Day 3 Holiday Challenge

Today's Objective: Practice Hunger Tolerance

As we looked at spontaneous exercise yesterday, today we look at another practice that involves intentionally choosing something hard over something easy. The concept of hunger tolerance is especially known by great spiritual traditions, such as our own, that practice fasting. Hunger tolerance is being able to endure the relatively small amount of discomfort you get from being hungry.

The purpose of this exercise is to help us endure cravings. There is a difference between real hunger and cravings. Real hunger is your body's reaction to not having the right amount of nutrition at a given moment. It is the body telling you, "I need something to eat soon, or I'm going to start to get the energy somewhere else" (i.e., your fat and muscle stores). A craving is an obsession of the mind over a particular food that for the moment will satisfy a desire, but might not necessarily fit what is nutritional, that is, good for your body. The difficult thing is when you have cravings while you are hungry.

Practicing hunger tolerance can help us differentiate between what is a craving and what is real hunger. As we progress in developing our food plans, we will need to decide what is the right amount of food at a given time, and practice abstaining from food between those times. It's those moments when we have cravings, or those periods around the times we should eat that we want to endure the relatively small amount of discomfort this may cause.

"Relative" is the key to this. Chances are the "pain" you feel when having a craving is very little relative to the pain you've endured from an injury, or the great emotional pain of losing something or someone whom you cherish. You may also think about the hunger of a third world orphan, and the small amount of "hunger" you feel now.

To practice hunger tolerance, choose one meal, either lunch or dinner (you need the energy of breakfast), and skip it. Make sure this meal you are skipping isn't around the time you exercise today. (If at any time you feel light headed, eat or drink something with carbs. Fruit or fruit juice is a good choice). This is not supposed to be a regular thing, it is only a practice in feeling what it is like to be hungry, and perhaps enduring some cravings along the way.

If again this is not advisable by your doctor because of some medical condition, please do not stray from your meal plan. But, if like most Catholics, you have been accustomed to a fast before, also take the time to remember the souls in purgatory while you practice this hunger tolerance.

Write down your experience of how the hunger went, and any craving you might have had. Recall the amount of difficulty or pain you felt, and perhaps compare it to other levels of difficulty or pain. Next, decide if you can go without those extras between meals. Come the holidays, you're going to need to know how to stave off cravings. You will be able to because you know that even the pain of a little hunger is able to be overcome.