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 …
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.
Comment on August 21, 2004 @ 9:44 am
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.
Comment on August 23, 2004 @ 8:22 am