Kelly's Success Story

Whatever was put on her plate, Kelly would feel compelled to eat it!  She was the youngest in a large family where leaving or wasting food wasn't an option. They didn't have a lot, but what they did have they were encouraged to have gratitude for.

Her mum wasn't a great cook but she did her best in providing a range of vegetables, and especially meat and dairy. A lot of their food was highly processed such as pies, sausages, burgers, and frozen packaged foods that were quick to stick in the oven or microwave, 

Every Sunday Kelly's mum would cook a roast with piles of cauliflower, cabbage, sprouts and potatoes. Thye even had icecream afterwards but this was conditional on them eating their main course first.

Overeating was a problem in Kelly's family; it was important to her mum and her mum's mum, that kids needed a lot of food to be fed well and to be healthy. Everything came with sauce, gravy, or bread, so additional condiments and carbohydrates were weighing heavy after a meal. Even so desert was a treat so Sunday's were especially filling since they had to eat everything else before they could be rewarded with icecream.

Kelly, now an adult, was unable to shake off and change the habits she had learned as a child. She was still living as she did back then; leave nothing, waste nothing, pile high, fill to the brim, and reward self with desert afterwards. 

It was getting her down, she was very overweight, since in that regard she wasn't that kid anymore climbing trees and playing out with friends. She was in a stressful job, having little energy for anything other than cooking and sitting in front of the TV on an evening, so her weight was increasing and her confidence and self-esteem plummeting.

It was time for a change. Kelly needed to learn some new habits and the main options were to cook less or leave more since time to do exercise didn't seem an option for her! Kelly decided to opt for cooking less since the temptation to eat and the voice and look of her mum would still haunt her whenever she remotely looked like the plate asn't going to be swept clean! So she decided to tackle that one later if need be.

She started her change work by doing what she would normally do with preparing food, but then half everything and put the other half back where it came from. She then only cooked half of the food. Kelly was very nervous at first thinking there wouldn't be enough and she would be hungry and end up eating more. However, with experimentation over several weeks of being mindful how much she was preparing, she started to get a feel for how much food she neede each meal.

Before preparing a meal she would sit with herself and be mindful of how hungry she was on a scale of 0-10, o being not hungry at all and 10 being ravenous. She became aware that when she rated 10 she was tempted to prepring more food and overeat, so on regular monitoring she intuitively started to notice the signs of hunger and to not push it beyond 5 before she started to cook.