“You must finish everything on your plate, after all there are people starving around the world!” I know this quote all to well, not from my family but from many of my clients, and we all say the same thing; how is it that if I finish my plate other people around the world aren’t going to starve? So we all know this, and we say this, yet we still feel guilty if we don’t eat all of our food.
My client and I were discussing this yesterday and we both started laughing. She knows she shouldn’t eat everything on her plate if she is full, yet she feels like she should. It is time to throw this saying out the window and begin a new mantra, “my body will tell me when I am full, I must listen.”
Our bodies tell us when we are full; we just ignore them. So put on your hearing aids and start listening. Not real hearing aids, of course, but your internal ones. When your stomach feels full it will tell you, when your brain has been satisfied it will tell you, when you have received your pleasure and nourishment, your body will tell you, all you have to do is listen.
In order to unclog your ears and listen you must make sure your body is using all of its senses, not the five senses you’re used to learning about, but your eating senses: satisfaction, pleasure and nourishment. When these are met you will leave that plate with one bite, two bites, heck, maybe half the plate!
Satisfaction comes when you have either put time and effort into preparing your food, set the table and set the mood, dined in at a restaurant with good lighting and ambiance or even just eating something with tons of flavor and excitement. When you give your body and brain more than just food, in the form of variety, flavors, happiness, and so on you will be fuller faster. You won’t need that little something extra afterwards because you got everything you need from your meal.
Pleasure is your ticket to enjoying your meals to the fullest. Take each bite of food in your mouth and enjoy it. Taste every flavor, every spice and herb, every texture, just take it all in. The French culture is so right on in the eating department. They get every bit of pleasure from their meals and they would never put up with flavorless diet food, or constricted calorie diets.
Nourishment sounds like a no brainer, of course my food is nourishing, it’s food after all … but is it? Do you punish yourself through meals or certain foods, or do you allow it to nourish you? Do you stick to high quality ingredients in order to ensure your food provides nourishment in the forms of vitamins and minerals? Are you eating in a relaxed environment, slowly to ensure that you are even digesting properly to absorb these nutrients? Your body seeks this nourishment in order to stay healthy, please don’t rob this from it.
If you want to help the starving people around the world, donate food or your time at a food bank. Give money to charities and other countries who need it. Finishing your plate of food is not helping solve problems around the world or in your own body, so leave this tradition behind and say hello to your new happy, healthy body that uses all three eating senses.
