[Blarg]

#4 is an interesting point. We get enormously habituated to things and it's pretty easy never to question it. Like, why should we eat at certain times of day whether we're hungry or not, why is a coke in the morning shocking but not so much after lunch, and why must breakfast always be some starchy thing with syrup, some sugary cereal or eggs? Lots of Asians for instance start off the day with a bowl of low-calorie soup with meat and vegetables in it -- extremely healthy and really warms up/kick-starts the body. But we can easily get so that the least questioning of our habits startles and discomfits us to an absurd degree.

Ironically, this is an area where oldth (oldth?) can have an edge on youth. After being an adult for a while, you realize that you don't have to do a lot of things you thought you had to, nor is doing the opposite necessarily interesting or any kind of statement. You don't have to conform or unconform, and can more easily start to do things simply because they make more sense. Eating habits can be tough to change or see anything wrong with, no matter how spartan or indulgent. They just stick, hard.

But actually having a number of lighter meals is an example of something well worth considering. They make one much less likely to suffer from that post-lunch crash that comes from waiting so long to eat and then stuffing yourself -- often with high carb stuff that makes you hungry for at least a little nibble of something a surprisingly short while later anyway. And eating something at whatever time of day simply because it is good for you makes a lot more sense than eating what you're "supposed" to eat just because as far as you know that's the way everybody else is doing it.