The human hand is, all in all, a wonderful instrument. Take opposable thumbs, for one. I know quite a few kitties who envy you those :).
But there is one feature that has, unfortunately for many of us, been omitted.
That feature is a measuring device.
Using the human hand as such is a step on the road to weight desaster.
You know the situation- a big tin full of cookies in front of you, and you take your hand to extract from that tin - what? The amount termed "a handful".
Depending on how far you stretch out your hand, that means anywhere between three or a dozen cookies.
Thus, the perceived "handful" may amount to two, three or more portions when you compare it to the portion sizes in the nutritional informations.
And , since you have had "just a handful", what is the damage in taking "just another"?
Or, how do you eat a handful of cookies? For me, there´s always the danger that I may stuff all of them into my mouth at once, swallowing down the lot without really taking stock of how many they are.
That´s dangerous because it maximizes my cookie intake while minimizing the pleasure I get from eating them. Ten cookies swallowed down in one big gulp are not more tasty than a single cookie eaten slowly. They are, actually, less tasty. Especially when I, out of feeling guilty at eating cookies at all, gulp them down without pausing to really taste them, which is the dumbest thing to do because in that case, I could as well chomp down on a bale of hay for all the pleasure they give me.
And, since cookies eaten by the handful do not deliver the eating pleasure they are eaten for, what does one do- raise the dosage, medically speaking. Eat more cookies, in the hope of finally getting the feeling of having enough.
Do you see the catch in that?
It´s the attempt at eating cookies to feel good while at the same time not permitting myself to really feel that feeling that I hope a cookie would produce.
Instead of savouring one single cookie mindfully.
The big surprise for me, when I first did that, was, that this single cookie gave me more pleasure to eat than stuffing myself with several hands full of cookies at once.
At a fraction of the calories.
And what applies to cookies, also applies to almost all of the other not-so-goodies that I have, for a long time, declared forbidden because I was fat. As long as I do not permit myself to really be present in the moment and be mindful when eating them, I only have a choice of not going anywhere near them, which sometimes takes a lot of willpower, or, giving in to the lure of bingeing on them.
Oh, and there´s yet another surprise.
I have discovered that some of the foodstuffs I had kept myself from with lots of willpower, or gorged myself on when willpower failed, were not even that tasty when eaten mindfully. Their allure had been kept up by me forbidding them to myself, nothing else. Eating them mindfully allowed me to find out that I didn´t even like them.
That experience has led me to adopt an entirely different policy towards culinary "sins".
To me, no food may ever be off limits any more. But neither may I chomp down my food mindlessly. Whenever I catch myself with my hand in the cookie jar, I stop myself, take just one and close the jar again.
I find it surprisingly easy to just have one cookie that way and enjoy it, knowing that two or three or four of them would taste just the same and not deliver any more pleasure in eating.
And I know that I don´t fall off the wagon completely that way. How often did I give up on ever being able to re-condense my body after a single slipup, retiring to the vicinity of that cookie jar instead, and not reemerging from it until several thousand calories and several pounds later.
The reassurance that I may, if I really want to, have another cookie is the best way for me not to want to eat them all at once.
And not bingeing is prerequisite for me to lose weight.
Julia
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