Hunger is good exercise

In my early twenties, I had a surprisingly good appetite.

Late every night, we all gathered in front of the kebab stall. Even the snowy winter, freezing shivering, sitting around in front of the fire, grilled cheeks slightly hot. We bullshit, drink, full of yellow mouth, reckless. Chicken neck, meat tendons, large loin, grilled to a crispy exterior and tender inside. In the summer night, in the next stall called on a dozen beers half watermelon. Mao beans, peanuts, rabbit head, duck claws. There are also ladies from work, geeks who brush the night, alcoholics who fight, and city police who run. The whole night was spent in the thick smoke. Kebabs are not really good, horseshoe crab salty brush sauce, but at the Time I loved it to death, as well as the taste of that earthly fireworks. Once, a developed pretend artist came to us and asked, “How can you create in peace in such a woozy place?” I smiled and said, “Fuck you!”

During the days when we didn’t eat skewers, we cooked our own Food. I’ve perfected my craft quite well. My specialty is chicken, sweet and sour pork, beer duck, spicy shrimp, dry-aged fatty sausage, roasted pork, and fish in sour Soup. In the winter, we pickled our own sauerkraut. A huge bucket of sauerkraut, a hundred pounds of cabbage. Sun dried skin slightly, layer by layer code solid, sprinkled with large grains of salt, pressed a large stone, put the water soaked. The coldest days, sauerkraut and white meat vermicelli tofu pot. Sauerkraut and pork dumplings, put a lot of oil. The oil is full of meat, and the acid is thick and tasty. A room full of friends, laughter and flour flying.

We made our own meat jelly, elbow flowers, made our own Guizhou sour soup, and whacked steaks with beer bottles. Sun-dried cowpeas, eggplants, sun-dried peppers, radish sticks. We had a private dinner and feasted on strangers at Home. I was invited to write recipes, and I consulted my Parents about it, and the names of the dishes filled several pages. At that time we were keen to eat buffet, twenty-two yuan a Chongqing hot pot, four two a plate of lamb easily finished eight plates. Later, the hot pot store collapsed, we all said that we were eating down, I think so.

At that time, one of my sisters and I ate KFC together. She watched me eat chicken wings without shuddering. She said to me, “I don’t know what kind of man would fall in love with you. The way you eat is horrible, and you don’t know how to moderate your desires at all.” Restraint? At that time, I didn’t even know what “full” was, I only knew “hold up”. For me, “just right” meant boring, and only excess was attractive. Life is a feast, it should be a feast, and if it is not, then I will stuff it with food.

What is hunger? I think hunger is a state of living. The hunger of twenty is a hunger for the whole body and soul. For love, for life, for everything. I can eat a supermarket, a bunch of livestock, a bunch of Dreams and ambitions, a pocketful of miracles, and many, many loves. Gnawing, chewing, and swallowing, the verbs associated with the mouth is all.

At that time my weight skyrocketed to more than 130 pounds. It was a disaster for my height. All the men in the world turned their backs on me, and only one man was worried. That was my father. One midday in the middle of summer, he came back from outside with a stack of promotional sheets from a weight loss center. He told me, “You have to lose weight, that’s the most important thing you can do right now. You can stop working, but you have to lose weight.” I looked at the nearly sixty-year-old man in front of me, sweat soaking through his shirt and sticking to his back. I imagined him riding his bike, looking all over the street for a diet store, walking in door to door to ask for flyers. My mom told me behind his back, “Your father said, “Our daughter is a piece of jade, but she thinks she’s a rock.” Then I told them with certainty, “I’m not going to a weight loss center. I don’t take pills, and I don’t use any equipment. I’ll lose it myself.”

What does it feel like to be hungry? This feeling is very familiar to me because it has not left me in the past three years, I think, will follow me for the rest of my life. Haruki Murakami once described it in a short story in a very literary way. He depicted hunger as a painting: “floating on the lake in a small boat. Looking down, you can see the reflection of the volcano in the water.” Frankly speaking, I don’t think he was hungry hard. Hunger itself has no poetry, no dignity. Hunger is similar to pain. In a long and continuous hunger, the gastric juice burns, the stomach lining rubs, and you feel real pain. Man degenerates into an animal and wants nothing more than to gorge himself on food. Other than that, nothing is wanted. Dieting is difficult because it is fighting against the most basic and primitive desires of man, against the most natural and direct functions of the body. The result is often anxiety, depression, breakdown and madness. But I win. Of course, not always, but most of the time.

