in a day is based on how hungry he really is!
I’m definitely not comparing one day of a liquid diet to his ten. But I remember how I felt back then; as if I wanted to eat out of habit, not out of hunger. An usually unconscious choice, like eating simply because it was lunch time, became conscious and I realized what I was craving wasn’t the satisfaction of a physical need, but simply the sensations of eating.
Like Steve alludes to, I realized I had been filling a void at times with food, and now had no idea how to fill it without. I’m not saying that eating out of habit is a bad thing per se, but I do think it’s a bad thing to perform the same habits again and again without being conscious of them.
In a way, it’s akin to how I feel when I come home after a while spent overseas. All those little habits that I do at home everyday and feel as if I couldn’t do without disappear in a foreign land. And when I come home, I realize the world didn’t fall apart just because I stopped reading my RSS feeds or watching my favorite TV series. And I didn’t end up any less happy either.
