Examples Of A Diet Mentality
I was talking about this website to a group of friends last night and I want to address some of the comments they made.
One objection I heard was that if you want to be thin, you need to budget your calories. For instance, my friend said the if she knows she is going to eat a big dinner, she saves calories at lunch.
If you are the type of person who thinks like this, you are using a diet mentality to manage your weight. Think about what budgeting your calories means. It means you live by a rule book that requires you to ignore signals from your own body. Your body is smarter and more dynamic that any rule book . Some days you need more calories than others. And some days you need less. Some days your body will crave watery fruit. Some days your body will want a lot of protein. And budgeting your calories trains you to ignore your body. And, you create a backlash that eventually will cause you to binge.
Living and using a “thin mentality” looks like this:
At 1 pm, let’s say, the “thin mentality” person realizes they are hungry. They do not think about the future or the past. It does not matter what or if they had breakfast or if they have a fancy dinner plans. They eat to satisfy hunger in that moment. He or she selects or makes something they like and eats it, and then moves on. They do not eat based on a future or past event. Then, if they are going out for a special dinner, they live in that present moment as well. So how do they go to that big fancy dinner and not overeat?
The “thin mentality” person never overeats because there is NO PLEASURE in that. When you really promise yourself that you will never diet again, your whole approach and attitude to food changes. You realize that the big fancy dinner is a wonderful opportunity to have bites of things that aren’t always available, to try new things, to choose exactly what you want and have it beautifully served to you. You realize that the true value of that dinner is not just the food. It is the people, it is getting dressed in nice clothes, it is admiring the decor. It is smelling and seeing and hearing. The actually ingestion of food- no matter how much you actually eat, is a small percentage of time spent at a fancy dinner.
Think about it. Actual “chew” time is pretty small, whether you eat 3000 calories, or 800. So, instead of over eating the food at this dinner, you truly enjoy the whole experience, not just the food. But you do enjoy the food, too. But you eat in quantities that don’t betray your body. You are happy and at peace the next morning. You have no guilt or regret. You have not surrendered your power and eaten what some book told you to eat. You know yourself, you listen to your body’s signals, without judgment.
I know I have been at dinners and wished I was hungry so that I could eat more. But I don’t. Because I know that I will be hungry again soon. So I might order a meal, and take it with me, because I know that when I get hungry, I will have something really delicious to eat. That is living like a thin person. Shoving food down when I am not hungry is not fun. It is awful. Hunger is the best sauce and every time I eat I enjoy it tremendously, and I venture to say that I enjoy eating way more than people who eat a lot more than I do, quantity wise.
Remember that every new day is chock full of more opportunities to create, or buy delicious things that you like to eat, whenever you are truly hungry. Remember, you can eat anything you want, but you can’t eat it all every day. And when you cultivate a thin mentality, you have no desire to eat it all every day. It takes a while to cultivate this, because it has been trained out of you. But it is possible to get it back. Trust yourself that you can do this.
Come back to this website for daily reinforcement. And read “my book” on this site to get a lot of info all at once.