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.