Fat Guy Skinny Wallet

As some of you have read in my past posts, I saw 150.4 last week which put me 10 lbs away from my goal. I did weigh in this past week and I was up .6 of a pound. No big deal! This week I am focusing on something I haven’t ever really given much thought to, but as I was reflecting and coming up with a plan for the week I noticed a habit that I had.

Every day after my girls are settled and ready for their day, I eat my breakfast. That’s normal, and not anything to draw attention to. However, I noticed that I apparently have a set time schedule for all my other meals throughout the day. It is something that happened without me realizing it, but it just was the way it was.

Why do I eat this way?

It didn’t matter if I was hungry or not, I ate something at set times.

Sometimes I wonder if it is because when I was a kid we had set snack times and lunch times at school. Then, when I came home dinner was at 5:00PM every night. I think having dinner at the same time every night is fine, but my snacks are really throwing me off. I know we all eat around the clock to some degree, but since being a stay at home mom with the refrigerator at my beckon call it has gotten much worse.

For example, I may get my breakfast at 9am, and then I go on about my day. If I looked up at the clock at it was 10:00am I knew it was time to have a snack. 10:00 AM was my snack time whether I had breakfast at 6:00 AM or at 9:00 AM. This is really a bizarre way of doing things.

The Rigid Schedule

I basically was forcing a snack when I wasn’t hungry, but because it was 10:00AM I knew I had to eat it.

Lunch is at 11:30 AM every day, snack is at 2:00PM, and then dinner is at 3:30PM. I would then have a snack around 5:30PM, and that would conclude my eating for the day. I know dinner seems early, but that’s what works for our family since Todd and the kids come home around that time and are hungry and I can prepare it during Taelynn’s nap time around 2PM.

Here is a glance at the ridiculous eating schedule I have created for myself.

6-9:00-Breakfast

10:00- Snack

11:30- Lunch

2:00-Snack

3:30- Dinner

5:30- Snack

Why is this bad for me?

Now some of you may think that’s great because you are supposed to eat frequently throughout the day. My hesitation is that when I look at how often I eat, I am not always eating when I am hungry. I feel like breaking free from a rigid time schedule of forced snacks may allow me to eat less calories than I am eating and it will give me more satisfaction as I will be eating only when I am hungry.

In my book, this time schedule has created a mindless eater and also taken some freedom away. I stopped counting calories because I didn’t want to be forced to think about food all day, and worry about every single thing I eat and how much I eat. I want my new normal life to be designed in a way that I can eat when I am hungry and stop when I am not.

I don’t want to be obsessed with thinking about food all the time.

Sometimes I still find myself thinking about food all the time. I LOVE food, and that love has not gone away just because I have lost weight. I have learned how to manage the love I have for food in a much more controlled way.  I don’t give into the love constantly, but I do think about it often.

I will eat my breakfast and think, well you only have an hour until snack time and then I watch the clock like a hawk. The second it says 10:00AM I am in the cabinets. It doesn’t matter if I am hungry or not.

Goals for Eating

I don’t know if this kind of thinking makes sense to anyone, but it is helping me put my plan out there and I am really going to be focusing on it this week. I will eat when I am hungry, not when the clock tells me it’s time to eat.

I have come too far in my journey to let a clock dictate when I need food. It amazes me that two years into my weight loss journey, I am still learning so much about my way of eating. It has become very clear to me as to how I got up to 241 lbs at 5 ft 2 in.

Ninety pounds are gone forever, and I will keep learning so much in order to keep these off and find MY new normal.

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