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If we follow the rule to eat only when truly hungry, those people who are “hungry” but weak and uncomfortable would fast until comfort and strength returned. Fasting would become one of the most common practices in our lives, at least, until we learn to live and eat to keep well and thus eliminate the need for fasting.

There are individuals who are always eating and always “hungry.” They mistake a morbid irritation of the stomach for hunger. These people have not learned to distinguish between a normal demand for food and a symptom of disease. They mistake the evidences of chronic gastritis or of gastric neurosis for hunger.

Hunger, as previously pointed out, is the insistent demand for food that arises out of physiological need for nourishment. Appetite, on the other hand, is a craving for food which may be the result of several different outside factors operating through the mind and senses. Anything that will arouse an appetite will encourage one to eat, whether or not there exists an actual need for food.

Hunger may be satisfied and appetite still persist, a not unusual thing. Our many course dinners, with everything especially prepared to appeal to the taste and smell, are well designed to keep alive appetite, long after hunger has been appeased. No man is ever hungry when he reaches the dessert, so commonly served after a many course dinner. Few, though filled to repletion and perhaps uncomfortable in the abdomen, ever refuse to eat the dessert. It is especially prepared to appeal to appetite. This style of eating necessarily and inevitably leads to overeating and disease. Too many articles of food at a meal over stimulate and induce overeating. Hunger and the sense of taste are the only guides as to the quantity and character of food required. If we eat when we are not hungry, and if the delicate sensibilities of taste have been dulled and deadened by gluttonous indulgence and by condiments, spices, alcohol, etc., it ceases to be a reliable guide.

The unperfected instinct of hunger craves most keenly the food that is most needed by the body and the unperfected taste derives the most pleasure and satisfaction out of the food or foods demanded, and will be satisfied when we have consumed sufficient of such food or foods to supply the body’s needs. But, if we have been in the habit of crowding the stomach when there is no demand for food, just because it is meal time, or because the doctor ordered it, and we know no other indication that enough food has been consumed, than that the stomach can hold no more, we are headed for disaster. The existence of a natural demand for food indicates that food is required by the body and that the organs of the body are ready to receive and digest it. Eating when there is no time, or as a social duty, or because one has been able to stimulate an appetite, is a wrong to the body. Both the quality and quantity, and the frequency of meals should be regulated by the rules of hygiene rather than by those of etiquette and convenience.