Cravings: Do They Really Go Away?

I was coming home last night late and I was hungry. I had not stayed up on my eating particularly well that day and I knew I really should eat something when I got home. I had eaten lunch late too--at 5:00PM. So, I was appropriately hungry now at 9:30PM at night. 

My 5PM lunch had been a spinach salad with ground turkey, tomatoes, sliced almonds and some dairy-free ranch dressing I had made a few days before. It was a yummy salad. So as I was headed home and hungry, I was wondering what I could eat. And nothing sounded good. It seemed like a lot of work to cook the food. I was tired. It was late. What if I just went to bed without eating? I could eat tomorrow.

Excuse me? I could eat tomorrow?

What alien was inhabiting my body? I've wished most of my life that I could switch bodies with someone, anyone really, who didn't have my issues and who looked good on the outside no matter how messed up she was on the inside. I was willing to trade all of my external and internal dysfunction for her infinitely greater internal dysfunction as long as I could look gooooood in the process. Mostly, I wondered what it could possibly be like to live in a body where you could decide casually one evening that despite being hungry you didn't want to eat so you would wait until tomorrow. 

That woman had heard my particular cry and she must be inhabiting my body now because eating has never been a take-or-leave-it business for me. I've always taken it. Food is good. Food is necessary. Food is life blood. Food must be eaten. 

Yet, here I was casually contemplating not eating that night because it was too much trouble? I really must be living in an alternate universe. That or living out a very vivid nocturnal dream. 

Pinch. Owwwww!

Nope. This is me. Very much awake and alive. Not dreaming, yet contemplating not eating as if it was possibly something I could do without for the next ten hours. Something is very, very wrong with this picture. 

Or possibly, I was for the first time in recent memory living in a body that could progress through one day without consuming every calorically viable food substance within a 30 meter range of my presence. A truly life-changing miracle. 

For one day. One day, folks, I have walked this earth and not felt that constant, never-ending presence of hunger and need and lack of satiation. For one day, I could join the ranks of those who are not mindlessly hunting food with each and every breath they take. For one day, I didn't have to beat back cravings with blood and sweat and tears. For one day. 

What a day it was.