Easy Healthy Eating Rule: Don't Listen to Your Parents - 5 Reasons Not to Clear Your Plate

     If you're my age, you're part of the last generation to have grown up with the belief that plates are meant to be scraped clean. Our grandparents, especially, having lived through the Great Depression, usually hate to see anything "go to waste." However, many of the principles behind this idea are no longer relevant, some of them never were ("There are children starving in Africa!") and in today's world where sedentary careers are increasing and your little Bobby is no longer outside chasing little Cindy around the whole damned neighborhood trying to stuff a toad down the back of her dress, extra calories are a lot less likely to be burned off.
     If you want to eat healthy and stay slim the easy way, one of the prime things you have to do is learn to stop eating when you're full, even if there is still food on your plate. In an attempt to reverse all the damage that your loving parents and grandparents have done to you (hey, give them a break, they meant well), I'm going to give you five entirely sound reasons why you should train yourself to leave unneeded food on your plate, which I'll explain how to do at the end of this post.

1) Because we are no longer living as serfs. We're no longer in a time period where if the crops are fruitful now, you better eat them because there may be no rain next month. We no longer have to eat an entire animal in one sitting because duh, we have refrigerators and freezers. We're also no longer working in the fields all day and burning more calories than Nicole Kidman two weeks before a major movie role. Most people in developed countries don't labor outdoors, and we don't have to worry about going without food for more than a few hours.

2) Because the starving African children are not going to know the difference. I don't understand this argument. People are starving in third world countries, therefore we should eat everything that is available to us here? Did I miss something? Do the restaurants and grocery stores of America have an official agreement with the Ethiopian government that if we all eat everything on our plates, America will ship them crates of food?
      Yeah, I didn't think so. I realize that for some people it's about principle, but if you're going to get into that, here's my question: Is that really how we should show respect for those who can't eat enough, by making ourselves sick in the opposite way? If you ask me, being a glutton is far more insulting than throwing away unneeded food.

3) Because no matter how much labor, water, transport, packaging and money has gone into an item of food, forcing yourself to eat it is not going to even everything out. Ever hear the phrase, "Two wrongs don't make a right"? It's the same thing when it comes to throwing away food. You're taught to think, "Oh, I can't waste it. It cost me money. It cost the earth water and energy." So you try to justify it by eating it anyway, but really, you're just furthering the fact that you bought or cooked unnecessary food by creating even more problems. Nothing major though. Just obesity, diabetes, heart attack...

4) Because forcing our kids to eat when they are not hungry is wrong. I firmly believe this mentality is one of the greatest causes of the obesity epidemic. A very young child, untainted by bad rearing, will stop eating when his body tells him he is full. His mother, however, will tell him that actually the very clear sign that his body is giving him is wrong, that he actually needs to eat more. It may not seem like you are asking much of your child if only a few tablespoons of food are left, but really, by forcing him to ingest those extra calories, you are teaching his extremely malleable and vulnerable young brain to ignore the very important biological signal that his body has had enough calories. Then he grows up thinking that food is meant to be consumed whether he is hungry or not.

5) Because in an ideal society, food is bountiful enough that we don't need all of it. There is never going to be another Great Potato Famine. The availability of food has skyrocketed in the past century at a rate like never before. The fact that we can go to a restaurant or grocery store and have whatever we want in massive quantities should be taken as a sign that mankind has reached an ideal level of food production. We don't have to worry about saving leftover food because modern society is prosperous enough that we simply don't need it.

     I promised that at the end of this post I would tell you how to retrain yourself to stop eating when you're full. So here it is:
     Next time you're eating a meal, pay attention to your body. If you feel full and there's still food on your plate, let it go. Save it for later or THROW IT OUT. The starving African kids are not going to know the difference, I promise.
     If you're full and you can't stop eating, make yourself leave just one forkful of food on the plate. It seems insignificant, but this will instill in you that it's okay to leave food behind. Eat like this a few times, and then start leaving even more food on the plate (but not before you're truly physically full) In China, it's actually considered rude to eat everything on your plate. It's an insult to the cook that he didn't give you enough food.

      Once you've reprogrammed yourself to stop eating when you're full, you'll find that eating this way is actually effortless, because it's what nature intended. And you'll enjoy food more.

Oh Make Me Over

      Fitness was never an interest of mine. I hate running with a passion - stomach cramps, feet violently smacking against the ground... really, what's to like? And then the immediate sore throat. What the fuck?
     And dieting, who needs it? Isn't food a highlight of our existence? Isn't it the promise of a fluffy bowl of ravioli with savory sauce and nice, salty cheese that gets us through our shitty days?
     There's gotta be a better way to do this.

