stop eating, get smarter and live longer: is hunger the new dream diet?
“Kate Gibbs discovers the lost art of feeling hungry.”
Being someone who essentially eats for a job – cooking, talking to chefs and writing about food all being the mere tool by which we get to the main event: food – I’ve never been a dieter. The fruitlessness of suffering a mere smear of quark on a quinoa chip for breakfast and then turning up for a three-course lunch at Bennelong, followed by fried chicken at Mary’s just because, doesn’t evade me.
Dieting, as a concept, requires a preoccupation with food, perhaps more than even writing about it does. Dieting demands calorie counting and skipping whole food groups, shunning butter and scotch fillet steaks, choosing chicken breast over the better bits of the bird; it makes us cautious about food, obsessive.
I prefer the no-junk blanket rule, never entering the soda-and-chip aisle at the supermarket for example, simply because there’s nothing there for me, delicious wise. I pack sandwiches for long car trips lest lunchtime strike on the M1 and the only sign of edibles are under the golden arches. I just eat real food, mostly.
For real food lovers it’s incredibly difficult to stick to Michael Pollan’s wise mantra: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Because ramen, because Colin Fassnidge’s bone marrow, because Matt Moran’s bombe Alaska and Neil Perry’s kimchi burger. It’s just not practical, let alone fun.
But in the last two weeks I’ve lost two kilograms, I have more energy and I feel sharp and more lean. I am the latest convert to a way of eating that means you can eat the same reasonably healthy, sometimes virtuous (but sometimes an almond croissant) food you always have – five days a week. On the remaining two days, I’m reduced to the calorie counting (500 a day for women) of my wanna-be-slender compatriots. It’s the 5:2 diet, and you can read all about it somewhere else. I call it alternate fasting, or, two days a week of skipping breakfast and just eating vegetables and protein for the remaining two meals a day, and zero snacking.
The punchy proposition that 5:2 will reduce bad cholesterol, prevent obesity, protect us against some cancers and keep us healthier through a longer life is the impetus for many.
But the offshoot is something powerful that I am going to say may change the world. We 5:2’er doers are discovering something we’ve not felt for a while, as humans: hunger. Not real hunger, not the third-world kind, but that gurgling tension that diverts your mind to what’s in the fridge, that has you sighing at old Instagram shots of Andrew McConnell’s chilli dumplings, that makes you conscious of the quality of the food you put in your mouth when you finally do. On fast days and normal days alike, every mouthful is a valuable commodity.
Is the 5:2 fast a way out of our tragic cul-de-sac? If most of us (pregnant women, children, many others, excepted) starved ourselves every now and then, as our antecedents did for millions of years, could this make a genuine impact on global health and the obesity epidemic, as well the problem of global food production? At the very least, it’s a way of eating that gives the internal organs a welcome rest from their duties as a processing plant….. MORE
Read the rest of the story, published in delicious. Magazine, February 2016, here.