For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been someone who saves the best for last. In terms of food, this is a pretty hard-core habit for me — whatever part of a meal I think is most delicious, I’ll put aside so that’ll be the last thing that I eat. It’s eating my vegetables before having the french fries. Or having dinner before dessert. Makes perfect sense.
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| Yup – this is my problem |
I have no idea how weird this makes me. Maybe no one out there can relate? I also can’t say that it’s anything that I’ve actively thought about changing. I mean, why would I? No reason, right?
Except now I’ve got this “eat to 80%” habit that I’m supposed to be following (since it was introduced, oh, about 1.5 months ago). And this ends up being a conflict: if I’m already getting full and know I should stop eating, do you think I’ll put my fork down and back away if the best part of meal is still sitting on my plate? And, of course, it’s not like my saved favorite part that I’m over-eating to finish is the vegetables or lean protein.
And then this plays into another long-standing habit: I could be a competitive plate cleaner, I’m so good at it. It still seems like such a waste to leave a few bites of food on my plate. I try to counteract this by making sure my portion size is reasonable, but sometimes I misjudge. I’m a mess, aren’t I?
I’m not sure why, but I guess I thought that I’d be better at implementing habits and it seems like the way I’m built interferes with what LE is trying to teach me. It’s getting easier — if nothing else, I’m getting much better at recognizing these situations — but I wonder how long it’ll be before this is habit. I know I’m whining a little bit, but this has seemed more difficult recently, for whatever reason.
I suppose what I want – and I’ve said this before – is to come along far enough so that the healthy choices become my new ingrained habits. I don’t want to have to spend the rest of my life having to think every time I want to put food in my mouth. That just makes my brain hurt, ya know?