     I have a troubled history with food. I guess I should blame it on my parents' divorce since that's the trendy thing to do. When I was a kid, I ate. A lot. Actually, constantly. Fruit rolls ups, cheese cracker sandwiches, Dunkaroos (oh my GOD, what a horrible food); I engorged in it all, and it never occurred to me that I had to stop when I was full. I lived with my Mom the majority of the time, and she was crazy busy pursuing a nursing degree at community college and working part time as a house call hairdresser. As you would imagine, she wasn't home much, and when she was, she had to study. But even with her schedule, she was a wonderful mother, as was my second mother (my grandmother), who provided the roof and looked after me all day. It was a stuffy apartment on the main street in the center of town. The only windows were in the bedrooms. I didn't have a backyard, or a front yard. I had two adorable cats though. And lots, always LOTS of food.
     My mother and my grandmother didn't try to correct my eating. They used to tell me I had "baby fat", and that every other woman in the family went through the same "phase" as a child, and that each and every one of them magically blossomed into a beautiful, slender woman once menstruation hit. So even though I looked like Kirby, I didn't worry about it.
     That all changed every other weekend when I visited my Dad. He knew I had a weight problem, and he knew it wasn't just "baby fat." So it didn't matter if it was snowing and 20 degrees out - he made me takes walks with him around the entire damn lake where he lived. He made salad for dinner with tuna steak or chicken, and usually no carbohydrate. At the time, I thought he was mean, but I realize now it was tough love. And he wasn't that bad. He even let me have a whole scoop of vegan ice cream for dessert.
     But on Sunday night, I'd just go back home to my mom where I had unlimited access to string cheese and Chips Ahoy. And if that wasn't bad enough, both my grandmother and my mother convinced me that my father was abusing me by depriving me of food whenever I wanted it and limiting my portions. So you can imagine how I developed this negative, flip-floppity relationship with food.
     And we can't forget that I learned to associate exercise with negativity. You know the fat kid in gym class that can barely run? That was me. I was the one who made everyone sit around and wait while I desperately tried to finish my laps. I was the one always picked last for kickball teams. And the kid that everyone laughed at when she tried to run? That was me.

     By my teen years, I had somehow managed to slim down considerably. Walking the new dog had done it. Yes, really. That, and walking around town a lot with my friends who lived nearby. And I guess my Dad's annoying wisdom had finally been drilled into me. To be fair, my metabolism did change when I hit menstruation, but I still could have been in better shape.
     I would be a size 12 (I'm 5'9) up until the middle of college. It was only after I moved onto campus that I ballooned to a whopping 179 pounds. Thanks, Chartwells.
     When I got off the meal plan this past May, I decided enough was enough. I was going to lose weight. From about June through the end of January, I lost 17 pounds. When the following spring semester started, I conquered my childhood fear and signed up for a gym class, specifically "Aerobic Fitness & Weight Management." It's helped me immensely (and so has living at home and eating real food). In the past six weeks since the class started, I've lost another 5 pounds, my hips have shed a full inch and my body fat percentage has decreased from 34.5% in the beginning of February to 28.7%. I'm now officially in the "healthy" BMI range for my height, and I'm not even barely in. I'm pretty far in.
     My current weight is 156 or 157, depending on the day. My goal is to get down to 145, but there's more to it. I want to be toned. I want a line going down my stomach. I want to be... I want to be... smoking hot.
     But I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to work out every single day of the week, and I don't want to go on the Raw Foods Diet, or the "I don't eat at all, and when I feel like I'm going to faint, I eat a cube of cheese" diet like this girl:

     I want to make changes now that I can continue even after I've reached my goal weight and toned up. I want to change my life.
     My grandmother used to tell me, "There's always an easy way to do something." Okay, so she wasn't entirely right about the baby fat thing, but she was right about banging a butter knife on a stubborn jar to release the air, and I'm absolutely convinced there is wisdom in what she told me. There's always an easy way to do something. And by easy, I don't mean no effort. Of course there's effort. By easy, I mean finding the most efficient means by which to do something, and in a way where it doesn't fight you back. It feels natural.
     So, that's what I Want a Hot Body, But I'm Lazy and Hate to Cook is about. Efficiency. Finding the easy way.
     Will you join me in finding the easy way?

- Jill <3