Parents are a problem

Parents help to create the obesity problem in the world according to me. I'm not singling anyone out in particular but I remember comments like this and comments like this really are a stereotype.

• "Clean your plate."
• You took it, you need to finish it.
• "You're not leaving this table until you finish those beans, young lady!"
• "No dessert until you finish your vegetables."
• You'll spoil your dinner/lunch.
• "People are starving in (add third world country)"

I think my weight loss journey has helped change my mind about how I'll deal with certain situations when we have kids. In a food situation, I think we will:

• make our kids have a couple bites of everything
• not enforce the clean your plate rule
• if they're leaving food on their plates (and it's veggies or non preferreds) then they get less of what they want and have to clean their plates before they get MORE of their favourite
• not have dessert (which I didn't growing up)
• teach our kids that when you say you're full, you stop eating
• eat at the table and no TV (maybe... lol)

(LOVE THIS QUOTE)
At the end of the day, though, that food is wasted whether it sits on the plate or whether it ends up in my already full stomach. And wasting the food on myself means I’m going to consume too many calories and ultimately be more unhappy with myself than just leaving it on the plate.

Read article here.

Ultimately I'm working to not overeat... see my two posts ago on good choices where I left half my pasta at lunch and half my fries at dinner. I'm trying to help my husband see that too. He keeps eating even when he's full... I caught him one night. 

"Ugh I'm so full." 

"Stop eating then."

"It's just one more bite."

"Nope." (I scraped it onto the leftovers plate) "Eat it tomorrow for lunch."

Why does he do that to himself? Even Sunday he was eating all his fries and everyone was done. I asked him "are you still hungry?" He told me he wasn't full and when I asked again he said, no he wasn't hungry. He seems to think that his sensor to tell him he's not hungry is broken... I guess he's got to learn the portion sizing that satisfies him if that's true. Restaurants are terrible. 

My strategy for next time? Ask for an extra plate and put half my food on that plate before I start eating. Let's see how that works. If it's just the two of us, I'm going to impose my strategy on Josh too. Let's see if he remembers it's even there :P