Biting the Habit: What's your eating style?

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Guilty eaters and "Bigger is Better"

Guilty eaters were often told to "clean the plate" even if they were no longer hungry.

People with a guilty or "bigger is better" eating style can usually find the root of it in their childhood and the attitudes toward food that developed when they were young. In childhood, guilty eaters often heard messages like "You have to eat everything on your plate because children in some countries are starving." This attempt at magical thinking is based on an illogical conclusion that somehow what you don’t eat affects people thousands of kilometres away. Guilty eaters were often told to "clean the plate" because it was a sin to waste food, or that they had to eat Grandma's favourite steak and kidney pie because "she spent a lot of time preparing it". They were also told to eat more because it would make them 'healthy and strong'. In any of these situations, it didn't matter if the eater was hungry or not, she had to eat what she was given.

The problem with this style of eating is that guilty eaters don't really know when they are hungry. They eat everything on their plates whether they feel hungry or not. They never learned to pay attention to satiety as a signal to stop eating. This inability to recognise fullness usually leads to eating larger and larger portions, and a "bigger is better" style of eating.

The "Bigger is Better" fix-it plan

If you are a guilty eater, the first thing you need to do is confront your unconscious messages. Tell yourself, as many times as you have to, that what you eat or don't eat doesn't affect anyone but you.
Get into the habit of asking yourself, before you eat, whether you are really hungry. Once you start eating, pay attention to hunger and satisfaction cues.
Decrease the portion size of your meals and snacks. Do this gradually to avoid being overly hungry. But don't make the mistake of going back and forth between small and large portions. Habits are difficult to "unlearn" if you switch back and forth between the old and the new.
If you still feel just a little bit hungry after eating, stop and wait a few minutes – this will help reset your eating cues. It is better to be a little hungry than it is to be a little too full. If you truly are still hungry, you can always go back and eat a bit more. But if you only stop eating when you feel a little full, you can't get rid of the extra calories.
Keep a food and exercise diary. By writing down what you eat, you will start to see the connections between portion sizes, calories, and weight gain.
Embrace the fact that eating large portions is a learned habit and that it can be unlearned. Eating smaller portions is also a learned habit. Over time, your stomach will accept less food. Conversely, if you eat large portions continuously, your stomach will demand more food.
When you eat out, ask for a doggie bag before you begin to eat. Doing this will show you that you can be satisfied with smaller portions. And by doing this before you eat, you don’t have to use willpower to stop eating everything on the plate.