Post by Pearl on Jan 18, 2013 14:02:34 GMT -5
"Stop Scarfing!" That’s what I told myself several years ago and decided to break the habit. I was mindlessly gobbling things while in motion - while cooking, while driving, while walking from the living room to the laundry room. Can you relate?
When you scarf, you eat fast, (literally shoving food into your mouth), without much thought as to what and how much you are eating. Most of us don’t count our scarfing as a meal, often we can hardly remember what we ate afterward - no real experience to savor, so we are inclined to want to eat again soon afterward.
Preparing food can be a pre-meal scarf fest if you allow it. Even good, slimming Trim Healthy Mama meals can be abused by wolfing down handfuls and bitefuls as you cook. Sure, you’ll need to taste test your dishes to check for flavor, but a taste is different from several chomps and swallows of this and that. We’ve all done it - gobbling pieces of roast chicken as we cut it up, snatching up nuts and pieces of cheese that are supposed to top the family salad. As a Trim Healthy Mama, you don’t have to count calories, but it can be too easy to take in a few hundred calories worth of food before you even sit down to a meal!
Just as we can learn to make new, wiser THM meals we can also learn to make wiser overall eating habits. If at all possible, sit down to eat your meals and even your snacks. Take a deep breath, acknowledge you are actually eating. I find that a hot drink like a herbal tea or a creamy coffee, along with my afternoon snack helps me savor the experience more. Afterward, I know I’ve eaten, I remember… I have relished!
As a Trim Healthy Mama, you get to eat snacks, but that doesn’t mean your afternoon becomes a time of grazing or gobbling. Have regular snack times, allowing flexibility of course. You shouldn’t have to starve yourself to make it to your next snack or meal but a bit of hunger is a natural, normal and healthy feeling. It means your cells are emptying out and soon require more fuel. That is a God designed cycle, allow it to happen. The scriptures in Ecclesiastes mention there is a time for everything, “A time to break down and a time to build up…”. You don’t build up fuel in your cells “whenever“. That is a mindless approach. We breathe in, we breathe out. Both are important. Allowing your cells to empty out of fuel is equally as important. Don’t warp the natural cycles of your body by constantly focusing on the “in” part when it comes to fueling your body.
Be a good steward over your body and set wise times for snacks and meals. You don’t have to obsessively watch the clock but the premise remains. Nursing Mamas will naturally require more snacks, nursing can cause faster depletion of fuel from your cells. More wise snacking will be needed, but a scarf fest is not wise snacking! If you truly feel you can’t make it to your next snack or meal, our “gluccie” based puddings or Fuel Pull smoothies can be used to tide you over, they are yummy, filling yet light in calories.
So that is my tip for today - don’t’ scarf! I broke the habit. Sure, I slip up sometimes and we all have to eat on the run now and then but now when I feel hunger I don’t immediately knee jerk and head to the cupboard. I say to myself, “Pearl, it is 2.30 in the afternoon, you can easily wait until 3 to have your snack and you’re going to enjoy it.” That sort of self talk works for me.