The Daily: 27 January 2025

It’s that time of year when I have to remind myself to eat… at least once a day. I’m just not that hungry in the late winter, especially in the morning. Breakfast is right out. Dinner is more of a snack. And there are some days when I am getting ready to brush my teeth at night and realize that I haven’t had anything to eat except my daily pot of tea.

It stands to reason that a body adapted to seasonal fluctuations in light and, therefore, food would become rather efficient at burning calories in the winter so that not very many would be needed. Metabolism slows down because we’re supposed to be resting more in the dark days because there isn’t as much food available and because we need the slow time after the season of growth to recuperate. I don’t feel like eating anything elaborate in the winter, nor doing much of anything at all. I usually love to cook, but right now I can’t be bothered to do more than slice and toast bread, maybe peel an orange. All effort is too much in the winter when my body wants to be resting as much as it can.

This is one of the many problems I have with clock time, that which is forced on us by this extremely unnatural “work week”. And it’s not just a winter problem. I am never hungry in the mornings. I think I am not that unusual. Many, if not most, of the women I know have to force themselves to eat breakfast before work and tend to not eat until midday on the weekends. But breakfast became necessary when people were forced out of the house at sunrise, to be on company time for the majority of daylight hours. A body working hard needs food before quitting time. Even a body sitting at a desk can get hungry without something before dinner. If there is no break in the middle of the day — and a place where you can get food in that break time — then breakfast is necessary.

Once upon a time, there were paid breaks for lunch and affordable ways to manage getting that meal while at work. Now, there are no paid lunch hours, and only some of us are lucky to have breaks at all. Some jobs might come with a break room and a fridge, but when the breaks are cut out so is the break room. Most call centers, warehouses, delivery services and retail jobs do not accommodate body needs of any kind. (Some, infamously, don’t even allow bathroom breaks. There are rumors of peeing into a bottle… no idea what the women do…) Mostly, if you get lunch at all, you have to eat non-perishable snack foods brought from home, vending machine food, or, rarely, there might be fast food nearby. But then, if you are buying lunch each day, you will be spending about an hour’s worth of wages on that meal, and the stuff you ingest could hardly be called food.

In any case, part of the Taylorism regimentation of time and working bodies was a recognition that bodies need food to keep working. Being reluctant to sacrifice efficiency by allowing mid-shift breaks, breakfast was invented, forcing people to fill up their bellies before they came to work. Of course, this had the further benefit of creating a whole new class of highly lucrative food product to sell. (Again, hardly food…) But until as recently as the 1800s, people normally ate light or not at all until the middle of the day — maybe a quickly toasted slice of bread now and then. But at lunch they ate a big meal, often the only full meal of the day. The lunch hour was a fixture of agricultural work and often lasted through much of the hottest part of the day. Early industrial factories shut down for lunch, though they also worked late into the evening. Even places that didn’t require hard labor from the body were closed for a lunch hour. Up through mid 20th century, many businesses had cafeterias to provide that lunch for “free” (sort of…) — because no body ever wanted to eat breakfast. Our digestive system just doesn’t want to do food until the body has been awake and active for several hours.

But here we are… In human body hell. We are never allowed to sleep as much as we need nor to slow down in the dark months. We are not allowed to get the exercise we need, nor the intellectual stimulation. We are under constant stress, being forced to produce more and more and more in the same number of hours (and for lower and lower and lower relative wages); and most of us do wage work that is absolutely deplorable, emotionally exhausting, if not physically dangerous. We work far more than is necessary to meet a body’s needs, but our bodies’ needs are never met. And we can’t even eat when we are hungry and not eat when we are not.

And we wonder why we all feel like crap all the time.

Because we are not allowed to live on body time, without slowing with the body’s winter metabolism, most people end up gaining weight during the holidays. It is then very difficult to lose this weight in the winter months. Often it never goes away. We blame our plastic and corn starch diet for the epidemic of obesity in this country, and that is a big factor. But even when we stop eating that stuff, or stop eating much of anything at all in the case of some of the more radical diets like purging or liquid fasting, it is hard to lose weight. It’s almost impossible in the winter — because our bodies developed adaptations that slow our need for calories when food is unavailable.

This can be triggered even in the summer months. If you go on a diet, you might start out great, losing a pound or so a week, but then it plateaus, sometimes even slides the other way, no matter how little your body is eating. This is because the body goes into efficiency mode. Noticing that there isn’t much coming down the pipeline, it slows the metabolism down and stores whatever calories you ingest as fat, mostly belly fat. Your body plays the long game and will sacrifice feeling energetic today so that it can live to see tomorrow. And it takes a long time to wake the metabolism back up. If you go off your diet and start eating normally again, the body does not immediately switch off the efficiency measures. It might take a week or two before it starts burning at a normal rate. In that time your body is turning all of what it considers excess calories into fat. This is why diets fail, often seeing more rebound weight gain than what was lost.

In any case, we are increasingly fat because we have to deny the body’s natural rhythms and live on wage-work clock time, among other systemic predicaments. It should also be noted that we don’t ever need as much food as we are supposed be shoveling into our bodies — in order to feed the Market, not ourselves. Nutritionists recommend that young to middle-aged men eat 2000-3000 calories a day, women slightly less than that (because we are smaller and have more efficient bodies). One venti Starbucks latte can run as much as 470 calories, nearly a fifth of what we can use in a day. A cup of beef and potato stew, what is called a serving but what usually is under half of what is actually served, is about 500 calories. A Big Mac meal at McDonald’s is 1100 calories. A plain bagel has about 289 calories.

