The Supper/Dinner Distinction
Despite the contemporary American tendency to conflate the two, you may recall that there is a difference between "dinner" and "supper." Dinner is the main meal of the day; supper is the evening meal. They need not coincide.
Until relatively recently, in fact, dinner was commonly served in the early afternoon. Many ethnic families preserve a vestige of the old practice on holidays: our Italian side, for example, traditionally serves Easter Dinner at 2pm. Some English families, I believe, still have the relatives in for Sunday [afternoon] Dinner, with roast beef and all the trimmings.
I bring all this up because, as part of the diet, I'm trying to take my main meal at lunchtime, with something lighter, typically a salad, in the evening. The theory is that I'll be much more active after lunch than after supper. Even an afternoon behind a desk -- which is never spent completely behind a desk, of course -- must burn more calories than the typical weeknight procession from table to couch to bed. And there's always the formidable walk home ...
Until relatively recently, in fact, dinner was commonly served in the early afternoon. Many ethnic families preserve a vestige of the old practice on holidays: our Italian side, for example, traditionally serves Easter Dinner at 2pm. Some English families, I believe, still have the relatives in for Sunday [afternoon] Dinner, with roast beef and all the trimmings.
I bring all this up because, as part of the diet, I'm trying to take my main meal at lunchtime, with something lighter, typically a salad, in the evening. The theory is that I'll be much more active after lunch than after supper. Even an afternoon behind a desk -- which is never spent completely behind a desk, of course -- must burn more calories than the typical weeknight procession from table to couch to bed. And there's always the formidable walk home ...
2 Comments:
Hi guys! Congrats on the diet, although I remember all of you as skinny people. I wonder if women's body image issues are spreading to men? I'll link to you whenever I get around to updating my own blog.
Lunch was my main meal of the day for years, largely because I always tended to value an extra twenty minutes of sleep every morning over eating something for breakfast. The predictable result was that I ended up very hungry by lunch time, and would eat a large meal (whether at a restaurant near work, a college dining hall, or wherever was appropriate at the time).
The problem with that, I know now, is the effort involved in digestion. A lunch of a thousand calories or more takes effort to digest, and as a result it's easy to slip into that sophorific mid-afternoon state -- the one that usually shows up midway through the afternoon on Thanksgiving, when all of a sudden nobody in the family has the energy to do anything but watch football on TV.
So recently I've been trying to avoid the main meal entirely. I had a small breakfast this morning and eat something else around 11, around 1, and around 3. Not big meals - a few hundred calories each at most. Then a relatively early, although not huge, dinner, and a final snack later in the evening. Not only is my energy level higher, I don't hit the 2pm slump and it's easier to keep the total calorie intake down.
Post a Comment
<< Home