A healthy appetite

Overindulgence isn’t healthy
So why does it seem so admirable?

Weight control is all about portion control. Truth is I don’t know very many people who can sit in front of an extra large all day breakfast with a few beers to wash it down on a regular basis who aren’t overweight and unhealthy. Yet, for some strange reason, it’s always a more cheering sight than watching a skin-and-bones sparrow picking over a salad.

Okay, there’s some facile logic to this, almost definitively so. I struggle to find an antonym to a Rabelaisian roisterer without resorting to words like “sensible” and you don’t often find cause to connect “fun” and “sensible” in the same sentence. It makes sense that the unrestrained and indulgent will be more cheery company than someone who knows their limits and joylessly sticks to them.

But it seems to me to run deeper than that. It’s not just about fun. There is something genuinely heartening about seeing a healthy appetite at work. I feel good seeing a mate attack an overflowing plate of artery-hardening protein and fat. One almost shares in the reward this glutton’s body will be giving him for the feast he’s about to tuck in to.

Which makes no sense at all. But it’s no less true. So what’s the reason?

Could it be simple empathy? We spontaneously laugh when people around us are laughing, even if we don’t know at what. We feel tearful when people around us are crying. Wouldn’t we feel pleasure when people around us are clearly taking it?

Maybe, but I know plenty of sensible eaters who demonstrably enjoy their food too. And what I feel watching a gorger go into battle with a knife and fork isn’t quite the same thing. It raises a different sort of smile.

Perhaps it’s because what we know is healthy and what we feel is healthy aren’t the same thing. We live, after all, in exceptional times. At no other point in human history has our world, and our understanding of it advanced so rapidly when compared against our development to survive in it. What my conscience identifies as healthy is a lean body and a balanced diet, a person who can live a happy and enjoyable life for decades to come. What my instincts identify as healthy is a person who eats big when there’s good food to be had, a person who can survive whatever the world throws at them in the coming weeks. We increasingly expect to live to a ripe old age because the odds of doing so are so much better now and we define being healthy in those terms. Our instincts have yet to catch up with that expectation.

This explanation feels better, and it certainly hands a pass to the army of mothers who, over this festive season, will be pushing disproportionate volumes of food into their pot-bellied brood. But still leaves me unsatisfied. After all, I get the same heartening pleasure seeing a total stranger tuck into an outsize dinner as I do with friends and family. Our instincts are fundamentally selfish, so why should I care about the health and wellbeing of a total stranger?

Maybe it’s because, when thinking about being healthy, I’m not looking at the bigger picture here.  When you’re ill the first thing to go is often your appetite. Being around people eating big is a very good indication that you’re not going to catch something fatal from them. Again this is driven by instincts born of a different time, a time when without convenience food and convenient drugs even the simplest little bug could be a life or death matter.

It seems more credible to me then that this is nothing more than a flight-or-fight reflex; that it is the same, shameful gut instinct that makes us shrink away from the disfigured or disabled which is at work here too. Deep down, we are unthreatened by the rotund and ravenous, but we are threatened by the thin and picky.

Overindulgence might not be healthy for other people then. But in other people, overindulgence is certainly healthy for us.