Eating when you’re not hungry, or when you’re bored, angry, tired, procrastinating, or celebrating can push your calorie intake way up.
The biggest problem is that we often don’t realize that we’re shoving food into our mouths – either because we’re distracted, we don’t want to know, or we just plain old don’t care.
What Makes Us Do It?
1. “Cheap” calories: the kind you find at all you can eat restaurants, freebie tastes in markets, the basket of broken cookies in the bakery, and “value and super sized meals.”
2. Bread and extras like butter, olive oil, and olives on the table or bar peanuts or pretzels. Way too tempting to pass up – especially if you’re hungry or you’ve walked in with the attitude that you “deserve” it because you’ve had a tough day.
3. Walking into your kitchen or the snack room at work and having your favorite snacks staring you in the face (see it = eat it).
4. Procrastinating or avoiding doing what you have to do by having a snack.
5. Watching TV with a bag of chips or a bowl of candy on your lap.
6. Parties— especially when you drink — causing you to lose count and control of what you’re grabbing to eat.
7. Food and coffee shops on every corner that offer lots of food, lots of variety, and are open all the time.
8. The in(famous) sugar/fat/salt combination in baked goods, fast food, candy, fast food, frozen food, and processed food.
9. Food that your family or roommates insist must be in the house – or that you think they want in the house.
10. Feeling tired, stressed, overwhelmed, bored, angry, or “out-of-sorts” and turning to food as a “pick-me-up” or for comfort.
11. Mindless bites – a piece of candy from the open bowl on a desk, a taste of your partner’s dessert, finishing your child’s food (especially dripping ice cream cones).
12. Being a member of the clean plate club – which also extends to polishing off leftovers and finishing the last bits left in the pan or serving dishes as you clean up.
I am a Beachbody coach and LOVE things that I can share that help my fellow challengers with their fitness or weight loss journey. I wanted to share this with my group (with your permission). I was going to just share it….but, then it goes to my personal page and I try not to bombard every person I know with my fitness info. I keep it to the challenge page. I also really appreciate being able to find helpful and known to be true healthy eating tips from a respected source that does not sell every other diet pill and weight loss scheme out there. You know, probably more than I know that there is no quick fix and that knowledge of how to eat right and exercise are not as hard as they seem when you have the facts. In truth, knowing the “why” makes eating healthy so much easier! Would it be ok if I share this with my group? I am a fairly new coach and I don’t want to just sell workouts or Shakeology (anybody can do that)….I want to educate my team and help them understand the “whys”, because, each person is uniquely different on their fitness and health journey.