Happy EastOver! Happy Paster! The Talmud and other Diet Books
Many Jewish households are celebrating lavish Passover Seders this week, and many Christian ones will have Easter feasts on Sunday. Celebrations like these are highly regulated, however. Not every day or every meal is meant to be a feast or a fast, and the one who feasts or fasts too much sins. It is far better, these traditions hold, for people to eat only the amount that satisfies them.
Among these old arguments is the novel idea of eating less than what fills one’s belly. The Talmud teaches that people should eat enough to fill a third of their stomachs, drink enough to fill another third, and leave a third empty. (A hadith in the Islamic tradition also teaches this.) Rashi, a medieval French rabbi, interpreted the Talmud to mean that the final empty third is necessary so that the body can metabolize emotions. If one ate until one’s belly was completely full, there’d be no room left to manage one’s emotions and one would burst asunder.
However absurd this may seem to us today, it made physiological sense in the premodern world as the emotions were considered physical things that, like food and drink, were metabolized by the body. A body stuffed with food and drink is full only of biology; it leaves no room for biography, for what makes us human.
The medieval physician and legal scholar Maimonides similarly instructed people to eat and drink less than what filled their bellies (he thought the stomach should be three-quarters full). Moreover, they should eat slowly. Modern science corroborates Maimonides: it takes about 20 minutes for the brain to receive messages from the stomach that it has had enough. Satiety can be achieved with less food than one might think, and it requires more time to reach it. . .
We have to realize that enough is enough. We should stop asking ourselves, “Am I full?” and start asking, “Am I satisfied?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/opinion/the-talmud-and-other-diet-books.html
