Finally Getting Fit

AKA: Children in China are Starving

I think it’s Africa these days, but I’m old enough to at least been on the end of the starving children in China statement.

Sometimes weight is just weight. Someone gets a desk job and puts a few pounds on. But for the people who are overweight or obese and have been for years, if not most of their life, there is usually a lot more to it than just weight.

That’s why in this blog, I want to address some of the other things besides your desk job which can lead to being overweight. I have a lot of personal causes, but I want to move beyond the scope of my personal weight loss and issues to issues many people might have.

Getting back to the above, I’m willing to be you heard something like the above when you were young. Either that or you were mature enough and in a family situation where you knew you should eat as much as you can right now because you don’t know when the next meal is coming.

There is yet another alternative in this group, and that is you heard a lot of:

Finish your dinner or no dessert!

You have to finish your plate before you can go out and play.

Or,

You finished your entire plate! What a good boy/girl!

Now picture me sighing and shaking my head.

I didn’t realize this was such a big issue until I came here to Australia. My husband and I would eat either out or in, it didn’t matter and I’d reach a point in the meal when it would just be uncomfortable to finish the rest of the meal. Eventually my husband kept telling me again and again that it was okay to not finish the meal.

It may seem the simplest thing in the world to simply stop eating when you’re full, but it’s not. At home, I would feel guilty if my husband cooked and I didn’t finish. I felt not only like I was letting good food go to waste but that I was somehow insulting him and his hard work by not finishing. When we were out, I wasn’t worried about insulting anyone, but I still felt guilt when I pushed a plate or bowl with food still in it away and said, “I’m finished.”

This is a case of easier said than done if you have hang-ups about food. It took me months to be able to be reasonably comfortable saying I’m finished when I truly was finished. It’s truly a habit you have to teach yourself. Learning it, however, is one of the factors that kept me around the 260 mark (my highest weight) instead of going any higher.

If you have troubles with this (when you’re at home, at least), take your leftovers and go through the act of making them leftovers. Even if you’d never really eat the leftover amount later, you’re still putting it away in the fridge and not into the wastebasket.

You won’t get the guilt from wasting it or insulting anyone, and you’re still teaching yourself to say your finished when you are really finished, not when your mind/society/your parents say you’re finished eating.

Remember: You should not be deriving a sense of accomplishment from finishing your plate.