We are so fortunate to be able to eat when we get hungry here in America. Have you noticed that you enjoy being hungry partly because you know there is always food and food tastes better when you're hungry? Because we are fortunate to have an abundance of food, we're able to play with the condition of hunger to our benefit.

I've been fasting every day for 16 hours by having my last meal by 2:00 pm. The hunger usually strikes around 7:00 pm, but my bedtime is 9:00 and as long as I keep my mind occupied with a good book, movie or favorite series on Amazon (like "The Big Bang Theory") those two hours pass quickly. Since I fall asleep fast I don't lie in bed and think about my favorite food and so far I haven't had any buffet dreams brought on by no food after 2:00.

One big lesson I've learned is by not eating after 2:00 my sleep is fabulous. I've had more flying dreams and lots of color in them. When I wake up in the morning I feel so rested! And I haven't needed my usual nap. I've read quite a bit about the benefits of giving our digestive track a rest and because I've had more energy since this fasting began, it's telling me digesting a meal takes quite a lot of energy.

With the title of my blog being "Hunger is the Best Sauce," I wanted to share with you something I wrote several years ago on the subject. 

It takes about 21 days of not eating sugar to transform your tongue into a tastebud-touting, pleasure producer. In 2011 Terry and I quit sugar by getting it out of our home and consequently our diet and it was a shock to both of us how sweet vegetables became after those 21 days. Fruit is so sweet it's like biting into a candy bar and whenever I've eaten cake or ice cream on rare occasions, they are sickenly sweet and I feel awful afterwards. In fact every time I've eaten sugar I get a hangover like I'd been on some kind of drinking binge.

You ought to try cutting sugar out of your diet for just 21 days and see if you aren't shocked too. 21 days, just three weeks, and by that time you'll have established a new habit and you won't miss sugar at all.

Here's a post that comes from a very happy eater and I wanted to share with you what she discovered.

How would you like to enjoy eating all the holiday goodies more than you ever have before? This is the most wonderful time of year to make a decision to do just that! 

However, enjoying your food starts with paying more attention to a part of your body that you may have been ignoring for a long time; your tongue. We all know without our tongues we couldn’t speak, but we also couldn’t enjoy our food because that’s where all those taste buds are.

Once when my kids were teenagers we were sitting at the dinner table and I suddenly noticed the way we were eating. Everyone was scarfing, gulping, guzzling, gobbling, slugging down, chowing down, wolfing down and pigging out like a bunch of animals. You’d have thought we were all late to catch a flight!

Since words don’t teach as well as experience does, I decided to prepare a special meal for the next dinner we’d be eating together. I wanted to get their attention, without words, to help us all be more aware of this marvelous gift we have…our ability to really enjoy our food.

Here’s what I did.