At its most basic level the reason why we are not the weight we want to be is because we eat more calories than our body requires and it simply stores them away as fat.
You will now be aware of how you can change the types of foods you eat and when you eat them to help you eat fewer calories without feeling hungry. The next step to continuing your weight loss is to decrease the total amount of food you consume.
It can be helpful to understand why it is that we continue to eat even after we have consumed the amount of food we need to satisfy hunger. If we do this without thinking the reason lays in hard wired historical thought patterns buried in our subconscious mind.
A generation ago food was so scarce that a slice of stale bread gave rise to the invention of French toast. Food was comparatively expensive, difficult to obtain and less convenient. There was a limited variety and amount of food available. 60 years ago your grandparents or parents were on food rations. You can still imagine your grandparents or parents saying: “You must finish everything on your plate”, “Don’t throw food away”, “Have some more to eat, you will grow up big and strong”, “Quick, eat your food before it gets cold”, “If you don’t finish it you won’t get dessert”, “You are getting too skinny, you don’t want to get ill!”
That mindset served humanity well when food supply was limited, had high perishability, was not always readily available or reliable, and our activity levels were a lot higher. However we are now more sedentary, have so much variety in the types of food we eat, its ease of purchase, length of use, affordability, and the amounts we can buy. Just walk down the baked goods aisle on your next trip to the supermarket. You can choose from 20 different types of bread from the supermarket, corner dairy or petrol station from 99 cents that never seem to go stale.
The family culture that rewards us with a calorie dense dessert for eating everything on our plate, or the one that drags us back for seconds when 3⁄4 of the meal satisfied us is now as outdated as stale bread. It belongs in the days of food rations. The single biggest threat to our health today is overeating. Obesity not famine is our adversary.
We must take responsibility for our habits towards food. Once the meal has been prepared whether we eat it, throw it away or store it does not change the fact that we have already paid for it, we can’t get our money back. What matters is whether it ends up as waste, or on our waist. Instead we can pay attention to our level of hunger and stop when we feel satisfied.