No more food, thanks!

Posted in: Food, Injury Time

One of the effects of being almost totally immobile 24h/day is your appetite shrinks to a diddly snack of its previous feast self. What also happens is the quality of the appetite shifts too. Regular physical activity seems to create a raw, animal need for food, and a concomitant satisfaction when it's sated. Every meal is a truly enjoyable experience. In fact, it's one of the really great side-effects of heavy exercise is that connection to a serious growling hunger.

Whereas without the exercise my appetite feels almost intellectual, a scrawning whining thing that makes weak mentions of its vague caloric insufficiency every so often but when actually presented with sustenance it seems neither grateful nor particularly excited. Lack of exertion has robbed me of a pleasure of being alive.

It's not the quality of hospital food - I'd say it's pretty decent, solid English fare, and they give the patients plenty of choice. No, the problem is physiological.

For example, right now, I am "hungry". Yet there's been a plate of roast chicken, sautéed potatoes, veg, and a pear sitting here next to be my bed cooling off for the last hour. My desire to eat is less than the effort required to simply shift the laptop off my legs and start the mechanics of consumption. Amazing, considering normally my hunger has been known (in admittedly extreme cases) to pull food out of bins rather than wait another 20mins before getting home.

To think that people who are totally sedentary live without the regular enjoyment of satisfying a proper hunger. Gah! Poor bastards.

Anyway, the meals here keeps me more than filled; it's generally an exercise in persistence, a sense of self-responsibility about nourishment, and strong aversion to waste that makes me even finish it.

So, no more grapes, thanks :-)

Come to think of it ... Green & Black's chocolate's fine though, hee hee

Posted by Paul Makepeace at May 25, 2005 13:24 | TrackBack