Yesterday in the late afternoon, I felt hungry but it was too early for my evening meal and if I eat too early I get hungry in the middle of the night. I decided to have a cup of coffee to keep me going until dinner time. Normally I have just one cup of coffee per day in the morning.
Coffee and cigarettes are known to be appetite suppressants which is why they are commonly used by actors and others who feel the need to be thin. Coffee is socially acceptable but cigarettes are now frowned upon so many of those people smoke in secret.
My having coffee to suppress my hunger reminded me of a fellow physicist that I used to know a long time ago. He told me that he only drank coffee and smoked cigarettes the whole day and ate just once a day, a meal in the evening. In those days, smoking was not banned in offices and public places as they are now in the US so he could always be seen with a cigarette and often with a coffee mug. He and I were both in our mid-thirties then and had the sense that is common among young people that our bodies could withstand anything. But even I, though not hyper-vigilant about healthy living, felt that his habits were not good for his health.
Our paths parted after a couple of years but I sometimes think of him and wonder what happened to him. Given that at that time he had a young child two years of age (the same age as my own daughter then), I wished that he would be a little more sensible about his diet in order that he would be more likely see his child grow up and possibly even see his grandchildren, as I now do. I hope he was able to beat the odds and do so. But I did not feel at the time that it was my place to advise a colleague about how to live and eat.
Not a smoker, but I often only eat in the evenings.
Lately with my bicycle commute, and having coworkers I actually like, I’ll often eat a lunch at work (mostly for the social aspect), but on days off and when my coworkers are out, I frequently revert to just a cup of coffee in the morning and maybe a soda during the day, and then a larger meal at home in the evening.
I’ve got a fairly slow metabolism, and in the past I’ve easily skipped eating for most of a day when I was engrossed in something, so I don’t seem to get as hungry or need feeding as frequently as most people. When I was enlisted, I always came back from field ops with a pack full of uneaten MREs, to the point where I was accused of stealing when one of the Staff Sergeants saw my locker full of unopened MREs…
Some people refer to this as “intermittent fasting”, and have found it helpful for dieting/weight control/etc., but I imagine it’s different for everyone, and probably not a good choice for people prone to “hangry”
Anyways, not a smoker, so I can’t speak to that, and I usually just have coffee to help wake up in the morning, and never really used it as an appetite suppressant, so maybe not terribly relevant…
I’ve always found eating seriously saps my energy, because digestion takes a lot of calories. As a young man I found if I ate lunch at work I would be sleepy and lethargic, so I would skip lunch and only eat an evening meal (I never had breakfast). This was normal to me. These days (as an old man) I will usually have a lunch and then an evening meal, but I never eat more than twice a day, often still only once. I don’t think there’s anything unhealthy about it.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/metabolism/art-20046508
Anyway, I feel it. I get lethargic after eating. So I have traditionally avoided eating during the day, and refueled at night. X-D
By the way, like your colleague I was addicted to coffee and cigarettes, but I think that’s incidental. I haven’t smoked for years and these days only have one coffee a day like you, but I would still be quite content with one meal a day.
Then you’ve got an old guy like me with a badly damaged thoracic diaphragm who’s forced to eat many tiny meals (“snacks”) throughout the day just to maintain a not-starving calorie level. The normal meal most people get to enjoy risks driving my stomach along with its failed junction muscle up into my chest cavity, into the vagus nerve and thereby stopping my heart.
Perhaps the cigarette route would be easier.
I do wonder sometimes whether, in 2125, people will look back in wonder at what we eat and drink, in the same way we shake our heads and say “you know before 1903 Coca Cola contained cocaine??”. They’ll likely be incredulous at the amount of high-fructose corn syrup, caffeine, alcohol, salt and mammal meat that gets eaten, to say nothing of the vaping going on.
