Un-PC Opinions: Reader Open-Mindedness Advised, Writer Open-Mindedness Exhausted
Quite frankly I think you people are being insane. If you have money in your pocket you have no reason to be hungry. If you are constantly hungry it is your body attempting to communicate to you, not something you need to supress with a special diet of rice and cooking oil. If you are hungry, eat until you are not hungry. If your car stutters, do you not put gas in the tank? If the fireplace dims, do you not put more wood on it? Why do you insist somehow you are healthy, or that you are pursuing a 'lifestyle', by being constantly hungry and pretending this is harmless and acceptable? It all seems like the sort of circular logic that made leeching fashionable.
The money in my pocket is controlled by my mother. Everyone around me thought I was dying as a child because I was so thin and looked malnourished, but her argument is that I was just right. Same goes for when I used to starve myself--she said I "looked perfect."
She's the sort of person who gets unhappy at you for putting sugar in your morning chai for a while, because it will
obviously evolve into a lifetime sugar habit. She's the sort of person who tells an (extremely thin) 9-year-old that she needs to watch her weight, because if she ends up with fat on her stomach OH NO.
This is one of the reasons why I did what I did, which I am not doing now largely because I refuse to listen to her. At the moment, I am trying to find food available from my dining hall to fill the hole caused by my lack of budget.
I am venting because for years no one knew about this but me, and as far as I know no one who actually knows me knows it but me. So, rather than letting it fester, I'm putting it down here.
I am hungry. I eat until I am not hungry. The question, though, is "what is good to eat?" Is there anything I can do so that my meals are more spread out, rather than having my body demand a meal every three hours--as-in, near the beginning of this I had to eat 5 full meals a day. I've
been insane before, for years, and this is not it.
So yeah. Here's the way it works: I eat a meal. I fill up. I study for three hours. I am ravenous. I eat a meal. Repeat... it's a major annoyance. The lifestyle I am pursuing is that of "mathematician," not of starving waif. The problem with pursuing the lifestyle of a mathematician is that it is, as my mentor told me, a bit like being a mountain climber (he found he had to eat the same amount for both, and he pursued climbing before changing his focus to mathematics). Hence the "perpetually hungry," since that's just the way it goes. Mathematics is extraordinarily hard work, and hard work makes you hungry.
Nikov, I'm not trying to be hungry. However, being a college student, my opportunities to eat are limited by my schedule and the awful hours of my dining commons (that takes a 10-ish-minute bus ride from whenever the bus shows up or a 20-minute walk), so frequently I don't have the option of getting proper food into my body because it requires a time commitment of well over half an hour just for traveling to and from campus, possibly much more depending on when the bus back arrives or if a bus shows up a minute early and I miss it. Hell, on the weekend (when I'm not on campus because of classes anyway) the bus to campus around dinnertime pops in scarcely more than once an hour.
Fast food can be used to take the edge off this, but it takes a heavy toll on my budget (in terms of cost vs. amount of food, the ratio really isn't that good) and Jack-in-the-Box isn't exactly ideal health food. Half the reason I'm in this thread is I'm looking for something decent to shove into my room's tiny-ass fridge-with-no-freezer that I can eat between real meals. So once I have an opportunity to actually pick some food up, I won't be constantly hungry, in theory.
For me it's a 15-minute walk, but it was still so much of annoyance that I've started packing two lunches and going with that (eat one at 12:00, one at 3:00, since I eat breakfast from 8:00-9:00 while studying and then head off to the math library). Then I eat a large dinner at 6:00, in hopes of it tiding me over until I sleep at midnight. So far, this plan is working out pretty well. I'd honestly go with cheese-meat-vegetable sandwiches and a bag of nuts in case you need more to get you through the day.
I also solve a lot of my problems by constantly being on campus, though that may not be an option for you.
Vector, quick question: have you noticed a marked difference in mental clarity after increasing your caloric intake? I've been blaming my lack of a reasonable sleep schedule (4-6 hours most nights, punctuated by 6-10 on weekends), and have been focused on balancing that one out. I'm starting to wonder if it might be tied more to my diet.
So, I'll put it this way. I sleep 5-6 hours most nights, but I end up with perfect mental clarity after about noon or so (once I've had my tea and been working for a few hours). It's definitely about the food. On the first day of my study regimen I went without lunch, since I'd never really needed to eat it before. After three hours I was desperately hungry; after 4-5 I could barely think; after 6 I couldn't think, and could barely hold myself upright. On the next day, I managed something like 11 hours of actual work (not just the "I say I'm working but I'm really just falling over" sort) after having increased my caloric intake 2.5-fold.
A week of eating like that has made the standard 9 hours easy to get through, and I'm only being halted by an inability to do more math/concentrate for longer. Now I'm gunning for 14 hours, which I expect will require even more food. I'll let you know how all this goes.
More on this subject: I tend to go into trances when I'm solving certain kinds of problems. This state pretty much amounts to ultimate mental clarity, since trancing means the problem
will be solved. In attempting to figure out the trigger (because I'd really rather have three hours of this than normal problem-solving, even if I end up rather batty afterwards), I've discovered that being well-fed is key. So yes, make sure you eat, and eat lots. It's pretty impossible to get any good work done on an empty stomach.
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Topic: Food for the perpetually hungry (Read 12116 times)