Leaving food on the plate - is that even possible?

Alright, hey! We're gonna try this the third time. So it looks like I'm live and it looks like you can hear me. See, at least that's what Facebook is telling me. I'm just gonna double-check on my phone. Okay, I think we— I think we got it together, y'all. I apologize for the technical issues today. Oh my goodness. But I am, even though I'm like half an hour behind schedule, I am committed to showing up live because that's what I told y'all I was going to do at 12 o'clock Eastern time. So thank goodness for the replay. I'm going to go ahead and answer this question again because I want you all to hear the answer. All right. So starting from the top, for those of you who don't know me, I am Jennifer Dent-Brown. You just happen to like stumble upon my page. I am a certified life and weight loss coach. I am now your certified life and weight loss coach, and I help women learn to stop dieting forever. If you have been on the weight loss struggle bus for most of your life, where you like lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, gain weight, I want you to just understand that nothing has gone wrong. You just have not learned how to lose weight in a permanent way by switching and changing your mindset. Because what we have been taught of how to lose weight is like, we just got to eat less and exercise more. Like, but if that— if it were that easy, then all of us wouldn't be here right now, okay? So I have created the Stop Dieting Forever process, which I teach inside of my Stop Dieting in 30 boot camp. And we're actually in week 3, going into week 4 next week of the current boot camp, and I'm super excited for this group of boot campers. And so I get a lot of questions from the boot campers. I do a lot of coaching on a lot of the same challenges and questions, and you guys also have been sending me emails and DMs with like, hey, I'm struggling with this. And some of y'all are telling me what you're celebrating, which I love. So keep sending me those messages. But I wanted to use this time once a week to just go live on my page to answer a challenge, answer a common question that I have seen, and like spend like 10 minutes talking about it and teaching you how I apply the Stop Dieting Forever process to whatever the question is or whatever the challenge is. Okay, so today's question or challenge is about leaving food on the plate. Okay, how many of us are card-carrying members of the Clean Plate Club? Alright, I'm getting fancy. I've activated a poll in the chat. How many of us are card-carrying members of the Clean Plate Club. I once was the president of the Clean Plate Club. Like, that's just what you do. You got a plate of food, you eat it all. There's like no questions asked, especially if it was really good. But here's what this person recognizes, and this is the reason why she asked the question, is because she realized she's eating too much food. If you're struggling with your weight, it's simply because for most of us, unless you have some like medical issue, most of us is simply because we're consuming too much food. We're putting too much food into our mouths and into our tummies. We are not paying attention to our body's natural hunger signals. We are overriding them because we're like, ooh, this food is so good. Oh, I gotta clean my plate. I can't leave food on the plate. In fact, the other thought that she gave me, it was like, I don't like leaving things behind. She's like, I'm not leaving any food on my plate. Right? Or so maybe your thought is like, well, I paid for this meal, so no, I'm definitely eating it all. Or you're just like, it's so good. That was me, like, oh, this food is so good, I can't stop eating it. So what I want you to recognize first, if you know that you are part of the Clean Plate Club and this is like your thing, you get a plate of food, you clean it, clean that plate, you very rarely leave food on your plate. I want you to just Recognize that what you're experiencing is probably just a habit. It's just a habit. It is a habit that you've never questioned. It is a habit that is on autoplay. As soon as you see plate of food, it's like, of course you're going to eat the whole thing, especially if it's good, especially if you've gone out to a restaurant and you've paid for it, especially if you're like, well, what's the point of leaving a little bit there? Like, I might as well just eat it now. That those thoughts that you're having that cause the habit of you finishing the plate of food, they're just on repeat. It's like they're on autopilot, silently, subconsciously in your brain. Sit down to eat, get a plate of food, you eat it all. You don't even question it. That's just what you do. So I remember the old solution to this problem. Like, who are my Weight Watchers people here, right? Going to Weight Watchers, their solution was you just ask for a doggie bag when you order your entrée, right? So you're out to eat, and we know restaurant portions in the United States can be ginormous. So you ask for, "Hey, I'd like to order this, but when you bring that out, could you please bring a doggie bag, please? Could you please bring a to-go container?" And the thought was that they told us to do was, well, just put half of your meal in the to-go container immediately, close it, and then don't eat it. Right. Sounds like a great idea. But if you're like me, you would do that, right? Because it looks good. But as soon as you got home, guess what you were doing? At least this is what I was doing. Opening up that to-go container, getting a fork and finishing my meal because I was the president of the Clean Plate Club. Hey, so the reason why that solution, God bless Weight Watchers, didn't work long-term and permanently is because it was just like an idea to change in action, right? It never addressed the reasons why I had those subconscious thoughts rolling around in my head of why I was a card-carrying member of the Clean Plate Club. It never addressed my thinking, right? So anytime you have a habit and you have an unhealthy habit that you're aware of, Just know that that habit is being fueled by a thought and most of the time, or a feeling, and most of the time you are unaware of what that thought is. I was completely unaware of the thoughts that were causing me to be the card-carrying president of the Clean Plate Club. So I've already given you a couple of thoughts, right, that may be the reason why you have this habit. You don't like leaving things behind. You're like, I paid for this