In particular, I wonder if some modern-day Hogarth will produce an equivalent of “Gin Lane”, depicting the hollowed-out modern high street, most of the “real” shops shutttered and long gone, the only extant businesses being vape shops, betting shops, Turkish barbers (or “obvious money-laundering operations for drug gangs” as my former policeman friend calls them), pawn shops and coffee shops. Seriously -- I live in a town with a population of about 50,000, and it’s remarkable how many coffee shops there are in the town centre, especially when contrasted with how few pubs there are left open. This is a considerable reversal from when I was a kid (70s/80s), when my then-home-town had a pub every 100 yards in the centre but not a single place where you could get a cup of coffee that wasn’t just some instant granules in a mug half full of luke-warm milk. For a stereotypically tea-drinking nation, the UK has been surprisingly ready to accept the creeping pollution of its culture by the invasive American obsession with coffee in all its ludicrously diverse and expensive forms.
Never could understand people who don’t need to eat all day. If I don’t get something in my stomach before going out of the house in the morning, I’m barely able to function. And I definitely need something to eat before the evening, otherwise I feel just awefull.
When I’m hungry before a planned meal, I’ll eat a light snack or eat the meal earlier with maybe a snack later that day. Even when I’m out on a long walk or bike ride, I’ll pack some fruit of cookies because at some point I’ll get hungry and feel week.
Reading about smoking and unhealthy living reminds me of an acquaintance who died last month. He smoked a lot, drank, avoided physical activity and didn’t exactly eat healthy. He would often joke about how people who lived healthily would live a long lives but would have nothing to enjoy.
He died in his early sixties and I don’t think he enjoyed the last ten years or so fighting COPD and increasing heart problems. He often wished he had stopped smoking before it was to late.
I tend to eat by the clock because I rarely feel hungry.
I always been a regular eater, especially breakfast. As a kid, you could hear my growling stomach as the next meal time came close. I have always awakened with a stomach politely saying “Breakfast now?” Except when I was pregnant, and woke up to a stomach demanding “EAT NOW!!” -- including the 2 am meal during the last trimester. Surprisingly, in my old age, I find I can tell my body, when medically required, that there will be no breakfast this morning, and I get little or no complaints.
Children need to eat frequently -- 3 meals and 2 snacks a day are recommended. Women need to eat more frequently than men. (Please forgive me, this is a generalization. Yet from what the commenters so far have said, it holds true even among them.) Pregnant women and babies may need to eat as often as every two hours, depending on what they eat and if they are having a growth spurt. Because women who give birth have just experienced what it is like to be ravenously hungry much more frequently than our culture usually considers normal, they are more likely to feed their babies and children all the many times they are hungry. Several of my close male relatives have ended up caring for their young children without the help of a woman. It has taken about a year for each of them to realize how important it is to consistently offer food to their children 5 or more times a day, even when the menfolk themselves were not hungry.
I use neither caffeine nor nicotine but rarely feel hunger. I don’t usually eat until I’ve been up for at least 2 hours then continue with my day until I’m feeling lightheaded and difficult to concentrate then I think about it and realize that it’s been about 8 hours since my last meal. Then I’ll snack on some fruit or veggies and follow it up several hours later with some meat.
I’m also not much of a cook since I by the time I realize I am hungry it’s too late to spend a lot of time preparing something decent. My sister has suggested making batches of stew or something and freezing portions for later, but my ADHD finds doing extensive food prep the least interesting of the many things I could be doing.
The appetite suppressive effect of nicotine is something that one must consider when reading research about effects of measures of body fatness (whether BMI, waist circumference, waist to height ratio, waist to hip ratio, or any other) on longevity. Whenever you see a paper saying ‘actually heavy people live longer than normal-weight people’ check how they dealt with smokers in their dataset. Because if they just grouped them in with all others, then the lower-weight group in their data is going to be enriched for smokers, and that would be an obvious reason for that group to not live as long as a group of heavier people with lower smoking rates. I would need to find the paper again, but I remember one that did the analysis separately for all people in their sample, and then for just the never-smokers. The higher mortality among people with BMI between 20 and 22.5 disappeared in the analysis of never-smokers.