In a world overflowing with easy and delicious food, it’s not surprising we just ‘go with the flow’ - we eat to avoid any hint of hunger pain and we seek the pleasurable experience that eating yummy food gives us. Pleasure and pain - the two forces that determine all of our actions. But we pay a price for automatically grabbing this instant gratification.

When it comes to longevity, it's readily shown from controlled animal studies that animals that eat less live longer. While it's hard, if not impossible, to do controlled studies to absolutely prove this is so among humans, it would be illogical if it wasn’t. We also know that populations that live exceptionally long tend to eat a lot less than other populations. The evidence all points in one direction, but unfortunately, we live in a world where $$ is made from us consuming, so there’s little funding for studies or research into the benefits of consuming less.

As explained elsewhere, our bodies cleaning and repair mechanism - autophagy - is dependant on periods of fasting to ‘ kick into high gear’ and do it’s work. So it makes sense that, even if the people who don’t overeat never do extended fasts, they’re not taxing their bodies unnecessarily to digest and process unneeded food, and, given they’re eating less, they’re leaving less of a mess to be cleaned up. Therefore, in their case, autophagy can do it’s job ok without ever ramping up beyond it’s low-intensity background level. Hence, it’s not surprising that those who eat less are healthier and live longer.

The takeaway here should be obvious: if we do not need those extra calories and we know they’re actually negative, why are we consuming them? The answer is because of habit and pleasure/pain motivations. We want to avoid the slight pain involved in changing those habits, and we don't want to forgo the pleasure eating provides us.

Ultimately, though, we choose which pain we experience and which pleasure we experience. A bit of temporary pain now as we change our habits, or a lot of accumulated future pain and shorter lives.

When we start doing detoxes, when we fast for some days, one of the things that's always a shock is realising how habitual our eating patterns are and how much daily time and energy we spend accommodating that habit. It’s so interwoven into our lives that it’s as natural and normal to us as sleeping is, yet while we need that sleep, we do not need all that food.This is why the major challenge of fasting is not physiological but psychological.

The hunger pains are really not painful at all, and they subside after a day or two anyway, but what can be challenging are the sudden yawning gaps we have in our day. We’re habitual creatures, and most of us have had breakfast, lunch, and dinner since we were children, it’s given structure to our day for decades, and it’s all this extra time - the gap- that is initially disorientating and uncomfortable. But once we’re through this barrier and we’re comfortable not eating for some days at a time, our new perspective makes our former habits seem weird because we see how blind and robotic it all was. We see that we were primarily eating for pleasure, not because we needed to eat. From our new perspective, we're able to easily separate pleasure-motivated eating from needed and healthy eating. Of course, we’re still motivated by pleasure, but we’re much more likely to have some control and seek to gain pleasure from enjoyable, but also healthy food, and only in the quantities needed.

In practice, we don’t actually lose any pleasure. Once we have new habits, there’s no struggle, and of course we actually feel a lot better because our bodies feel better and because we’re aware we’re in control and eating healthily. Plus, this is bigger than just about food. The reality is, if we can’t control this basic aspect of our lives, if we avoid this hurdle, or if we can’t jump this little hurdle, then what what does that mean about us? If we can’t do this, if this hurdle is too high for us, then most of the other hurdles life puts in front of us will also be too high. Conversely, jump this and all similar and lower hurdles, are now easy for us. We have control; we can navigate the environment effectively, and so we can take ourselves to the reality we choose.

If we can’t gain rational control over our health, because we can’t resist instant gratification (which is what it boils down to) or we, after researching the issue, deem our health to not really matter, then ok, that’s people's decision to make. The point here is that often we don’t seek to gain some control simply because we’ve never considered this perspective.

Probably the most beneficial, yet easy, change the vast majority of people can make is simply not eating in the morning.‘Breakfast’ means break-fast, of course, though we now associate it with morning food when it originally just meant the first food consumed after many hours of not eating.