food. I'm eating it. Or maybe like, let's go way back to programming when you were a child and you were not allowed to get up from the table and leave food on your plate because our parents came from a generation where it was like they were happy, like they didn't always have food to eat. And so when you sit down and they're like, oh no, we are not wasting this food, child, you better eat it. And that's what you did, right? So we still have that programming going on as well. So the old solution of like, well, just eat half and don't address the thoughts doesn't work because what you're doing is you're just using willpower to try to force yourself to leave food and you're not listening to your body. You're not paying attention to your body's natural hunger signals. You're not paying attention to what your body really wants. You're just listening to that old programming that is just like on replay, on repeat, and you don't even hear it. It's almost like it's on silent. You don't even hear it. So what I want you to think about in order for you to break this habit, I want you to begin to think about thinking from your 2.0 brain. It's what I call it. Because right now, you're very well-versed in your 1.0 brain. Your 1.0 brain has these thoughts that keep you at your current weight. Okay, so your 1.0 brain has you as a card-carrying member of the Clean Plate Club. What you have not done yet, and what I teach you to do in the Stop Dieting Forever process, is how to tap into your 2.0 self, how to tap into your 2.0 thinking, okay? So we can override this 1.0 habit that is causing you to eat clean your plate at every single meal. Okay, now how are we going to do this? Well, one, join the boot camp. That's the first thing you want to do. So go to jenniferdent.com/bootcamp. But until then, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about eating more intentionally. I want you to just very simply plan ahead. And the reason why you need to plan ahead, you need to decide ahead of time how you're going to experience experience this meal with your 2.0 self, because your 2.0 brain is like a little infant. It's like a little wee-wee baby. It is— it's not strong, it's not prevalent, it's not like loud. It's just in a little— it's, it's in its infancy. And your 1.0 bratty brain is like, hey, party time! Like, those thoughts are loud, they got a megaphone, they are well-versed, you know them very well. And so you've got to intentionally tap into your 2.0 infant brain, your 2.0 thoughts, in order for you to change the habit of cleaning your plate every time you sit down to eat. Okay, so you're going to plan ahead for all of those bratty brain thoughts that come up before you sit down to eat, before you're like tempted and by the food. I want you to think about some of those thoughts and how you want to respond to them, right? So what? You paid for the food. Does that mean you need to eat it all right now? So what? It is really good. Guess what? You get to eat again later. There's going to be another opportunity to eat another later in the day or tomorrow or the next. Like, you get to eat again. It doesn't mean you need to eat everything now just because it's so good. And you're going to have another really good meal, right? So your 2.0 self needs to begin to like poke holes in your 1.0 thinking in order to dismantle this habit. Okay, so the result of you doing this every single time before you sit down to eat, you're like, all right, let me just tap into my 2.0 self. How is she going to experience this meal? How do I want to feel? When I see like this food is delicious, how do I want to end— how do I want to end this meal when the food is really good? Am I gonna leave food on the plate? How do I feel when I am satiated and not full, right? These are all things that we talk about in detail in the boot camp. So the more often you can do this and the more consistent you can do this at every single meal, guess what's gonna happen? You're gonna begin to poke holes in this 1.0 habit of always cleaning eating the plate. And the more that you can poke holes in the thoughts that are driving this habit, the more that you can welcome in the 2.0 thoughts to create new habits, which, my goodness, will actually may result in you leaving food on the plate. And when you leave food on the plate more often, guess where it's not? On your hips, in your stomach, right? On your chin. Okay. So the more often you can do this, the more consistently you can do this, you're also going to begin to train your brain that it is okay to leave food on the plate. A lot of us have like this fear around leaving food on the plate, and sometimes it's because of the way we were raised, right? It's like, you get in trouble if you leave food on the plate. Like, that is— we don't waste food in this house. You— we're going to eat everything, right? And you feel like you're going to be in trouble, so you just have not comforted yourself and said, you know what, we're going to be okay if we leave a little bit of food on the plate. We're going to be okay. And the more that you do this, you're also beginning to train your brain to think more with your 2.0 self than your 1.0 self. And that's how we begin to quiet down and not listen to our very loud 1.0 bratty brain. Okay, so I think that was a really good question. Um, and I think a lot of people struggle with being a member of the Clean Plate Club, whether they want to admit it or not. If they're secretly eating all the food on the plate, I hope that you listen to this and replay it as much as you can and begin to plan and think ahead, intentionally plan for all of those bratty brain thoughts before you sit down to eat so you can come back at them with your 2.0 self. All right, again, Jennifer Dent Brown, certified life and weight loss coach. Go to jenniferdentz.com/bootcamp if you're interested in learning more about creating your 2.0 brain and overriding your 1.0 self. We do it in the boot camp. That is just the beginning of the Stop Dieting Forever process. And if you can't wait until August, that's the next boot camp, is when— yeah, August 15th is when we open up. Enrollment opens August 8th. Go to my podcast. If you don't listen to podcasts, you are missing out. It's free, 100% free. Go to your favorite podcast listening platform, search for Stop Dieting Forever. And actually, those podcasts are on this page as well. And just subscribe and go and listen to all the things and let me know how you're doing. All right, I will see you guys next week in the next Jennifer Live. Bye!