I keep waiting for the next time I can eat

Sometimes dinner is barely over before tomorrow’s food has started setting up camp in my head.

I can still taste the meal I have just eaten. The plate may not even have made it to the kitchen yet. But some part of me has already moved on.

Not because dinner was necessarily too small. Not because I am physically hungry again seven minutes later. I am thinking about tomorrow’s food because I need to know that something lovely is waiting for me.

The comfort is not quite in the food yet. It is in the appointment.

My day had become a series of food landmarks

Breakfast ended and lunch appeared in the distance. Lunch finished and dinner began glowing on the horizon. After dinner, tomorrow’s meal took over.

Food became the timetable and punctuation of my day. Everything else happened in the gaps.

I could be working, watching television, going somewhere or doing something I genuinely liked, but a quieter part of my brain was still measuring the distance to food.

Three hours.

Two hours.

Surely half past four is practically five.

Sometimes I eat because the next meal feels too far away.

That is not quite the same as hunger. It is more like refusing to remain in the waiting room for another four hours. Eating brings the occasion closer. It lets something happen now.

Except that is another trap, because once I eat early, the meal is over early too. Then the next stretch of waiting becomes even longer. A brilliant administrative decision all round.

Every meal was a wedding and a funeral

The approach to a meal could feel like a wedding.

There was anticipation. Planning. Excitement. A sense that the day was moving towards something. In my imagination, the food would be delicious, leisurely and completely satisfying. The violins were practically warming up.

Then I ate it.

Sometimes it was lovely. Sometimes it was only fine. Very often, the anticipation had been better than the actual meal.

A real meal has an impossible job when it has been carrying several hours of emotional expectation. It must taste wonderful, last long enough, feel generous enough and somehow justify all the time spent looking forward to it.

That is quite a workload for a plate of food.

Then it ends.

The wedding becomes a small funeral. The plates are cleared, the pleasure is finished and I am left standing at the far end of the occasion thinking, well, what now?

Apparently, the answer was to begin organising the next wedding.

I am already thinking about tomorrow’s food while eating tonight’s.

Why I now eat once a day

I am currently doing OMAD, which loosely means eating one meal a day.

I am not saying this is the correct way to eat, or that anybody else should do it. It is simply what I am doing at the moment, and one reason is the exact problem I am writing about here.

For me, having three meals to anticipate created three emotional climbs and three emotional drops every day.

I would look forward to breakfast, eat breakfast and begin waiting for lunch. I would look forward to lunch, eat lunch and begin waiting for dinner. Dinner would end and tomorrow’s food would step forward to collect the baton.

It was an emotional roller coaster built entirely from ordinary meals.

So I removed two of the occasions.

Now I have one meal to look forward to instead of three. One period of anticipation. One ending. Fewer negotiations and fewer repeated reminders that eating is over again.

That structure suits my brain better at the moment. It may not always suit me, and it certainly will not suit everybody. It also deserves its own honest article, including the less convenient parts.

But it has shown me something important. My problem was not simply that I liked food too much.

I had made food responsible for giving the day its shape.

Give yourself something nearer to arrive at

I do not think the answer is to stop looking forward to eating.

Food is pleasurable. A good meal is worth anticipating. I would be deeply suspicious of any plan requiring me to receive dinner with the emotional response of someone opening a council tax bill.

But when I notice that I am mentally pacing beside the clock, it helps to ask one plain question:

Am I hungry, or am I waiting?

Sometimes the answer is hunger. In that case, I do not think the prize goes to the person who can remain hungry for the longest while becoming increasingly furious with everyone in the house. If the way I am eating repeatedly leaves me genuinely ravenous, then the structure may need adjusting. Hunger is information, not an exam in moral strength.

But sometimes I am not especially hungry. I simply dislike how far away the next meal feels.

That is the harder one, because eating solves the waiting immediately. It gives me the event now. Unfortunately, it also ends the event now, and then I am left with an even longer stretch before the next one.

Close the decision

What helps slightly is deciding about the meal once.

I know what I am eating. I know roughly when I am eating it. The decision is closed.

I do not need to keep opening the imaginary menu, rearranging it, calculating the hours or visiting the kitchen as though dinner might have moved itself forward out of sympathy.

Choose one nearer landmark

Once the meal decision is closed, I need one other thing to get to first.

Not a new life purpose. Not macramé. Just one definite point between now and the meal.

Finish this piece of work. Have a shower. Watch one episode. Go for my walk. Change the bedding. Read until the end of the chapter. Anything with a clear beginning and a clear ending that brings the horizon closer.

None of those things is dinner.

That is fine.

The aim is not to trick myself into believing that tidying a drawer is as exciting as eating something delicious. It is to stop asking the next meal to provide all the comfort, structure and anticipation in the entire day.

Sometimes the thought of food will still hover in the background. I may still look at the clock more often than necessary. This does not mean I have failed to distract myself correctly.

It means I am learning to notice the waiting without automatically ending it by eating.

I can look forward to the meal.
I just need something else to happen before I get there.