You don’t have to eat just because it’s a certain time of the day. Meal times are set up arbitrarily. People in different parts of the world eat at different times of the day, and there’s nothing sacred or particularly natural about breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It might be interesting if just for a week you ate only when you were hungry, as if breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t exist. When do you suppose you would be hungry? It would probably be different for you than it would be for another person. People get hungry at different times and in different ways. There’s such a thing as the cocktail hour, but you already know that you don’t have to have a drink every evening at 6:00.

Eating by the clock is a good way to fall back into unconscious eating. The clock says noon, so you start putting food into your mouth just because the hands on the clock are pointing up. You don’t think about whether you’re hungry, or even about what you want to eat. You just move automatically toward food.
Eating because it’s time to eat doesn’t even have to center around breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You may have a friend with whom you always take your morning coffee break. Each day the two of you go down to the cafeteria or the deli and grab a bite to eat. You do it as a ritual, more out of a habit and companionship than out of hunger. Ask yourself whether you want to continue doing that. You can still take breaks with your friend, but you can change the ritual. You might want to take a walk together than eat. The important thing is that you don’t have to continue doing something just because at one point it became a habit.

Another way you can use time to fool yourself into eating more than you want is by saying, “If I don’t eat now, I’ll be starving by the time dinner comes.” Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. Eat what you want now, and let later take care of itself. Your eating habits and patterns will be changing. You might not get hungry at the same times. Let your body develop its own patterns. Avoid preventive eating. Carry an apple around with you if it makes you feel more secure.

And who said you have to wait till dinner to eat, anyway? You can eat anytime you’re hungry, even in the middle of the afternoon. You and your body are in charge not the clock.

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