Monday Confessional: The Truth About My Overeating...

Ok, it's time to get serious.  I'm about to talk about something that I wouldn't normally let out in the open, but I'm fully committed to this weight loss thing and talking about how my struggle with over eating began should be healthy for me...I think.  So here goes...

I was home schooled from 1st to 12th grade (also not something I regularly talk about, so you, my readers, are privileged to know about this part of me).  It's understandable that your parents do things that they believe are for the best and in the best interest of their children, but I have to say that being home schooled allowed too much freedom and not enough of a schedule for me.  We didn't really have a strict schedule to tell us when to get up, when to eat breakfast and lunch, when to do homework, when to go outside and exercise, etc.  In my teen years, I ended up with a loosely formed routine, which involved sleeping in and going to bed around Midnight (no one ever told me any different).  I have to say that when your childhood doesn't really involve a consistent schedule, it becomes very hard to formulate a good schedule when you're an adult.  Forming that schedule was one of my biggest struggles when I turned 17 or 18..  Now, being an adult and living on my own,  I tell myself when to wake up, when to clean the house, when it's time to leave for work, when it's time to make dinner...all those things I could easily ignore if I didn't have any concept of people relying on me or the fact that a consistent routine is a very healthy thing.  But I digress...

Back to where the problem with over eating came from - because I didn't have a well-formed routine as a child, I didn't have a good understanding of when to eat and if snacking was OK or not OK.  I didn't really have anyone watching me, so I would pretty much eat whenever the mood struck.  That became an issue when I would eat (or snack) too much during the day, and then be expected to eat whatever was put on my plate at dinner time.  Until we were older, we weren't allowed to serve ourselves at dinner, so we didn't really have a say in how much food was put on our plate.  Our strict dinner rule was eat everything on your plate, and if you wanted any kind of desert, you had to have a "no thank-you helping" (which was a second helping of food, about 1/3 the amount of the first serving).  And desert is so lovely, and I frequently wanted to have desert, so I always had to eat a lot of food for dinner.  I say a lot of food, meaning it was a large amount of food for a young kid to have to eat... it really was a vicious cycle.  I can remember being overweight as a teenager, but not really having any concept of how to lose the weight or even receiving any encouragement to do so.

Being home schooled, I really didn't have gym class, although as a teenager I used to walk the neighbors dog a few times a week.  I thinned out a bit around age 15,  but I still didn't get my weight down.  As I got older, I tried to make better food choices but if I wanted anything particularly "healthy" (or out of the ordinary) in the house, I had to buy it myself (by healthy, I mean low-calorie items).  Basically, the odds were against me..I didn't exercise, I didn't eat right, and I ate too much.

So flash forward to now, when I'm married and live in my own place.  I have control over what food is in my home and how much junk food is around.  As a 20-something year old, I want to be healthy in general and at a healthy weight for my age and height.  I am making a conscious effort to eat less food and exercise more.  One of the biggest mindsets I am trying to change involves those times where I put too much food on my plate, because I'm used to getting a large spoonful (or two) of food.  It has been SO hard to get myself to say, "It's OK to not eat everything I put on my plate, I gave myself a bit too much food.  I can save it for later."  I have a mental fight with myself all the time over this - I guess my mind has been trained to think that I'm wasting food or that I'm being ungrateful for the meal I have to eat.  But that's not the case at all.  Everyone eats a different amount of food, and that's perfectly fine!  Personally, my eyes really are bigger than my stomach, and it's not worth the weight gain or stomach ache to chow it all down when I don't need to.

And that's about it - I was trained at a young age to let other people tell me how much to eat, and the problem with that is that they're not you.  They don't know that when you say you're full, you really mean it.  Breaking habits formed as a child is a difficult thing to do, but I'm slowly doing it.  I hope that you keep following my blog as I continue this weight loss journey.

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to leave me a comment!!


~ Grace Kathryn


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