No, I don’t mean actually eating tiny jars of baby food, but the concept is the same. If you want to lose weight, eating like a baby may help you to reach your goal.
In general, we could learn a thing of two from the way our smaller-bellied offsprings eat. First off, they eat only when they’re hungry. Have you ever tried shoveling sweet potatoes into a baby’s mouth who doesn’t want to eat? It’s pure and utter rejection. Closed mouth, struggling to get away from you, sweet potatoes everywhere! Moms on the other hand (or at least this one), can generally eat when we’re stuffed to the brim, as long as we’re tired, stressed, PMS-ing, or just plainly bored. Bad for weight loss, bad for your emotional state, bad in general.
Babies also eat small amounts of food, frequently throughout the day. Not only is this a good way to avoid overeating, but it’s great for metabolism. In America, we have grown accustomed to sitting down for gigantic meals and consuming huge amounts of calories in just one sitting. This type of eating is counterproductive for many reasons. If it’s what we’re used to, we don’t think twice about going for long stretches of time, and then pigging out at one meal (most commonly, dinner). We feel we’ve earned it after eating so little throughout the day, right? But the opposite is true. The truth is, when you don’t make time for a few snacks throughout the day, you slow your metabolism down immensely and when you do finally eat, your body wants to hold on to those calories, which means it stores them as fat. Try taking some calories away from your largest meal and eating a healthy snack a few hours earlier.
Lastly, it seems we often put a lot more thought into what goes into our baby’s bodies than our own. I mean, veggies and milk are pretty much the first solid foods we give our kids, right? We are so concerned with them getting the right amout of nutrients and many parents these days chose to buy organic baby food, or organic fruit and veggies and make their own. It’s great to put so much thought into what goes into our little ones bodies, absolutely! But putting a little more thought into what you use to fuel your own body is just as important.
| |||||
More articles by this author
5 Tips to Keep You Fit (and Warm!) This Fall
