Eat when hungry, sleep when tired

Why is it that eating when you aren't hungry is so repulsive?

Eating when you're hungry is, of course, the main thing that gets me through the day. I really look forward to eating dinner having worked up a good honest hunger, or failing that a dishonest one. Eating is incredibly rewarding most of the time.

But today I had to eat a big bowl of tomato soup and I really struggled with it. I had gotten up late, felt hungry, and eaten a big breakfast at about 10:30 am. Then I got to uni by midday, but I knew that I would be busy all afternoon so if I skipped lunch I would be ravenous by 5 pm and would end up impulsively eating something ridiculous like 5 cheese sandwiches, a leftover packet of biscuits, and some hummous, and then I would feel nauseous. So I opted for the early lunch after the late breakfast. The supercharger option.

I suppose it didn't help that the soup was pretty bad. It really tasted just like it had been poured out of a tin and warmed up. Not even some pepper or tabasco or sauteed spanish onion or melted anchovy fillets or diced boiled eggs or any of those other yummy things you can throw onto a bowl of bad soup to turn it good again. I had a dinner roll with some rock-hard butter that I had to soften in my armpit for a while before I could spread it, and that was okay. But the soup itself - bleurgh.

Actually, it was a lot like trying to eat when you have a really bad cold. Except it was even worse than that because when you have a cold you can't taste anything. Today I could just taste bad soup. But I had the same bizarre biological awareness that you are forcing stuff into your head and mashing it round before squeezing it down further inside you. It was about as fun as feeding someone else. I should have made aeroplane noises to persuade myself to eat. "Open wide - neeeeeeOOOOWWW!! Here it comes!"

Kids have it so easy - they just spit it out. And when they get hungry later on they just scream out for food. They don't sit there, hunched over their microscopes, peering down at slides of some poor bugger's cancerous colon, thinking that they feel really hungry but just lost their appetite all the same. No, that particular joy seems to be reserved for medical students.