I stopped in front of a storefront at the mall.

“Oh, look!” I said. “They’ve put in one of those ice cream places we’ve seen advertised.  Let’s try it.”

“I’ll get you something if you want,” my naturally-thin husband, Paul, replied. “I’m not hungry right now.”

Not hungry?  What does that have to do it?  This is the special, creamy, yummy ice cream we’re talking about.  You don’t have to be hungry to enjoy it.

And there, folks, you have a living example of the disconnect between naturally thin folks and naturally fluffy ones.  Thin people eat because their bodies tell them it is time for nourishment. And they are in the habit of listening to their bodies. The rest of us eat for a variety of reasons, but hunger isn’t the main one.  We eat because we are bored, stressed, or sad.  Or because food is available. In fact, we get so separated from the hunger factor that we often can’t tell whether we are actually hungry or not.

Thin people also stop eating when they are no longer hungry.  The rest of us eat until we are stuffed or the food is gone, whichever comes first.

What can we learn from naturally thin folks?  We can learn patience as we endeavor not to physically harm those aggravating folks –those wretched people who say, “Oh, I lost five pounds since I last stepped on a scale. Wonder how that happened?”

Only one who has been in a do-or-die struggle with weight and lost five pounds after a month of effort can appreciate the true cruelty of that statement!

Seriously, what do those thin folks do that we can do, too?  An old book I found in my bookcase titled The 7 Secrets of Slim People by Vikki Hansen and Shawn Goodman has some good points about this topic.  I don’t agree with all their premises, but they got this one right.  Thin people eat only to satisfy physical hunger.

We’ll talk about hunger — how to use it and how to control it — in the next few posts.

Eating to live and living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown