When the Body Forgets the Sun: On Evening Meals, Lost Rhythms, and the Quiet Warmth After Eating

The Old Agreement Between the Sun and the Stomach

For most of the history of our family, and I think for most families in our part of the world, there existed an unspoken agreement between the body and the daylight. This agreement was never written down anywhere, and no one ever sat us down as children to explain it, yet every person who worked with the land or with animals understood it in their bones. When the sun was high and the shadows were short, the body was ready to receive food and to turn it into strength and warmth. When the sun began to lean toward the forest and the air grew cooler, the body began to slow itself down, to prepare for rest, and the appetite grew quieter. My grandfather used to say that the stomach has its own eyes and that these eyes look at the sky rather than at the plate. I did not understand him then, but now, after many years of observing my own body and the bodies of the people around me, I am inclined to believe that he was speaking a kind of truth that our grandfathers knew without needing any books to teach it to them.

When the Clock Inside Forgets the Clock Outside

There is, inside every one of us, a small and patient keeper of time, something like an old woman sitting by a window who counts the hours by the passing of birds and the turning of leaves. This keeper has lived in our families for thousands of years, and she has always kept her rhythm in step with the rising and the setting of the sun. But in our present life, we have begun to ignore her. We sit under bright lamps long after the darkness has fallen outside, we stare at small glowing screens until our eyes grow heavy, we eat our evening meal at ten o’clock or even later, and we wonder why we feel so strange in the morning. The keeper of time inside us grows confused. She no longer knows whether it is day or night, whether the body should be working or resting, whether the food that has just arrived should be turned into warmth or stored away for some difficult winter that never comes. This confusion, this disagreement between the clock inside and the clock outside, is something I have felt in my own body for many years now, especially during the winters when I work late into the night and then sleep until the sun is already well above the rooftops.

The Warmth That Rises After a Meal

There is a particular feeling that many of us know well, though we rarely stop to think about it or to give it a proper name. It is the gentle warmth that spreads through the belly and then through the cheeks and the hands in the first hour or so after a good meal, especially when the meal has been eaten in the middle of the day and the food has been simple and warm and prepared with care. My grandmother used to call this feeling “the body thanking itself,” and she would sit for a while after eating with her hands folded over her stomach and her eyes half closed, as though she were listening to something very quiet happening inside her. I have come to understand, through long observation and through many conversations with older people in the villages, that this warmth is not simply the heat of the food itself, because the food cools quickly enough on the plate. It is something the body makes on purpose, something the body does when it is certain of the hour and when it recognizes that the food arriving is expected and welcome. The body spends a little of its own energy to welcome the food, and in return it receives warmth and a pleasant heaviness that is not unpleasant at all but rather like a soft blanket laid over the shoulders.

Why the Same Bread Feeds Differently at Night

I have noticed, both in myself and in my wife and in many of my friends who live similar lives to mine, that the very same piece of bread, the very same bowl of soup, the very same slice of salted fat with dark rye bread, behaves quite differently in the body depending on the hour at which it is eaten. When I eat this same simple meal at one o’clock in the afternoon, after a morning of walking or of work in the garden, I feel the familiar warmth rise in me, my hands grow comfortable, my mind grows clear, and the food seems to become part of me without any trouble at all. But when I eat that same meal at nine or ten o’clock in the evening, after a long day of sitting at a desk and staring at pages and screens, the warmth either does not come at all or comes in a strange and uneven way, and instead I feel a heaviness that is not comfortable, a fullness that sits in the belly like a stone, and a certain tiredness that is not the good tiredness of honest work but rather the muddled tiredness of a body that does not know what is being asked of it. I have written about this before in smaller pieces, and many readers have written back to tell me that they feel exactly the same thing, which tells me that this is not merely some peculiarity of my own constitution but something much more widespread than we usually admit.

What I Have Seen in My Own House and in the Village

Over the past twenty years, I have had the unusual fortune of living two lives at once, or at least of moving back and forth between them often enough to compare them carefully. In the city, where I spend perhaps eight months of each year, I watch my neighbors and my students and my own children eat their meals at hours that would have seemed unthinkable to my grandmother. They eat breakfast quickly while running to catch a vehicle, they eat lunch at their desks without leaving their work, and they eat dinner late in the evening after all the other tasks of the day have been finished. In the village, where I spend the remaining months and where my relatives still live in the old wooden house, the rhythm remains much as it was when I was a boy. The main meal comes in the middle of the day, the evening brings only a small and quiet supper, and the body follows the sun as it has always done. I have watched carefully, over these many years, how the bodies of the people in the village age more gently than the bodies of the people in the city, how they carry less of that particular heaviness around the middle that so many of my city friends complain about, and how they speak of their stomachs with a kind of friendly respect that I rarely hear in Kyiv or in Lviv. I do not wish to romanticize the village, because the village has its own hardships and its own sorrows, but on this one matter I am fairly certain that the village still remembers something the city has chosen to forget.

