Dinner-Time

It's been about 19 years, I think, that our family has been eating dinner in the middle of the day instead of in the evening like normal Americans. I love it. It's better for your health. The food is digested during the day when your metabolism is higher and you're burning the calories. That means less weight gain and more nutrition absorption from the same food. Eating dinner mid-day and eating very light in the evening also seems to cut down on reflux problems and hot flashes overnight. There are other health benefits too, but I can't remember them off the top of my head right now (and my nutrition books are not with me while I'm away from home right now).

The problem is that most families cannot gather for dinner in the middle of the day. As we're looking at the need for Gary to obtain income from outside the congregation, dinner-time is probably something we'll lose. When the kids were little, those studies came out about the importance of the family eating together. With grade-schoolers and toddlers and a daddy who worked less than a block away from home, it was easy to have every meal together. As the kids grew and got jobs, it became nigh onto impossible to have a set meal-time that allowed everyone to gather daily. So we just had our dinner, and everybody who was available came to eat. But if Daddy is gone at dinner-time every day, I think we're going to have to adjust dinner-time to the evening time. It's just kind of sad to think of how that's going to mess with our days and our digestion, though. I don't want to have to make decisions about trade-offs between health and family togetherness. But I suppose it's something the whole rest of the world does, and we've just been spoiled the last couple of decades. Oh well.