Perfunctory Eating....by Heather

When I first started looking in to how I could adapt my diet to incorporate the kinds of principles talked about at some length by Peter Attia at the Eating Academy - I was carried away with the theory (to which I still hold fast) but didn't think through some of the down sides.

Peter has done a couple of posts detailing what he actually eats - he's surprised, he says at the traffic these posts attract - I don't know why that would surprise him - he is serious about staying nutritionally in ketosis and that isn't as easy as he makes it sound - so obviously people are going to want to know what it takes, what he eats.

One simple point of his however, caught my attention - Currently I only eat three meals per day about once a week. I eat two meals per day probably 4 times per week, and one meal per day twice per week.

This pulled me up short, because irrespective of what I eat, I think this sounds lonely and bleak - does he eat with the family? I'm down to guessing here, but given he has at least one child, I would say largely he can't do.

So here is a guy who has it nailed as far as I'm concerned - the eating and the exercise and the weight management and the health - but I find myself stalling everso slightly because that little sentence bothers me....

We as a family sometimes struggle sometimes with competing activities to maintain proper meal times at the dining table, but it's something we largely insist upon whenever we can - and now our eldest son is at University - sitting down as a family, the full family, is rarer still - but I like the bringing together of all the souls I love most - and sharing food, and tales and life. The dining table is the surest place for this to happen.

The joyousness of food, or the lacking of it, is something a lot of people would struggle with - not that he's wrong in any shape or form or that what he says won't work - but because in reading his blog, I find it very  scientific, which contrarily makes it once understandable and attractive but also less likable; perfunctory eating isn't attractive to folk and I come away thinking - how can I tweak this for me and mine? This is also the reason I know, that whatever I say, Katy won't go for it.

Katy is the ying to my yang - I have proven evidence in me, that a la' the Eating Academy',  I can alter what I eat, not feel hungry particularly and lose weight - because that is exactly what I have done - but if the joie de vivre is removed, it becomes a lot more difficult to 'sell'

Peter Attia (and I could be doing him a massive dis-service here) doesn't seem to me to enjoy the process of eating, and the corollary to that for me would be the lack of the socialness of the activity.

On saying all of that - my family meals are far less the conviviality of the Italian family set up above - but more of this......