Becoming Me – Off Limit Foods | The Sisterhood of the Shrinking Jeans LLC

0

Welcome to Becoming Me, a monthly blog series where I set out to answer questions developed by Christie Inge, HHC in an effort to dig a little deeper and get to the heart of some of my esteem, body, and food issues.

Last month, I tackled the issue of who I would be if I weren’t the girl always struggling with food, her body and her weight?

This month’s question:

Do you have a long list of off-limits foods? What are they and why are on the list?

Labeling a food as “off limits” is something that I don’t do.

There are definitely foods that I have trouble controlling myself around, but if there was one thing that I really took away from my time at Weight Watchers, it’s that there are no foods that should be off limits.

I very firmly feel that I can eat anything I want, I just shouldn’t eat huge amounts of everything I want.

Does that make sense??

Don’t get me wrong, I very definitely have “trigger” foods: foods that I have a hard time being around on a regular basis because I seem to exhibit ZERO self control when confronted with them. And I have foods that I don’t eat anymore because I have decided that I don’t like the way they make me feel, but I haven’t deemed them “off limits”. For instance, I choose not to order chicken tenders for myself at restaurants anymore because they make me feel like crap about an hour later, but I have (on more than one occasion) had a bite (or 4) of my kids chicken tenders after they have decided they are full.

Another example is Cool Ranch Doritos. I don’t buy them at the grocery anymore so I never have them in the house. But whenever I go to Subway, it’s my Chip of Choice to complete my meal. And my family knows I love them so they make an appearance at every get together. Thankfully, my family loves them, too, so I definitely have plenty of help eating them, LOL!

Sweets are another trigger food for me. Again, I try not to buy ice cream and boxed cookies at the grocery anymore because they don’t last very long when they are around, but I have no issue at all with having dessert or ice cream with the family every once in a while when we are out of the house.

For me, it’s all about the foods I choose to have consistently vs. the foods I choose to indulge in. I think putting an “off limits” label on a food completely opens it up to becoming a “must have”. Isn’t there an old saying somewhere about you never knew how much you needed something until someone told you can’t have it?

So much about making good choices has to do with the attitude you approach the choice with. “Not right now” is so much easier to accept than “Not ever”, as far as I’m concerned!

Christie Inge, HHC is an intuitive eating and body image coach and is the creator of The Body Love Alchemy Community. After years on the diet and binge roller coaster, she realized that the answers she was looking for had nothing to do with the size of her blue jeans or the food on her plate. She set out onto a quest to make peace with food, her body and her weight once and for all. She began sharing her experiences on her popular, heartfelt blog. Overtime, she found that her greatest gift was helping women, just like her, overcome their struggles, too.

She has taken what she learned in the school of hard knocks and coupled that with what she has learned in her professional trainings to create a system that has helped thousands of women to make peace with food and to stop hating their bodies. She offers support, insight, and real world tools for creating a body and life you love. You can stay in touch with by subscribing to her inspirational weekly eLetter or join the conversation facebook and twitter.

(Visited 26 times, 2 visits today)