naturally thin
 

I watch how my naturally thin friends eat. It fascinates me. Having had an ED for a large portion of my life - I have no idea what normal eating is. Which I'm sure is how a lot of us feel. So I'm always watching my friends eat.

So ruling out all my male friends (who eat like 1 huge meal a day) these are things I've noticed:

- They eat normal portioned meals of normal calorie foods.
- Don't ponder while standing in front of their cupbards about what to eat
- They ENJOY their food, but not to the point of no return
- They don't snack, or always have to have something in their mouths
- They forget about food until they are hungry again


Basically - food isn't a big deal to them it seems. They just eat reasonably - what they want when they are hungry. I wish I could just forget about food and not think about it every second of the day..

Agreed. I've seen the same things in my friends, and its so frustrating.

wow... you got it!!!
That’s why I LOVE 3FC. People here can see things with the same “eyes” than I.
I had this terrible experience this summer.
My best friend is losing weight and is so upset about it. (And I having a hard time to make my schedule to move down)...
She tells me she doesn’t feel like eating because she is going through tough times in her life right now... and sometimes she has to push food down her through.
She says she keep forgetting to eat - How can it even happen?????
And sometimes she is talking to me on the phone and says: I am starving.
And I tell her to go eat and she reply she will after we finish...
Whenever I am hungry I can’t hold to go for food.... In fact I can’t hold to go for food at any time....
Furthermore when I am stressed and going through hard times I reflect that on food and overeating it :(
Naturally thin people are in a different level, which I’ll never be... :(

Yeah the fact that they don't think about what they're going to eat until they're hungry again never ceases to amaze me. I feel like I'm always planning my next meal, and food is never far from my mind.

And yeah, my guy friends do that too...they just don't think to eat until they're like hey, it's 5 o'clock, maybe I should eat something, and then wolf down 1 HUGE meal.

My boyfriend can easily not eat all day then sit down and nom down a 2000 calorie meal from BK or Pizza Hut.

WHAT!

garstar, my boyfriend is exactly the same way..one meal per day. he always says he forgets to eat too.

i just can't relate...i wake up thinking about breakfast....

I go to sleep thinking about breakfast...

ditto:o

LOL me too

My whole day revolves around food! I have friends that can just eat what they want, when they want and not give it a second thought. My boyfriend is like alot of yours; he'll eat nothing all day then remember to have a huge fatty supper, drink some beers and forget all about food for another day.

Yea I remember when I saw my friend once eat one cookie from a pack and then put the rest away for another day. I was shocked! lol something so simple, I wouldn't have been able to do that. Her reason for that was she just didn't 'feel' like another one.

mmm breakfast

I think about food ALL day too. My sister is one of those naturally thin people and it makes me so jealous. I am also a person recovering from an eating disorder that has lasted for 11 years. I do so well for a while and then something stresses me out and I go back to it. I would be so grateful if I only thought of food for even half the time that I do now. My life would be so less complicated.

Talking about waking up for breakfast. Every time I am on vacation and am staying in a nice hotel, my motivation to get up early (since they have a scheduled time) is having the nice breakfast...
It is not even the beaches or places to go, but the thought of what they will have for breakfast... that’s sad :(
One day my skinny pregnant sister said: “Now, that I am pregnant, the breakfast is a reason for me to get up”...
And I was: WHAT???? I was like that my entire life!
That’s when I realized I really have a food issue and people around me doesn’t feel the same way I feel around food.
Until then I thought everyone was like me.

Ohh, I can totally relate. My brother's fiance and I were playing a board game yesterday, and I made us spaghetti for dinner, portioned it out and set her bowl in front of her.

Without even thinking about it, I'd shoveled my food into my greedy face, and my bowl was entirely empty of pasta within about 2 minutes.

I stared across the table at her, and realized that my 120 lb sister in law had eaten two noodles, muttered something about it being too hot... then proceeded to graaaaze on it for the rest of the game (about 30 minutes) until it was finally gone.

Why can't I change my eating habits? How come when there's food in front of me, I shovel it into my mouth like a greedy two year old? How come I HAVE to portion control my food, because I know I won't stop eating (even when I'm full!) if I don't? Why am I like this???

