Dear ,
If I could wave my magic fitness wand and sprinkle my make-believe diet
dust and change one of your behaviors this weekend, having you eat only
when you are seated at a table would have far reaching benefits beyond
the final firecracker. You see, having to sit down to eat puts an end
to much of the mindless munching that makes picnics notorious for
overeating.
This is because a circuit panel in your brain has buttons that
stimulate "feel good" feelings and the more we push them (through
eating fat, sugar and salt) the more we want to push them. I could go
into more detail, but that pretty much sums it all up. When we push
buttons in circuit panels, whether it is mental buttons or buttons on
the breaker panel in your basement, it is always a good idea to be
aware that you are actually pushing them. Can you remember the last
time you blew a circuit in your house and how you reset it? Did you go
down and start randomly pushing buttons? Probably not.
So sitting down, rather than standing next to the 9 layer dip is a good
way to take more conscious control of what goes into your mouth and in
the trickle-down theory, what ends up on your tush.
It is such a struggle already to control what we eat. It would be so
easy to blame the food industry (or your mom for being such a great
Italian cook maybe) because grocery stores, not to mention food
manufacturers, do everything imaginable to make foods look, taste,
smell and feel melt-in-your-mouth delicious. It occurred to me the
other day that there is an inverse relationship between how good a food
looks and tastes and how healthy it is for you. The worse it is for
you, the harder stores, restaurants and food companies try to make it
irresistible. So with such a sensory overload, how do we stop
overeating?
We have to have a plan. In technical terms it is called a
countermanding action. So especially for risky eating situations like
4th of July Picnics, parties, visiting your mother or being home alone
with half of a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies, you have to
plan in advance how you will deal with yourself so that you don't wake
up Monday morning with that familiar sense of self-loathing and bloat.
Start by standing away from the food table. Have a healthy snack
before. Drink 2 glasses of water before you have anything else to
drink. Sit sown to eat. Chew each bite 20 to 30 times. Do all the
talking while everyone else eats. Throw out what is on your plate that
you don't want to eat immediately. Don't drink more than 2 alcoholic
drinks and know exactly what non-alcoholic drink you will switch to.
Don't just plan to do these things in your mind. Tell your spouse or
whoever you are going to the picnic with your plan. Out loud. So they
hear you. Ask them to kindly remind you of your goals.
These tips all bore me to tears from hearing myself say them over and
over but there's a reason I keep saying them over and over. They WORK.
But you have to actually implement them. Imagine waking up Monday
morning feeling like jumping on the scales and looking forward to
seeing what you weigh. Now that's a star spangled idea.
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