As you may have figured out by now I’m always in search of figuring out my triggers in over eating and in my general over consumption of life really. While I have found victories for myself this past year, I know I still have a long road ahead, especially when it comes to my weight loss goals; but I do love what I’m finding out about myself and life along the way.
With that said, as I reflected on my recent eating habits and weight loss goals, I realized I again was ignoring reality and just going with the flow – mirroring my eating after my BF (boyfriend) and not my own intuitive eating. See what I always fail to remember is that I, unlike my BF, was not blessed with skinny genes. He and his entire family can eat everything and anything their hearts desire and not gain weight. To them food is mainly seen as fuel vs. the emotional healing it is for me. It is because of this that my BF can easily allow a crazy day at work to derail him from eating. To me, a crazy day at work makes me run toward food, which I guess is why I have this stock pile of food waiting to let me indulge and shut off my thinking brain which tells me my hunger/fullness levels.
As soon as I allowed my brain to process the fact that my BF eats a big dinner because he, unlike me, has probably not had a meal since dinner the night before, I was able to allow myself to truly listen to my hunger/fullness levels again. As a result, my dinners this past week have not mirrored his big plates. That is not to say that I’m depriving myself because I still eat the same things he’s eating for dinner (I’m totally not the type to have a salad while my BF has a steak). Instead I follow something I heard during Bethenny Frankel’s promotion of Naturally Thin – you don’t need to eat everything placed in front of you, sometimes a taste is all you need so that you don’t feel deprived and go into the food scarcity mode I had frenzied myself into the last couple of weeks. So for dinner now I’m really listening to my hunger/fullness levels and listening to what he says his hunger/fullness levels are. Generally that means he gets a larger portion while I get a small to medium portion or turn to a snack instead of a full blown dinner.
Not indulging in a full blown dinner is huge for me. See for me growing up, dinner has always been my biggest meal of the day. Through out my time living at home, through high school, I never ate breakfast and only had a snack at lunch. Dinner was where we threw down my Mom’s delicious home cooking. As soon as I hit college and I started to see everyone on a diet, that’s when I learned that according to standardized diets, breakfast was the most important meal of the day and you should eat most of your calories before dinner, so I did. I added meals at breakfast and lunch, however I never took out the big dinner, which is what has lead to my weight gain since high school.
Dinners are big to me because that was the only time in the day where we shared something together as a family. While dinner is still that point of the day for me, I now realize that I can share that time together with my family at the dinner table, on the couch, outdoors or at any other place/time during the evening. The dinner table is not the be all, end all for sharing anymore and I’m starting to slowly but surely let go of it. 🙂
What triggers you to over eat? What snaps you back into listening to your hunger/fullness levels?
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