If you follow the Market’s plan for your food intake needs, you are eating three meals a day and probably snacking once or twice in between those meals, counting our ubiquitous sugary caffeinated drinks as a snack. Obviously, this is far more food than we need. It is also the wrong kinds of food, but mostly it is just excess calories that we eat because that is what messaging is telling us we should do — so that more food is sold, not so that you are getting what you need.

Breakfast is at the top of this list for most bodies. There are no commonly available breakfast foods that are not calorie dense. Originally, this was because bodies doing heavy labor would be able to put away a lot of calories in a little package, mostly as they dashed out the door to work. (Remember, your stomach is only a bit bigger than the size of your fist. A meal that takes up more volume than what you can hold in your palm makes you decidedly uncomfortable and sluggish, and therefore unproductive.) Though most bodies are no longer doing heavy labor, the breakfast food industry has not changed. If anything, it has gotten worse with sugary coffee drinks and super-sized pastries. (Remember when coffee was black and came in a cup and a scone was the size of a biscuit…) But even if you eat “healthy food”, you are probably eating more than your body wants at that time of the day. And if it doesn’t want the food, it’s just turning the calories, no matter how healthy, into fat. Probably with a side of indigestion.

This is true no matter the season, but in the winter it’s much worse. You probably don’t need even that recommended minimum of 1500 calories in the shortest days. You don’t need many carbohydrate calories at all. You could probably be perfectly healthy on a daily diet of a bit of dried fruit, nuts and yogurt or cheese in the middle of the day and a cup or so of some stew involving grains and pulses at dinnertime. If you eat meat or eggs, you could probably get by with just that, a few ounces a day, as long as you get some veg now and then for balanced nutrition. But then you’d be spending less than $10 a day on food. Probably much less. And none of that is fast food or restaurant fare.

Also… none of it is holiday fare.

I’ve often wondered what came first — the feasting or the desire to make money off of people who were feasting. It is unlikely that there was much feasting involved in holy days for regions and cultures that did not produce an agricultural surplus. Though it must be remembered that in non-horticultural societies, every time you kill a deer or slaughter a cow, there is excess for days, weeks if you live in a small group. So eating habits tend to follow a feast and famine schedule, or maybe glut and digest schedule. Pack in all the calories you can before the meat turns bad, and then burn it off over the course of many days afterward.

But though there are special foods associated with holy days throughout all cultures and throughout time, there isn’t a tradition of excess anywhere except among the wealthy — who were mostly throwing banquets to display their wealth, not for the feasting, per se. So I think our modern notions of holiday food are more about getting us to part with our wages than any ideas we may have about the proper way to make merry. In any case, over the Midwinter holidays, we eat far more than we can afford in every way. It costs us dearly at the grocery store or in the restaurant, but it also costs us dearly in health. Even one big meal a week is more than we can manage to process in the winter — unless we stop eating everything except those four or five big meals for the entire month. Which we are discouraged from doing… because then we are not spending money. If we were to listen to our bodies, we would probably celebrate Yule with song and dance, followed by a long night of sleep, and skip the feasting altogether. In fact, I will wager that none of your best holiday memories involve food. (And probably many of your worst involve alcohol…) Winter is just not a time for excess…

It should also be noted that we have many kinds of wintering… Illness is a kind of wintering. We don’t want to eat when we are sick because our body has shut down everything but the healing processes. Depression is also a kind of wintering. When we suffer grief or emotional harm, the body goes into stasis. We feel lethargic, not just emotionally, but physically; if we do eat, it all becomes fat. And most of us go into a semi-permanent winter phase when we pass into old age. For women, this happens rather abruptly, very soon after menopause, when our bodies stop the cycle of preparing for pregnancy each month and then flushing all that material out. Suddenly, we need much less intake, and our bodies slow down accordingly. (Would be nice if we could have some time with all the nutrients and calories going to our own body for, you know, a year or so… but no…) I am definitely in the winter of my life. Combine my age with the season of darkness, and I can get by on a few hundred calories a day… in other words, one bagel…

Which is why I sometimes go for days without eating any more than that and not even noticing. I find myself craving some things for their nutrient content. Bananas when I feel low on potassium. Yogurt when I need calcium (which is more of a need in the cold months to keep the arthritis to a low roar). Popcorn when I need salt. Oranges just because oranges… But I am rarely hungry.

My mother chides me when I mention that I’ve forgotten to eat again, but she hardly ever eats. When I was a teenager, I was living with my grandmother while she was undergoing chemotherapy and was perpetually amazed at how little she ate. She could go for days on nothing but a handful of dry Cheerios. At the time, I wrote it off to chemo, but now that I look back, she didn’t eat much even before the cancer. She would fix elaborate meals for all of us and then not even take a plate for herself. Her wintering body seemed to live on bourbon and cigarettes. (Hence the cancer…)

My grandmother never needed to follow wage-work clock time. My mother worked in jobs that allowed a body to be a body. Even allowing for the cancer, they were both healthier than I and my sisters, who are a collective bushel basket case of autoimmune disorders and degenerative diseases… and more cancer. This is, I think, mostly because we have always been forced to live by the clock and the Market’s imperatives and not by our bodies’ needs. And I’m in relatively good shape compared to my millennial sons’ friends who don’t even know that there is a better way of being. I, at least, don’t always follow the rules. These younger generations don’t know that there are other rules to follow.

Not a wonder that most of them are in therapy… they don’t even know why they are sick, nor that it is not “their fault”.

Anyway, I am not hungry right now… so not much is happening in the kitchen. I refreshed the sourdough culture without even baking a loaf of bread this week. I feel faintly guilty at being so unproductive… and that too is an effect of this culture. In most places, if you have no necessary work, you don’t do work… because anything unnecessary is just unnecessary, a waste of time and stuff and then more work trying to cope with the waste.

And this usually involves a good deal of indigestion…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025