Why We Eat the Holidays.

It's the holidays again and, for me at least, that means an excessive amount of opportunities to eat. Why is that I wonder? Firstly, I imagine that having Thanksgiving lead into a whole month of Christmas frenzy can only promote festive treats and festive meals of colorful cookies and candies. Secondly, and this point may indeed only apply to those of us living in the frozen North, winter is not the most friendly time to be going outside and partaking in various tangents. At the very least it becomes that much tougher to convince oneself to get up and go outside instead of just staying in, having a cookie or six, and watching an old movie. Food is such a fascinating social element in human interaction. Simply speaking we eat to give ourselves energy to keep living, but it's not hard to see that food and the consumption thereof has a much greater significance in the lives of almost everyone on the planet. We eat on a first date; we eat when we get together with family; we eat at work to celebrate nondenominational holidays; we eat when we're happy and sad; we even eat when we have nothing better to do -- people eat for so many reasons and factors that the idea transcends the act.

An average human being eats over one thousand pounds of food in a year. On the basic level, our bodies urge us to do this for 'building blocks' needed to grow and repair our bodies and for fuel to give us the energy to go about our business and eat more. But is this the reason we eat, and if so why then do we eat more during the holidays? Some have suggested that many times we eat in a 'zone' of 'biological indifference' wherein we are neither hungry nor sated. The next time you sit down to eat, examine if you're legitimately in need of sustenance or if indeed you are responding to environmental cues. "Environmental cues," you ask? These can be any number of things ranging from the company with which you dine to emotional state and even - surprise, surprise - the time of year (more appropriately categorized as 'social circumstance').

The holiday season in particular fires on all three of the aforementioned cylinders of the eating engine. Obviously during the holidays family is in town, old friends come home, and as previously mentioned there are an abundance of treats and sugars to ingest. If we meet with a group of friends at an acceptable social gathering place like a restaurant, the stigma falls to us that we are required to eat. We do so in most cases without even being aware of what it is we're eating or if we even need it. The very nature of the holiday season can evoke the emotional triggers that cause a flux in eating patterns. From experience the string of seasonal merriment can affect a range of emotions from bliss to absolute melancholy. Being such a staple of our day-to-day stimuli, eating easily becomes a safely habitual haven for those of us overcome by either end of the spectrum of feeling. Our emotional state and the amount and types of food we eat are so closely tied together largely because of a closeness in the experience of existing. In essence we eat to stay alive and we experience emotion because we live. The conflux of the two activities, while seemingly unrelated at first glance, inevitably becomes much more apparent given the greater complexities at work in our minds and lives on a continuing basis.

In most of ones life, eating is never such a pervasive topic in a normal day of thinking, but that is not to say it is not prominent in our thoughts. It is prominent but in an almost subconscious way. It is such a primal instinct that it bleeds through to the more actively engaged impulses in the course of a day. Simply because of this fact eating and, by extension, food affect and in turn are effected by almost every stimuli we encounter be it internal or externally prompted. These reasons are chief among the factors that make topics such as weight-loss and healthy diets so frustrating to corral. While it is easy to assign logic to how we should relate to food; the biological tangle of stigmas, environmental cues, and ingrained behaviors make it a much more complex topic.

So why are the holidays usually such a catalyst for us to partake in consumption? I think it comes down to a perfect storm of stimuli. Christmas time has a way of throwing everything that makes the act of eating part of our daily lives at us in greatly exaggerated amounts. To me, the increased frequency of eating indicates that we are indeed alive and living. If this is the case, it means that things could be worse and maybe we should all be looking forward to a new year and a chance to experience everything life has to offer while we have the opportunity.

Would you believe I write outlines for these kinds of posts?