What is this donut around my belly?

So many women over the age of thirty struggle with their weight. Myself included. I used to blame it on baby weight, but as my kids are now seventeen and almost five, I guess that excuse has really run its course! I think that I have tried everything. Did I try it long enough to get results? Maybe not? Probably not? If you are like me, then you have tried all of the things and you if didn't see results right away and got frustrated and felt defeated and quit.

I worked in a restaurant for so many years, and the logic was, "try it and if it didn't work, you immediately adjust and try something else." That approach works great in a restaurant, where you need to adapt quickly and change things. With weight loss, maybe not so well?

I have had to have some real honest moments with myself to ask myself if I was really doing the things that I thought I was doing! Staying within my macro's, eating healthy clean food, giving it my all in my workouts. It turns out that there was a lot that I wasn't counting. Those little spoonful's while cooking, finishing those couple bites of my kids food when they were too full to eat it.

I learned some things during my childhood that have not served me well as an adult. As a parent I totally get the lessons that I learned, like not wanting to waste food so you need to clean your plate. Which is why I have carried them into adulthood. But as an adult, who see's obesity everywhere, and never learned to stop eating when I am full, I don't want my kids to learn that. So, I let them stop when they are full. But then my brain reverts back to the no waste thing, and I finish their food for them. Or the alternative, is to put two or three chicken nuggets into the fridge. I know you are reading this thinking um nope!

As adults, many of us have to un-learn some things that we learned in our childhood. I once heard someone ask a group if anyone was a member of the clean plate club! It took me a second to register what that meant, and then I realized that I had been a member since I was little. Everyone from my mom to my grandparents had taught me to clean my plate. While that is great for not wasting food, is it a good thing? We could save the food and have more leftovers and have a family smorgasbord for supper.

Sometimes we need to realize that there is so much truth in the statement that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. We have to embrace that feeling and know that it is ok to stop eating and not clean our plates.

I remember that part in the middle book of The Hunger Games when Katniss and Peeta are on the Victory tour and the capital person tells them that they just take a little drink in the bathroom, and then they can eat more food. I love food! And I love super tasty casseroles, and I have a huge problem of knowing when I am full and when I am not. Or I know that I am full, and I keep eating anyways just because it tastes so good. I have had to take a long look at my issues with self-indulgence and instant gratification and how those things relate to my issues with overeating!

I know that people say, "change your mindset", but how do you actually do that? If a person could just flip a switch in their minds and not overeat or not be depressed, then life would be great! Shrinks would be out of business and cardiologists and dieticians would be bored senseless! But it isn't that easy! If you have ever tried to do anything like losing weight or battled depression or trained for a race or marathon, you know it isn't just that easy.

But if we can identify some of these things and lessons that we learned, then maybe instead of having to "change our mindset," we can recognize when they are happening, and we can begin the process of un-learning some and learning better behaviors when it is an in the moment.

It is a hard tough process to become mentally strong and overcome lessons learned in childhood, so they don't have a negative impact on our adult lives. But it something that we have to acknowledge and own in our lives and then work hard at overcoming it every single day.