Eating Early Changed My Life

How the unexpected can encourage us to examine our lives

A couple days of early dinners had me feeling giddy, as if I had discovered a crucial piece in my jigsaw puzzle of life.

And it happened quite unexpectedly. On New Year’s Day, we traveled home from time spent with family. By the time we pulled into our garage, unloaded and fed the dog, it was nearly 5pm - far earlier than I usually start dinner, but we were all a bit hungry, so in the absence of other tasks pulling me away, I shushed the chiding voice that said, "It's too early!" and promptly started cooking. We were finished and cleaned up by 6:30pm leaving us hours of free evening. My boys played, I read, we watched a show together AND I got to bed early. It felt long and luxurious. Time slowed down.

I’ve just finished Elisabeth McKetta’s lovely book, Edit Your Life - a handbook for living with intention in a messy world. She suggests, as a first step, that we spend time examining our lives - paying attention to what is working, what is not working, what we care about and what we can let go. I believe it was this priming that allowed me to recognize that this shift in dinner timing had profound effects.

We proceeded to follow this schedule the next several nights, and I felt rejuvenated. This single shift had far reaching effects stretching across hours and into future days. We all felt more rested, less rushed.

The magic of those early January dinners carried us through the holiday break. Now, ten days later, our regularly scheduled work-school-activities programming has resumed, and I recognize that maintaining that daily schedule is not a reality. While my initial exuberance is tempered (this eating early business is not the holy grail I felt it might be), its possibility has offered nuggets of wisdom.

1.) Eating early can be revolutionary.

It feels so simple to state it this way - something countless other parents have known all along and undoubtedly a recommendation I have received along the way. But advice often has a circuitous way of reaching us. The planets of life, time and receptivity must align at just the right moment for us to fully appreciate some simple truths and accept them as epiphanies of our own.

Dinner has always been sacred time for our family. I love preparing it, I strive to have us sit down together each evening. But somewhere along the way, perhaps out of developed habits, or more likely, my own preconceived ideas about early-dinner-eating, I had labeled us as “late eaters.” When talking with fellow moms, neighbors or family members, I would state the fact that I couldn't get dinner on the table before 8pm as though I were a victim of my circumstances. It was an immovable fact that I wore as a badge of pride, a symbol of my busyness. I didn’t approach early eaters with any sort of curiosity because, frankly, I wasn’t interested in changing our habits. They were what they were.

So, even as our kids’ evening activities shifted later and our dinner and bedtime routines followed suit, I didn’t budge. We were late eaters who were now routinely sitting down at 8:30 or 9pm. My kids are 8 and 11 years old. They weren’t sleeping enough, I wasn’t sleeping enough. My husband and I had lost any semblance of evening down-time, and my beloved, peaceful 5am mornings had disappeared because I couldn’t get to bed before 11pm. This was unsustainable, and I felt grumpy. But I couldn’t see another way.

Then the unexpected happened and we ate early on a whim, offering an incredible moment of clarity. While this ever-later shifting schedule had us all feeling exhausted, I hadn’t been able to see that pulling out one element and moving it earlier could make a difference.

2.) Time feels different depending on when we experience it.

This shift was easy to make over the holiday when commitments were fewer and time moves slower. Back in the bustle of our more typical routine, I am seeing that the 60-90 minutes post work/pre activity is time that disappears quickly. That same time block shifted later in the evening, post-dinner, seems to slow down. I was describing this to a friend, and she totally understood, “I know what you mean! If I come home from work and keep up that same level of task-accomplishing energy for another hour, I am able to get dinner on the table early and quickly. Then I can rest more deliberately.” Time can feel different based on how we fill it and what’s going on around us.

It won’t work for us every night. We have commitments that prevent 5:30pm dinners from being a nightly reality, but when it can work, I am making an effort. For this season in our lives, this feels like a minor change that can make a significant difference in how we all feel at the end of a day, the end of a week and how we engage with one another.

3.) Examination leads to discovery.

Perhaps it was the suggestion in the book to “examine my life” that primed me to pay attention to how I felt those days when we ate early. Or maybe it is the time of year - a time of natural reflection as we look to start fresh. Regardless, I love how this unexpected gift of trying something new and noticing its impact has allowed me to shed the labels/judgements I had around dinner timing. Who knew I was holding onto something so tightly! In doing so I feel more curious about how it works for others and hopeful that some minor tweaks can lead to more frequent slower weekday evenings.

By paying attention to the little things - what we are doing and how we are feeling - we gain awareness. Sometimes these small discoveries are like finding the right puzzle piece: they shift our entire picture and remind us that the careful examination of our daily habits can lead to unexpected transformations in our lives.