贴篇习作：My Diet Theories

Most diet theories are scientifically unsound, but some are effective ── in discouraging people from eating. Here I offer two, hopefully effective ones.

The amount of food, that is, the amount of energy, one can consume in her/his lifetime is pre-determined (by goodness knows who and how). Quota, if you will. So if you eat more every day, you use up your quota sooner. What happens if I use up my quota? Oh, you die. Sorry.

Hunger is a natural and healthy status of life. For a very long time in human evolution, starving was (and still is, in many parts of the world) the number one threat to life. Whoever ate faster, ate more, and thereby accumulated more fat, had better chances to survive famines that were sure to come. As a result, we are all overeaters by inheritance. We feel hungry way too early and too often than we should, and we are not satiated until we eat too much ── our brains are trying to build up for famines that never come (for us lucky ones, thank God). So we need to re-train our brains to take hunger as a signal of well-being, not a life-threatening urge to eat. Try to tell yourself: “Hunger is good; hunger is healthy; hunger is beautiful; and I love hunger.”

By the way, it is not all that bad to be hungry. You stay alert and do things faster when you are hungry, as your brain wants you to fight for your life. And you get an immediate payback ── your food tastes a lot better. How about a long term payback? You get to live longer, in better shape.

In his June 2005 Stanford University graduation commencement speech, Steve Jobs (Apple founder and CEO) quoted the tag line of The Whole Earth Catalog: "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish". While it is obvious that “stay hungry” here means to stay mentally hungry ── for knowledge, there is no harm to take it physiologically also.