Sit down and shut up!

21^st August 2012

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.  Morris West

Well I have found my new diet aid!  It’s the shorts I’d stuck on my fridge a while back, actually I’ve just checked back it was the 30^th July, they were my motivation for losing weight I wanted to get in them.  If I’m honest I didn’t think I’d do it in time for my Corfu break this weekend, but I have.  So I’m sitting in them to remind me to stay on track and I’ll put them back on when I get home tonight to stock me over indulging! 

Despite managing to get back in them the scales yesterday showed a weight gain of wait for it!  3.5lb WHAT!  That can’t be right, surely I wouldn’t be in these shorts if that was a true reading, I genuinely don’t believe that’s a true weight gain I think it’s a combination of overdulging in the wrong foods at the weekend and a bit of water retention, so I’m not going to let it get me down, I’m still lighter than I was at the beginning of August and I’m now in these shorts which is a huge bonus because they would have actually took skin off my hips if I’d have kept forcing them up and down before ;-)

I’ve got the best beef hot pot in the oven, I can’t wait to eat it today, ooo if I did an F&H day, I could have it for breakfast, dinner and tea.  I prepared it last night before I went out and left it on gas mark 2/3 for hours, when I got home I wasn’t hungry so it’s waiting for me to eat it now, can’t wait.

Yesterday I bought the small table back in the house from out of the shed, I realised on Sunday at Lynne’s house how nice it is to sit up a table to eat, not only that but it’s good for your digestion and it also encourages you to be more mindful of what you’re eating.   Try it, today every single time you eat something, even if it’s only a biscuit – sit down!  Sitting down makes you more aware, more conscious of what you’re about to do, the most damage done when eating is when we’re not paying attention and usually we’re standing up at those times.

Eating standing up is strongly linked to impulse eating, when you sit down, you can calm down and slow down, you’re telling your body you have made a conscious decision to eat.  You’ll be more likely to enjoy what you eat and also more likely to track it too.

I bet there’s a part of you disagreeing with me, that little voice inside your head saying things like,

“I don’t need to sit down to eat”

“I haven’t got the time”

“As long as I stay within my allowance does it matter what position I’m in when I eat”

“I enjoy eating standing up”

Here are my responses, we all need to sit down to eat, when we eat standing up, we just don’t notice what we’re eating and we easily eat too much without even realising it.  If you want to lose weight try imposing this rule on yourself for a while, see if it makes a difference, if nothing else it’ll stop you eating when you’re out and about, it’ll stop that eating a Greggs Steak Bake (or similar) as you’re walking down the road.  I actually cringe when I see that, and it’s not a snobby thing, I cringe when I see anyone eating and walking around because they’re not paying any kind of attention to that food whatsoever and are likely to overeat again soon.

So find the time to sit down, even if it means eating less often, if you’re eating on the go you will eat more and get less satisfaction from it.   I know fruits a food we often eat when we’re moving around and you’ll probably think well that’s zero ProPoints anyway, but remember it’s not calorie free and you are supposed to be paying attention to your satisfaction levels which if you’re walking around you are unlikely to be doing!

Right that’s me for the day, I’m off to lay my table nice for my lunch, I might even light a candle, what the hell, you don’t need to have guests to make an effort ;-)

Enjoy your day xx