As a child were, you taught to eat everything on your plate?
And now, as an adult, it feels almost sinful to leave any amount of food on the table — no matter how bloated your tummy?
Most of the women I work with grew up with this rule.
And, as you may have found —without hypnosis — it’s one of the hardest habits to break.
BUT IT CAN BE DONE.
Have compassion for yourself
Firstly, if you were raised with the well-intentioned guilt trip of “you have to eat everything on your plate because of all the starving children in the world,”
….I want you to have some compassion for yourself.
No wonder you have a sense of shame around leaving food on your plate or putting it in the bin.
After all, those starving children right.
Take back control with some logic
When we apply logic to the dinnertime rules we grew up with, we can take start to take our power back.
Think about it.
You eating everything you your plate helps those starving children — how exactly?
You knew that logic was flawed even as a child, didn’t you!
The only thing that guilt trip achieves is to teach us to ignore and override our body’s instinctual fullness signals — which sets us up for weight gain.
Please send it to the children
If you really want to help the starving children, what I encourage you to do is purchase, cook and serve smaller meals.
All that money you save on your shopping bill, send it to charity.
And with the smaller portion sizes, you’re no longer using your body as a waste bin either.
How practical and tangible is that?
PS: Your mum was coming from a good place. It’s probably she grew up listening to Aunt Gertrude’s stories of food storages from the Great Depression.
PPS: Remember eating everything on your plate is just a habit, and all habits can be changed. If you’d like help resetting unhelpful eating habits so you can be your happy shape and size, Lighten Up might be for you.