Aside from the fact that two meals a day is ample - many people just have one - the main benefit of not eating till around midday is that it extends our fasting window dramatically, given we’ve already fasted for at least 8 hours over night.

Think about it like this; Within us, we have our cleaner (autophagy primarily) who tidies up and cleans our body after we've digested and processed the food we’ve last eaten, and it takes our 'cleaner' 4 or 5 hours every time just to do the basics. Because we've used the 'kitchen', 'he' needs to gather the dishes from the table, clean them, put them back where they belong, mop around the area, etc. Ok, 4 or 5 hours to do just that means we have a slow cleaner, but we do have a slow cleaner within us. Autophagy works at a very slow pace and only ramps up intensity after about 20-24 hours of fasting.

Point is, the more times we eat every day, the more our cleaner has to repeat the same tasks over and over, and the less time he has to do any deeper cleaning. If we’ve slept at 11p.m. and woken at 7a.m. with our last food consumed at 8 p.m., then our fast is 11 hours. That’s good, as our slow cleaner has been able to move beyond just the basics for around 6 hours. He’s now busy cleaning the oven or emptying the fridge of rotting food, and he’s about to move into other areas of our house/body. Great, but let him keep going deeper; let him do more cleaning and maybe even some repairs before interrupting him and forcing him to start over from the beginning again.

This is why intermittent fasting - eating only within a relatively small daily window - is effective and so popular. We’re still eating twice a day, still getting all the calories we need, but we’re limiting our consumption time to a smaller window - typically 6 or 8 hours - which means we get a much bigger fasting/cleaning window.

Three meals a day, and especially three meals with late evening snacks, and we’ve crippled our bodies ability to clean deeper than the superficial.

Eat a snack at 10p.m. and eat at 7a.m., and that’s only a 9-hour cleaning and repair window. Take away the 4 or 5 hours needed to clean up the initial basics, and that only leaves us another 4 or 5 hours for extra maintenance tasks to be done. This is something, but not much can be done in that time; remember, our cleaner is slow, and the ‘to do’ list gets longer and longer.

But if we skip that late evening snack, and skip breakfast, we’ve now got a 16-hour fasting window. Subtract the 5 hours basic kitchen clean-up, and our worker now has 11 hours instead of just 4 to start completing the cleaning and repair work on the long ‘to do’ list. That’s nearly three times the amount of cleaning and repair work completed daily. Think how that adds up over the months and years, and it’s cost us absolutely nothing except a bit of initial pain to change our eating habits.

Our ancestors didn’t eat three times a day. Ok, they might of, in the relatively rare times when food was plentiful, but then they also had many days with no food at all. Overall, they were in cleaning and maintenance mode a lot longer than we are when it's added up over a typical year. Also, they weren't eating the junk food we eat, so there was less cleaning and repair work to be done.

The other thing to remember is that after 24 hours of no food, autophagy ramps up, and we now have 'two cleaners'. After 36 hours, we have three, and by 72 hours, we have five. Which means we can eat three times a day and still get the maintenance work done if we detox/fast for multiple days now and again. Sure, but why eat three times a day when it’s pointless and negative?

Personally, I’ve gone about 40 years without eating breakfast. I’ll eat and enjoy a breakfast if someone puts one in front of me, but that’s rare, and I don’t seek it. I didn’t stop eating breakfast for any health reasons; it was just because I worked as a deckhand on a fishing boat for a few years when I was around 18, and we didn’t have breakfast. We got up before dawn and worked till 11 or 12 and then had breakfast/lunch and this quickly became my habit, so I never bothered to change it as I no longer had the morning eating habit. After we got married, Nui had to adjust to not having morning food, and for a few days she found that a bit uncomfortable, but within a week she was completely fine with it, and no more beatings were required.

Like so many of our actions, it's just habitual, and if we can swap out a negative habit for a positive one, the actual benefits experienced are doubled.