Overeating

“ I am recommending to people that they should seek the higher pleasures of the intellect, and those pleasures are not found in standing over a cook stove, nor in compelling others to stand over a cook stove. Moreover, I know that the artificial mixing of foods to tempt peoples' palates is one of the principal causes of overeating, and therefore of ill health, and therefore of the ultimate destruction of the pleasures of life. ”

“ Eighteen grave and reverend doctors assure us that overeating is the prevalent dietetic sin of the century, while the remainder of the two dozen are equally positive that the vast majority of their patients are underfed. One man preaches the gospel of dignified simplicity on one meal a day and one clean collar a week, while the lean and learned Fletcher declares that if we only keep on masticating our one mouthful of food long enough we shall delude the stomach into magnifying it into ten, and can dine sumptuously on a menu-card and a biscuit. ”

“ Overeating, by introducing an unnecessary amount of food into the body, overworks the organs of digestion and also the organs of excretion. It may also lead to the accumulation of burdensome fat and of harmful wastes. On the other hand, the taking of too little food impoverishes the blood and weakens the entire body. As a rule, however, more people eat too much than too little, and to quit eating before the appetite is fully satisfied is with many persons a necessary precaution. The power of self-control, valuable in all phases of life, is indispensable in the avoidance of overeating. ”

“ Symptoms of Overeating.—Efficiency depends not only upon one's capacity to perform, but upon the character of the performance. The spirit must be willing to perform. The overeater is heavy, phlegmatic, indifferent, lacking in energy, tact and initiative. She is constantly subjecting her system to needless overwork; she is depressed, nervous, imaginative and she is not ambitious. She is a victim of self-poisoning, of constipation, indigestion, headaches, flatulency, neuralgia, vertigo, and melancholia. An overeater never enjoys good health, never is efficient, and cannot possibly be successful. ”

“ Food and Caprice.—Those complaining of lack of appetite should learn not to let caprice rule them in the matter of eating. There are people who by habit eat too much. What they must do, as pointed out in the chapter on Obesity, is to unlearn the habit of overeating, and that is almost as hard to break as the habit of taking stimulants. Most nervous people undereat, but they must take themselves in hand, eat three meals a day, and reestablish the habit of taking as much at these meals as they ought. ”

“ But one who lives a natural and active life, especially if out-of-doors a fair part of the time, is not likely to lack a good appetite nor to eat less than the required amount. Good general health always brings with it a normal appetite.
Overeating, however, is no doubt in many cases due very largely to the inadequate character of the foods consumed. I am satisfied that if all our foods were eaten in their natural condition and if they perfectly supplied the needs of the body there would be no tendency toward overeating. ”

“ They are actually in debt to that extent to their tissues, yet they are persuaded that they are paying nature's claims in full. Sometimes the excuse is that they have heard, or read, of how much harm is done by overeating; they have taken to heart the phrase that people are digging their graves with their teeth, and so they are actually cultivating the habit of undereating instead of allowing their instinct for food to manifest itself. Many are found to be following the good old saw of getting up from the table hungry. ”

“ Such aversions are allied to the feeling of repletion by which Nature warns the eater to desist, and, if this warning is persistently disregarded, the monitory instinct finally suspends its function; overeating becomes a morbid habit, our system has adapted itself to the abnormal condition, and every deviation from the new routine produces the same feeling of distress which shackles the rum-drinker to his unnatural practice. Avoid pungent spices, do not cram your children against their will, and never fear that natural aliments will tempt them to excess. ”

“ While in our day we hear much of people overeating, the nervous specialist finds that many of his patients are undereating. {298} These patients grow out of many discomforts, dreads, and symptoms that often seem, even to the physician, to be due to organic change, when they take on enough weight to relieve them from the incessant calls for more nutrition to which insufficient food has made them subject. ”

“ We know today that overeating for some is an emotional problem, stemming from feelings of rejection and insecurity. Individuals who feel unloved, whether this is truly the case or not, make up for this lack to themselves by stuffing in large quantities of food. ”

“ If this goes on for long the person can expect to create a serious illness of some kind.
Individual sensitivity to this type of overeating is dependent upon genetics and personality and who is generating the negative emotions. Self generated negative emotions are very difficult to avoid. If you are unable to change your own emotional tone or that of others around you, then it is important to eat very lightly, eat only easily digested foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, raw juices, steamed vegetables, and small servings of whole grains, nuts and seeds. ”

“ Even the habit of eating may be cultivated into a vice. Indeed, there are those who gorge without restraint, which in itself is unchaste and immoral. We've often seen them as, with napkin under foot or tucked under the collar, they eat their way through mountains of food and wash it down as they reach for more. ”

“ If sensations of hunger are neglected, appetite is lost; on the other hand, if the stomach's warning of "I have had enough" is unheeded, the nerves of that organ after a time get wearied, and no longer send their important message to the brain, so that a habit of over-eating is acquired. ”

“ How often is it the case, that persons, by the appearance of a favorite article, are tempted to eat merely to gratify the palate, when the stomach is already adequately supplied. All such intemperance wears on the constitution, and shortens life. It not infrequently happens that excess in eating produces a morbid appetite, which must constantly be denied. ”

“ Is it not too absurd to contemplate without both tears and laughter that that man who should plead with his fellow men to abstain from habitually living on butter cakes and coffee, should be charged with obscenity and imprisoned in consequence? And imagine some sapient postoffice official solemnly declaring that any discussion of digestion is obscene! Consider how the land would be flooded with literature describing the pleasures of gluttony and depicting impossible gastronomic feats! ”

