How Do You Know You Have Changed Your Eating Habits?

Most of us are the size we are because of what we eat, when we eat, how much we eat and what triggers us to eat.  If you are thin you probably have a fairly good handle on not letting things change some relatively good eating habits.  If you are somewhat over weight you probably have a few eating patterns which could be improved.

Changing your eating routine for the long run is not an easy job.  In fact, it is a job and one you probably hate as much as you hate cleaning out a grease trap.  The problem is you always need to eat something and once you have created a memory of a yummy food it is hard to wipe it from your brain.  If you are a late night eater you need to find new ways to distract yourself.  If stress drives you to seek the chocolate fairy you are under the power of an intoxicating mistress.

Somehow the desire to have healthy eating habits and be thinner is not great enough and that is why the majority of people who lose weight on diets end up gaining it back.  You have to create new ways of living so that food is not a medicine, friend, comforter, consolation, reward or distracter.

Experts say it takes months and months to change desires and even then you have to constantly work at it.  Today I recognized that I might be on the road to creating new habits.  I discovered that a drain in my down stairs bath had gotten clogged and since it is the pipe that leads from the dishwasher as it ran overnight all the dirty water flowed on the bathroom floor and rug.

After scooping water out of the sink and trying the plunger I searched the house for Liquid Plumber and finding none I went off to my regular store.  I picked up two bottles of drain cleaner and approached the checkout, which was thankfully free of other customers.  The clerk told me the total was $15.07 and I handed over a twenty as I bagged my two items.  Realizing that I had seven pennies in my wallet I asked the clerk if I could give her the seven cents since I really did not want four one dollar bills and 97 cent change.  She looked at me and said, “No.”

I assumed she was kidding because she would much rather make all that change than just give me a five dollar bill, so I asked her, “Are you kidding me?”

“No, I already keyed $20 in the register.”

“You are really going to not take my seven cents and going to make me take all that change?”

“Yes.”

This is normally the point in life when I go crazy.  I am a really good customer of this particular store.  I am not holding any other customers up by asking this clerk to take my change.  This is the kind of situation that used to drive me to eat a brownie, but not today.  That clerk should have recognized a woman who was carb deprived and accepted my pennies without an argument.  Eventually she did, but both she and her manager will never make that mistake again.

I went home poured the liquid plumber in the sink and still have a clogged drain, but none of these things have driven me to fall back into old stress relieving eating patterns.  Have I permanently changed?  No way.  But just recognizing a situation that used to derail me is a big step in the right direction.