Eating Like a Skinny Person

Most Monday mornings I go to Solana Beach to meet with a group of weight conscious friends. We've been meeting regularly for over three years. Originally we had our own Weight Watchers group, with an official leader and lectures, but after 12 weeks, many in our group dropped out and we did not have enough participation to keep Weight Watchers on board. So we started our own weight management group. We've been meeting Monday mornings ever since. Have we lost weight? Well, some of us have, but more importantly, most of the group has at least maintained their weight. Each week someone brings information for the group meant to inform or instill things we already know about weight loss. There's no one in the group that isn't a professional dieter. Atkins, Slim Fast, Jennie Craig, Weight Watchers, fasting, we've done it all. It's hard to find anything new to say about dieting, but I found an article this week that opened my eyes.

The article was called "Eating like a skinny person." This article talked about how skinny people deal with food and how they eat. If you know how skinny people eat, all you have to do is COPY what they do. Very simple. There were a few important concepts in the skinny story.

First, skinny people do not eat until they are stuffed. They eat until they are satisfied. Measure your fullness half way through your meal on a scale of 1-10, then again when your have about 1/4 of the meal left. If you are satisfied, stop eating. We don't have to be members of the clean plate club. Rating how full I feel will definitely keep me from overeating.

Eating when you're hungry is NOT an emergency. It's ok to feel a little hungry, you will get something to eat soon. Skinny people have no problem delaying eating, wheras heavy people feel they must eat right away. It reminds me of my old dog Barney. When he first came to me he'd been living in a shelter with other dogs and had to fight for his food. So when he came to my house he devoured his food in no time flat, thinking someone might take it from him. After a while he realized that the food was his, no one would take it, and he could postpone eating if he wasn't really hungry. We need to realize that we don't have to eat the minute we're hungry. We can delay eating for awhile and it will still be there.

Fruit. Skinny people eat more fruit than non skinny people. Not juice, but fruit in its original form. So try to incorporate fruit into each meal. Maybe its blueberries on your cereal, sliced pear on your turkey sandwich, or a baked apple for dessert. I just came back from a cruise where half the clientelle was Asian American. The most obvious thing I noticed about their eating habits? Most of them piled high the fruit on their breakfast plate. It was so apparent that they ate differently than the rest of us. Yes, they were all thin.

These are just a few of the many ideas suggested in the article. The bottom line is to watch skinny people eat, and copy them. Easier said than done, but at least I'm going to be measuring my level of fullness. That should help.