“ If people were more temperate in the pleasures of the table, the purveyors of remedies for dyspepsia would find their incomes considerably lessened. Satisfy your hunger, by all means, but do not pander to the vice of gluttony.
Instead of "eating to live," a large proportion of people simply "live to eat." But sooner or later Nature exacts the penalty for violation of one of her cardinal laws, which is "temperance." An outraged stomach will not always remain quiescent, and when the reaction comes, the offender realizes that "they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." ”

“ Fat and flabbiness and over-feeding is a national vice with us. The fashionable cafés and restaurants are thronged with puffy, heavy-jowled men and women, eating and drinking. Hotels and food-purveyors are constantly inventing new palate-tickling dishes to tempt your appetite. Orchestras and dramatic troupes are engaged to entertain and amuse you while you overload your stomach, take on fat, and lay the foundation for future cases of indigestion or dyspepsia. ”

“ We can tell how much food to eat by our hunger or appetite. We can always feel when we have enough. Then is the time to stop.
Sometimes we eat plain bread and meat until we have enough, and then sweet cake or pie is brought in. Then we have a false appetite for sweet things. If the sweet things had not made a false hunger, we should have had enough to eat. But the false appetite makes us want more, and so we eat too much, and sometimes get sick from it. ”

“ It was only after the missing link was found and added to the chain that I could fully realize the enormous waste of strength and the mental and moral degradation from eating food in excess, because the enticements of relish are taken for the actual needs of the body. Think of it! Actual soul power involved in ridding the stomach and bowels of the foul sewage of food in excess, food in a state of decomposition, to be forced through nearly two rods of bowels and largely at the expense of the soul itself!! ”

“ With these, and various biting alcohols, the delicate lining of the stomach is inflamed, inducing a desire for food which passes for what it is not, namely, honest appetite. The palate demands more food than the stomach can digest or the system assimilate. Poor nature, anxious to do the best she can, adapts herself to the unnatural situation, and forces all the other organs to do the same; and thus we become accustomed to over-eating and do not know it. ”

“ That through a manner of living, of a character so fostering of corrupting and putrefying principles, is generated and nourished a whole host of diseases which, [Pg 284] otherwise, would not exist, is so easy to see, that only an extremely obstinate love of flesh-meat can blind one to the fact. Before I renounced flesh-eating, which, unhappily, I had not the courage to do before I had lived a half century, I suffered from time to time from a frightful neuralgia, which tortured me many long days and nights. Since I abstained from that diet I have rid myself of this evil entirely. ”

“ I do not say likes and dislikes; a child's whimsical desire to treat innutritious or injurious substances as comestibles should certainly not be encouraged as long as its hunger can be appeased with less suspicious aliments. For it is a curious fact that all unnatural practices—the eating of indigestible matter as well as of poisons—are apt to excite a morbid appetency akin to the stimulant habit. The human stomach can be accustomed to the most preposterous things. ”

“ And when feeble digestion, delicacy, or bad health result as the natural consequence of our insane proceedings, instead of blaming our own folly and amending our conduct, we sit down complacently to lament the degeneracy of the age, and boast of the marvellous constitutions and hardihood of the children of our day, whom neither wind nor weather could hurt. If it were a favourite colt or dog whose training we were superintending, the folly of shutting it up all day in a confined atmosphere and denying it food at proper intervals, would stare us in the face. ”

“ The popular habit of using, inordinately, appetizers in the shape of the ordinary table condiments, begets a false and unnatural appetite. The time comes when honest food palls upon the depraved senses. The pampered, jaded appetite no longer finds satisfaction in simple food-flavors; the palate must be prompted with pungent things. The cook, who is never a physiologist, responds to the demand for spurs to appetite, and finds them in mixtures of spices and peppers and mustards and acids and essential oils and chemicals, and multitudes of non-food substances. ”

“ Want of appetite is equivalent to the most authoritative [Pg 22] command to eat nothing, and we disregard it at our peril. Food, no matter how wholesome, taken into our stomachs under such circumstances, instead of being digested and appropriated, becomes rank poison. Eating without appetite is one of the most fatal of common errors.
We have no room, even if we had the ability and the desire, to discuss the comparative merits of the two opposing systems of diet—the vegetarian and the mixed. We shall consider the question of flesh-eating an open one. ”

“ When loss of appetite is occasioned by depraved humours, we must give those kinds of food and drink which will either clear away such humours by vomiting, or downwards by the bowels, or those that by dilution will render them better. You have the materials of these things treated of in the First Book of this work. Should the loss of appetite be occasioned by debility, since all debility is owing to an intemperament of the parts, we must cure the species of intemperament by its contraries. ”

“ Yet numbers of people attempt to justify the gratification of their gluttonous proclivities by the statement that they are "blessed with a good appetite," while the truth of the matter is, they are cursed with an inordinate lust for food. ”

“ For when food and drink is served to us late or too little or poorly prepared, if we are weighed down by the domination of gluttony, it will follow that we will also be provoked by the goads of anger. ”

“ We swallow with stupid gluttony muscle, fat and intestines of beasts without discerning in those substances such parts as are truly adapted to our nourishment and those much more abundant which we ought to reject; and we fill our stomach indiscriminately with good and bad, useful and injurious. That’s the very point, where a separation is to be made, and, if the whole medical faculty could boast of a chemist and philosopher, we should no more be compelled to partake of such disgusting feasts. ”

“ Mental gluttony, or over-reading, is a dangerous propensity, tending to weakness of digestive power, and in some cases to loss of appetite: we know that bread is a good and wholesome food, but who would like to try the experiment of eating two or three loaves at a sitting? ”