I would say that the most frightening thing about people is their habits. We can get used to everything, including hunger. Slowly, my quest is no longer “full” but “not too hungry.” I began to like the state of “slightly hungry”. In this state, my mind is particularly clear, and I can see paintings, books, and movies with extra sharp impressions. When I write something, I seem to be more organized. In the past, when I wrote articles, I was redundant and bloated, and the whole person was in a sensational state, but later on, I slowly became much more composed and simple.

I certainly lost weight, nearly 40 pounds before and after. The feeling was good, so good that it exceeded starvation. My old body, every day is a new world. I love that feeling – the feeling of possibility. It is possible to become a more beautiful version of yourself; it is possible to become a better version of yourself. Life, it’s possible to meet someone who is willing to feed you feed you well, you have the best love and the best sex, you stay together and it’s naturally good. You deserve to have a life that good because you are also that good.

I don’t want to betray my past self, but I will say that hunger is like a carving knife that slowly carves out a true silhouette. All fat people look alike, all have similar expressions and physiques, the one who slimmed down is the one who hides among them. I like my past self, like a striking yellow bulb, open teeth and claws joyful enthusiasm, but I know that I do not want to go back, never again.

Someone asked me: after losing weight, have you become happier? I thought hard about this question. I don’t think I did. But I can’t tell if it’s the years, the increasing heaviness of life, the fact that this age has made me less happy, or just the dieting itself? Maybe it’s both. But I do know that, from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate the person I am now and accept the new person I am. No longer a combination of seemingly prideful but actually inferior, no longer a combination of fancy clothes and sexiness to release myself, I know that perhaps what I will be seeking is no longer the joy of intense satiety, but some kind of deep and comforting peace.

At the age of thirty, I began to feel that “moderation” is not a bad thing. Eating a little, but feel better taste. The gourmets’ tongues will be numb, right? And my tongue, which is so clear-headed, is as hungry as a widow, a little bit of deliciousness will move me to tears of happiness. A bowl of cornmeal stubble porridge, I can drink the aroma of the richness of the grains; a bowl of steaming rice, topped with a little meat sauce, that’s heaven. I gave up self-help, I stopped loving meat so much, and the salt and spice started to get tiresome. When I don’t eat it, I really don’t eat it, and when I do eat it, it’s real food. I believe I can eat the real taste of each food, and each taste has an aftertaste that lingers for three days.

I don’t know if there is a connection between the two. Before that, I had been living an extremely busy and anxious life. I was taking on lots and lots of work, partly because I was really forced by life, and partly because I was restless inside. If I didn’t take this one, I wouldn’t have been approached. Even if I take this single, if yellow, then I will fall short, life will not catch up. We in the industry called this “dog catching eight bubbles of shit”, very unpleasant. So many, of course, the posture can not be relaxed, things are not fine, but no way, is crazy to receive, crazy to do, crazy to turn. In fact, what we need is not money, is a sense of security. Just like what we need is not food, but love. Last year I stopped living this way. Only take what I want to write, only do what I want to do. Not a lot of money, but a good life. Took control of my life, digested my inner turmoil, and I’m content, at my age.

Sorry I didn’t write about love and sex in this post. Love does not become more, what becomes more is the possibility of love. Is this in itself a comedy or a tragedy?

A long time ago we all heard the famous quote: STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH. staying stupid is easy for me, I have always been a passionate fool. Stay hungry, what does it mean? I think in the modern world, it becomes easy to eat well. Middle age is a process of becoming increasingly materially satiated. Digestion slows down, metabolism slows down, and it is easy to become sluggish and settled, and to become complacent. To stay hungry is to keep yourself sharp and awake. Not to become greedy, the constant pursuit of satisfaction, on the contrary, I think, is to maintain a state, a youthful posture. To be hungry at a hungry age is a constant. STAY HUNGRY, is to cherish the sincere senses and to sharpen the desire to depart.

Hunger is good exercise, I believe.