I still use the word hungry, but I can’t remember the last time I knowingly used “starving”. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine now also. Especially when the person is a bit chubby and I know they just ate 3 hours ago. I usually tell them to shut up.

I used to be a guy that thought he was starving every 3 hours when my stomach started cramping (probably junk food gas). It’s all mental!

Now I fast daily in the 18-26 hour range, regularly into the 40+ hour mark (today), and up to 14 days before. I will second that virtually nobody in an industrialized country is starving! I’ve found after the 4th day the “hunger” starts to go away.

I recently did a 3 day fast/hunt on foot with nothing but water. Many of your senses are heightened when you’re fasted (especially smell). I fasted over 100 something hours the week leading up to the hunt so it wasn’t like my tank was full going into it. After re-hydrating I think I showed a 7-8lb loss. http://castlegrok.com/kill-to-eat-episode-8/

I can appreciate what you’re trying to accomplish. Yes, I’ve been doing Eat Stop Eat since the beginning of this year and to say it has caused a paradigm shift in terms of my concept of hunger and relationship with food is an understatement. I would love to convince everyone to try Eat Stop Eat and reevaluate their approach to eating, but I don’t think exhorting them for simply using a word figuratively is the way to do it. If anything it will just serve to alienate them. (There are people in third world countries who don’t always have ready access to potable water and who suffer from dehydration–should we also correct our friends and family when they say that they’re thirsty?) I suppose we could split hairs over semantics ad infinitum. At the end of the day we’re on the same side: most people in the “developed” world have forgotten (or even more sadly were never properly educated about) the basic purpose of food, probably because we have access to it in such abundance. As with most things it’s often not until you’re actually deprived of something (willingly or unwillingly) that you realize the extent to which you truly need it. Our best chance of having an impact is to be living examples of moderation. Thanks for all the great posts!

Lou

Yup you got it. The whole point was the ease with which we use these words, and the sliding definitions they carry.

If our pop culture slowly erodes the true meaning of a word then that word becomes completely meaningless.

We all think in words, so I wanted to shake up some thought in people and get them to realize a bigger picture when they are speaking and thinking about eating and weight loss.

The first step to making any real change in the state of the world as it pertains to people starving is to first bring it into all of our awareness. This is partly why I put the magnifying glass on both words.

It really is difficult for anyone in modern western industrialized cultures to use either word in reference to themselves if they stop even just for a moment and thought about the bigger picture.

JB