My little let downs
I’m a lucky man, there are many reasons why I think I’m lucky but one of the main reasons is that my lovely partner Jo loves cooking. This is a match made in heaven because I love eating. Every night I have a meal that to me is like restaurant quality, even when Jo quickly whips something up she delivers a better meal than what I could put together on my best day in the kitchen. Although you could count on one hand the number of dinners I have cooked for us in the years we have lived together, I do have a role in our daily meal schedule.
Since we both work from home it’s my job to make lunch and although my lunch repertoire isn’t huge I can deliver a pretty mean wrap. Each day at around 12pm I stop what I’m doing and make our lunch. If you ask me what is on the menu I think of what I see on my plate; there’s a healthy wrap filled with a mix of fresh salad ingredients, an orange and a couple of biscuits. While that is a true representation of what is on my plate it isn’t actually an entirely true representation of what I’m eating at lunchtime. You see, I recently discovered that I’m a ‘food preparation eater’ which means that when I’m making our lunch I spend the whole 15mins picking at the food that I’m using to make the meal. I’ll have an extra slice of cheese, a couple of bits of tomato, extra ham and pick at the other ingredients as I work my way through making lunch. If I were to be completely honest I probably add an extra quarter to the amount of food that I have on my plate when I sit down to eat my lunch.
My lunchtime preparation eating habits are what I like to call my ‘little let downs’, these are the times in my day where I am adding unnecessary eating in ways that aren’t accounted for. Often with ‘little let downs’ we don’t even realise we are doing it, it is almost a subconscious practice that happens when we are mid-task and if you asked me what I have for lunch I would most likely only acknowledge the food on the plate. It’s not because I am trying to hide it or lie about it, I just don’t see it happening when I’m doing it.
I think this happens to many of us and occurs a lot in our day to day eating. It’s the food we eat when we are preparing a meal, the snack we grab when we come home from work or the candy bar we grab when we are at the petrol station or waiting in line at the supermarket and while we may not account for these, they can make up a decent component of our daily food intake.
Are someone who struggles with your weight? It might be a good idea to see if you can identify if you have any ‘little let downs’ in your day which could be playing a negative role in your weight management. Many people can identify these occurring between 3 to 5 times a day and if we think back to my lunch example I was adding around 25% more extra food to my meal, if you times that by 3 or 5 - that is a lot of additional food in a daily diet.
For the person who wants to lose weight or who finds it hard to keep in a healthy weight range that they are happy with, learning to identify little let downs and then planning ways to remove them could be a big step in getting to a healthy place with eating. A great tool to use is a food diary as these identify the times when these little let downs sneak in.
There is so much information on weight loss out there, so many different approaches and theories, it can become very confusing to decipher and determine what the best approach is for you. Looking at your little let downs and spending time removing them from your day to day diet could be a great place to start and you may find that after you have identified and removed them, weight management could become a much easier thing to do.
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