If you are like most people, especially women, the scariest number in the world is on the bathroom scale. We weigh ourselves in the morning, before breakfast without clothes hoping for the smallest number possible. We stare at the number in disbelieve and wonder where did such a large number came from. I would be lying if I said I didn’t fall into that category. At my last doctor’s visit I got the lecture about that horrible number. “Susan, your weigh is creeping”, she said. Unfortunately since I have reached the second half of my life it has been harder and harder to control that number. It is not that I don’t know what to do it is just that I have already done all the easy things. I rarely drink soda and when I do it is diet. There is no sugar in my tea or coffee. I eat breakfast. Most of the meat I eat is broiled. I drink lots of water. I don’t bake nearly as often as I would like and when I do bake the bake goods find a new home very quickly. On any given day my diet is fairly well rounded with foods from the five food groups. So what is left is the hard realization that I must eat less.
Eat less, eat less I tell myself. Are you really hungry or are you eating just to eat? Now my plight would be easy if I really only ate when I was hungry but I don’t. I love food and I love cooking. Being hungry has never been part of the food equation for me. Let's be honest I love to eat and eating or food is a big part of everything I do. No matter where I am going with friends my biggest question is always, "Where are we going for lunch?" All my great adventures always have a food equation with some of the best memories being the resturant and the food that was eaten. It is finding that balance between what I love and what I must do to be healthy.
The portion size of food in the United States has grown rapidly since the 1960’s. That hamburger and fries you got back in those days would look like the kid’s meal today. When was the last time you ordered anything resembling the size of a kid’s meal on the menu? If you are like most of us the answer is probably, “When I was a kid.” To help control my portion size I am going to implement a motto I used many years ago. Only eat half of what you think you want. Now many of you would just cut out a food or food group or follow some fad diet. Not me! I know that all foods belong in a balanced diet, even those cookies I ate yeaterday, because there are no bad foods just bad quantities. When you add lots of those bad quantities together a large scary number appears on the bathroom scale.
The portion size of food in the United States has grown rapidly since the 1960’s. That hamburger and fries you got back in those days would look like the kid’s meal today. When was the last time you ordered anything resembling the size of a kid’s meal on the menu? If you are like most of us the answer is probably, “When I was a kid.” To help control my portion size I am going to implement a motto I used many years ago. Only eat half of what you think you want. Now many of you would just cut out a food or food group or follow some fad diet. Not me! I know that all foods belong in a balanced diet, even those cookies I ate yeaterday, because there are no bad foods just bad quantities. When you add lots of those bad quantities together a large scary number appears on the bathroom scale.
This year I am making positively healthy choices everyday by learning to count backwards using my bathroom scale. To make counting backwards happen there are other numbers that I need to increase. Exercise and eating more fruits and vegetables are among those. Numbers are everywhere in our lives and many times those very numbers define how healthy we are. Do you have scary numbers in your life? What would it take to make those numbers positively healthy?
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