A Small Word on the Things People Take to Help the Body

Because this confusion of hours has become so common in our time, many people have begun to look for help in small bottles and in powders and in drops that promise to set things right again inside the body. I am generally a suspicious person when it comes to such promises, because I have learned over the years that no small bottle can replace a life lived in step with the daylight, and because I have seen too many friends spend good money on things that did nothing at all except to empty their wallets. But I will say this honestly, because I believe in speaking honestly about the things I have actually tried or seen with my own eyes. There is one preparation that several people I trust have recommended to me, and that I have myself watched work in a way that seemed reasonable and gentle, which is called Abslim. It comes in the form of drops rather than pills, which I think is a better way for the body to receive anything, and it is meant to support the body’s own quiet work rather than to force the body into some unnatural rhythm. I should mention, because it is important and because I do not like it when people are sent to the wrong places, that this preparation cannot be found in ordinary shops or pharmacies but only on its own official place, which is Abslim.org, and this is how the makers themselves have chosen to distribute it. I do not say that any drop can replace the old agreement between the body and the sun, but I will say that sometimes a small help is welcome while we are still learning to remember what we have forgotten.

The City Man’s Attempt to Return to the Old Ways

I am not so foolish as to suggest that every person reading these words should abandon the city and move to a wooden house in the foothills, because I know very well that most people have work and families and obligations that tie them to the places where they live. Nor am I foolish enough to pretend that I myself have perfectly kept the old rhythms, because I have not, and there are weeks in the winter when I eat my evening meal at an hour that would have made my grandmother shake her head in slow disappointment. But I have found, through much trial and much error, that there are small things a person can do even in the middle of a city to remind the keeper of time inside the body that the sun still exists and that the day still has a shape. I try, whenever I can, to eat the largest meal of my day while the sun is still well above the middle of the sky, and I try to make the evening meal small and early and simple. I try to step outside for a few minutes in the early morning, even when the air is cold, so that the eyes can tell the keeper of time inside that the day has begun. I try to put away the small glowing screens at least an hour before I intend to sleep, even though this is perhaps the hardest of all the small disciplines. These things are not difficult in themselves, but they require a certain willingness to go against the current of the life that surrounds us, and this willingness is something that must be renewed almost every day.

On the Patience Required to Remember

I want to say one more thing, which is perhaps the most important thing of all, and that is that the body does not forget its old rhythms in a single day and it does not remember them in a single day either. When I first began, many years ago now, to try to eat more in step with the daylight, I felt strange for several weeks, as though my body were complaining that I was asking it to remember something it had long been allowed to forget. I felt hungry at odd hours, I felt tired in the middle of the afternoon, I felt a certain irritability that I could not quite explain. But I kept at it, gently and without scolding myself when I failed, and slowly, over the course of perhaps two or three months, the keeper of time inside me began to trust me again. The warmth after the midday meal returned, the heaviness after the evening meal grew lighter, and the mornings began to feel clearer than they had in many years. I tell this story not to boast, because there is nothing to boast about in eating a bowl of grains at the proper hour, but to say to anyone who is reading this and who feels the same confusion in their own body that I once felt, that the body is patient and that it is willing to forgive us if we are willing to return to it slowly and with kindness.

The Quiet Truth the Body Still Knows

In the end, what I have come to believe, after many years of thinking and writing and observing and living in two different kinds of time, is that the body still knows something that we have largely stopped listening to. It knows when the light is strong and when the light is failing, it knows when it should welcome food and when it should prepare for rest, and it knows how to turn that food into warmth and into life when we give it the chance to do so in the proper order. This knowledge is not something that needs to be taught to us, because we were born with it, and it is not something that can be taken away from us completely, because it lives too deep in the flesh for any amount of electric light or late evening meal to erase it entirely. All that is required of us is a certain quietness, a certain willingness to slow down enough to hear what the body is saying, and a certain respect for the old rhythms that carried our grandfathers and our grandmothers through their lives without any great trouble at all. I do not ask anyone to believe me on this matter, because belief is not what is needed here, but only to try, for a few weeks or a few months, to eat the midday meal when the sun is high and the evening meal when the day is still young, and to watch carefully what happens in the body as a result. The body will answer, I am fairly certain of this, and its answer will come not in words but in that familiar quiet warmth that rises after a meal eaten at the proper hour, and that warmth will be its own proof that the old agreement between the sun and the stomach has not been broken after all, but only forgotten for a little while.