I don't want my food, I want yours!

How do you get a two-year-old to eat? This is a question that I ask myself everyday. My two-year-old seems to survive with a bite here, a bite there. However, I've found that when she says she's done and I go take a bite of her food suddenly she wants to eat it. Or sometimes she won't eat what's on her plate, but she'll eat what's on mine. The good news? She's getting more to eat. The bad news? I'm getting more to eat.

I figure that my increase in eating happens for two reasons. First is when I eat something off her plate in order to get her to want to eat. Sometimes when I do this she really doesn't want to eat more and I find myself finishing her plate for her. The second is when she eats off my plate. I tell myself that I'm not eating as much because she's helping me eat it, so I take larger portions and end up eating more than I would have if we hadn't shared food.

Of course the best cure for this would be for her to just start eating well on her own, and that's not going to happen. At least not for a while. So I need to commit to leaving her food for her and if she's all done I need to throw her food away or put it in the fridge and not eat it myself. And the other solution is to dish her food off my plate onto her own plate. If that doesn't work and she still wants to eat off my plate I need to leave my portion size and listen to my hunger instead of my justification.

Intuitive Eating: Chapter 1

Hitting Diet Bottom

This chapter was me. The first subheading in the chapter is "diet backlash," the side effects of dieting. I get now why I diet, and then eventually gain the weight back. Ok, so granted I just had a baby and of course that will bring the weight back, but if my last diet had worked I wouldn't have gained almost 60 pounds during my pregnancy, right? Well I did. So now I'm back to having lost half that weight from actually having the baby and stuck wanting to lose the other half plus some more. But Tribole and Resch point out that dieting brings on cravings, binges, and feelings of guilt (all SO me).

My favorite backlash, though, is what they called  "the Last Supper." This is where you eat all the foods you won't be able to while your dieting. Every time my husband gets fast food or pizza he says "this is the last time and then I'm eating good." With this mentality I eat half the pizza instead of just one or two pieces 'cause I want to to get as much as I can before I don't get any more for a long time (see going, going, gone).

I'm excited to see what I can do to get rid of this dieting mentality and all the side effects that come with it.

Same place same time?

Every summer I help out with a softball league by working in their snack bar. While working there I can  have any of the snacks free of charge. Sweet! Only now when I go in there I automatically think, ok what do I want to eat? I feel like I need to eat something.

This same thing happens when I go to my in-laws house. They have a snack cupboard and when I first started going over there I was told that I didn't have to ask, just eat whatever I wanted. And oftentimes one of my sisters-in-law would be eating something, so I'd just snack along with them. Now as soon as I go over to my in-laws house I automatically head to the kitchen and check out the snack cupboard. I'm not even usually hungry!

I call this habitual eating. Eating simply because it is a habit. It's usually connected with a time of day (for example, dinner every day at 5, even if I had a snack at 4:30) or a place (such as the snack bar or my in-laws kitchen).

Last night I was working at the snack bar asking myself  the same old question, what should I eat. I reached for a licorice rope when it hit me, I wasn't hungry. I really didn't want to eat anything. So what did I do? Nothing! I didn't eat a thing. I'll be honest, I was pretty proud of myself. Now when I go to my in-laws and I find myself in the kitchen I head to the cabinet with the dishes in it and get myself a cup of water.

Intuitive Eating

The other day I was telling a friend about the issues I've been thinking about regarding my relationship with food. She recommended I start reading "Intuitive Eating" by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. The subtitle reads "Make Peace with Food. Free Yourself from Chronic Dieting Forever. Get to the Natural Weight That Fits You." It sounded perfect. I'm going to take you on this journey with me as I read this book. After each chapter I will blog about what I've read and how it applies to me and the changes I'm trying to make.

You have been weighed and found wanting

I hate the scale. It makes me eat. Ok, it's just a tool and can't make me do anything, yet when I get on it I tend to eat more. This is regardless of what it tells me. If I get on it and I've gained weight I get depressed and eat. If I get on it and it says I've been sustaining my weight I get depressed and eat. If I get on it and it says I lost weight I get excited and eat. As I'm writing this I begin to realize my relationship with the scale is actually a relationship with emotional eating. However there's more to it than just that. When I let myself I become obsessed with the scale. I get on it everyday, sometimes even more than once a day. That's not a healthy obsession, especially with the emotion tie I've just discussed.

Here's the plan. I am only going to weigh myself at the beginning of the month. This is just to be sure I'm on the right track to a healthier weight. But what I really want to do to gauge myself on how I'm doing is focus on how I feel (which is great since I started my exercise program) and how my clothes are fitting. Those things are really more important than a number on a scale.

Going, Going, Gone

I don't know where this next thought process regarding food came from, but here it is. When I have something I probably shouldn't eat, like sweets or chips, I tend to eat it all in one day. I've convinced myself that it's better to eat it all so that it's gone and can't tempt me later. Obviously it's best not to buy that kind of food, but then when I am out somewhere and have to chance to eat bad I go overboard because I know I won't be able to eat it when I get home.

I know if I eat just a little bit at a time I'll savor it for longer. But when I try to do that I end up eating it in 2 days instead of 1 because I want to get rid of the temptation. I suppose this just means I have no self control? And to be perfectly honest I don't know how to address this issue. What do I do to stop myself? To start I won't buy tempting food. Yet I'm already pretty good with that. It's other people buying junk food. Just say NO! Shoot. Easier said than done.

Don't you wish that at really embarrassing moments you could just roll over and play dead?

Tonight I was at a sporting event with my two kids. It was getting cold and I'd decided to leave early when my two-year-old made a decision of her own to run out onto the field and get hit by the ball (don't worry it just lightly hit her foot). Where was I during this escapade? Trying to run after her while carrying a baby in a car seat and hoping she'd just come back from me yelling her name (which, obviously, didn't work). The game was put on hold as I ran out to get her and another sports mom cam and took the car seat from me (bless her). So the point of this story? Terribly embarrassing moment for a new mom trying to learn how to juggle two kids. But it gets better (or worse?). The reason she ran out onto the field was because she wanted to say bye-bye to her daddy who was officiating the game; which meant the game was put on a longer pause as everyone watched the sports official walk off the crazy mom who let her kid run out onto the field.

Alright, what does this story have to do with eating? By the time I actually got home I was feeling terribly embarrassed and worried that my husband was upset with me. All I wanted to do was eat. So I ate a cookie, or two. Then I heated up the left over ribs and ate all of those. Then I made a banana split with caramel sauce and tried to enjoy every bite. Turns out, though, I don't really feel any better. If anything now I'm mad at myself for giving into my emotional eating.

How do I learn from this? Well for starters, I recognized that I was eating to try to distract myself from what I was feeling. And I recognized that it didn't work. I need a different outlet. I'm pretty sure Zumba would work, but I have my two little ones with me and no one to babysit (not to mention no Zumba classes going on). Yoga would probably work well, too, and hopefully I'll be able to do that when the kids go to bed. But what outlet can I have when I can't exercise? I suppose I'm creating an outlet right now by blogging about this. However, I'm going to have to explore more things I can do to help alleviate unpleasant emotions.