Feed Your Hunger

Categories: Uncategorized Jun 15, 2014

If we are hungry, we eat. The hungrier we are, the more we eat. Feeding keeps us alive and it should keep us healthy. A friend of mine recently told me that people were eating plenty. He reminded me of the obesity statistics in America. According to those stats, most Americans are not starving.

But maybe they are. Obesity could lead you to assume that people are eating plenty, that they are not starving. But hunger drives consumption. If so much food is being consumed, enough food to create alarming obesity statistics, surely there must be a hunger.

The truth is, we are all hungry. Some of us are even starving. Most of us can not distinguish our hunger, that emptiness inside, that gnawing within us. Our obesity statistics would hint that we are trying to satisfy the wrong hunger with the wrong nourishment. Being hungry, and not really knowing where that hunger come from, could lead us to feeding the wrong hunger with the wrong "food."

For example, our bodies are made to move. Our very brain craves stimulation and information, nourishment, from movement. If we do not move, if we do not nourish our brain through one of its primary sources of nourishment, we may start to crave movement. We may grow restless, we may grow bored or apathetic, we may simply be hungering for movement. But perhaps we don't move, perhaps we try to soothe this restlessness with a substitute = food. Boredom is often appeased with food. However, the root cause of boredom is often idleness, or not moving. Food is most often simply a distraction, or a bandaid, for boredom and apathy.

We were also made for affection, for love. Science has proven that children that grow up with out the love and affection of care givers, display signs of malnourishment, and even develop mental disabilities. These children can get adequate food, but still appear to be malnourished. This does not contradict the above statements about obesity, by the way. Obesity is not necessarily a sign of rich nourishment. Anyway, people were clearly made for love, affection, and social interaction. Yes, social interaction! Now, picture millions of people sitting alone in isolation, bored, depressed and munching on "comfort" food. We even call it comfort food. It is the wrong type of food, for the hunger that is within these people.

There are other hungers in life that we all have. The point is that many of us address these hungers with the wrong type of sustenance. Food is not the answer for all the types of hunger that we can experience. The type of hunger, the type of gnawing inside of us, can only be fed appropriately by what we are lacking.

If you don't move as you were designed, movement is the only way to feed that need. If you don't interact with others, if you don't have companionship, chips and dip are only a shallow substitute that will leave you feeling empty though you may get feel temporarily full.

The obesity in America suggest that we don't have an issue with lack of food. It does however suggest that many of us could all be starving. Do you have a gnawing in you, a hunger? Are you lacking adequate nourishment? Do you simply need to feed your brain by moving? Do you need to soothe your soul by laughing with a friend? The best food in the world is often the food that you cannot find in a grocery store, or even a health store.

You were indeed designed to get hungry when you need nourishment. Hunger means you need to be filled. Which hunger(s) are you feeding and how are you feeding them? Food itself can really only satisfy one type of hunger.

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