No waaaaay Jelbb! The same thing happened to me last summer. Me and my bf went over to his brothers house where his brother's wife made us my favorite meal, spaghetti. I wolfed mine down because then, I never portioned out anything and she ate so slowly, i felt like the biggest pig in the world...ugh. it really doesn't help that she had a kid and is already thinner than me. lol!

has anyone every heard of Paul McKenna? He has this thing called 'I can make you thin' where the whole bases of the diet is that you eat like a naturally thin person would. Eat whatever you want. Only eat till your full and stop. Eat more slowly and be more aware of what your eating.

I wrote something similar in my blog not long ago. I think the "secret" for thin people who we think can "eat anything and not gain" isn't that they can eat whatever they want and not put on a pound. It's that they eat normal portions. They eat when they're hungry, and stop when they're not. They don't graze, they don't eat that bagel sitting on the kitchen counter when they just had cereal for breakfast.

I also had an ED for a long time and so my view of "normal" was very skewed. "Normal" for a bulimic was "eat until I'm stuffed and then go barf it back up." What stuck with me (post-therapy) was the "eat until I'm stuffed" which led to me putting back on all the weight I'd lost.

Only recently have I started to figure out this whole "eat until I'm content" thing. I can still get in trouble if I'm starving and we're out at a restaurant.. look out! I will eat the entire menu! :lol: but in other settings, I'm starting to realize what "normal portions" are - like, two slices of pizza instead of 4 or 5. Just because my 230-lb muscular hubby can put away half a pizza doesn't mean that I should.

If I watch my thin friends and how they eat, it's smaller portions. If we meet at Starbucks, they won't have anything to drink. If they order an appetizer, they'll eat one or two bites and that's it! It's like I have some sort of control issue... if you put Italian nachos in front of me, watch out. I will have half of that plate eaten like it's nobody's business. They, on the other hand, have a few nachos and then they're done.

Amazing.

So can mine, and he is a STICK! LOL

If I put a smaller piece of lasagna on my plate to begin with, I will feel full when I finish it. If I put a larger piece on my plate, I won't be satisfied till it's gone. How do I shed this clean plate club mentality? Right now my solution is to put less food on my plate, but when other people serve me, I can't stop till it's gone! GRrr.

And I know people who can stuff themselves and not gain. They eat 3x what I do, some of it healthy but plenty of it not (a particular ex-roommate could and would eat 3 brownies to my 1 and she was thin as a rail), so it's not just a portion control thing. And when it is, how do they do this effortlessly? Mind boggling.

my husband is the same way-ill tell him to eat before work or while at work, he'll come home and scarf stuff down and tells me he just didnt feel like eating..im like wt heck?? my sister is naturally thin and man..im jealous lol

This has been such an interesting thread! I've spent so much time and effort observing how naturally thin people eat, and trying to replicate it. I'm definitely in the clean plate club. I eat whatever's in front of me and consider it the right amount. A small portion leaves me just as satisfied as a huge portion.

The past few weeks, if I've eaten out (which I have a lot: I was on holiday) I've been trying the thing of eating half the plate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but I've really been trying to control how much I eat, but I need to break out of this mentality.

I've been thinking a lot about why I eat: am I an emotional eater, etc.? I don't think I am - I maybe eat when I'm bored, but not when I'm stressed or upset or anything. I think I just eat because a) there are certain foods that I just love and would eat over and over and over (which is why I go to Subway so often :/) and b) because I hate and am scared of hunger, which is definitely something I need to address.

wow, i had never really thought about it but this i me to a t. interesting...

and, my mom is the naturally thin person who just never thinks about food until she is hungry and then just eats til she is full. she has never had a weight problem, at 47 she weighs 125 at the most. why wasn't i blessed in that area of the gene pool??

I saw this one episode of Wife Swap where this family where they didn't care what they ate, and ate junk all of the time, and they were all overweight, if not obese. So the wife traded with a family of personal trainers and they were into sports and eating healthy. Like, very healthy.

So during the second week where the wife gets to make the rules, the first thing she does is try to make them eat unhealthy food, and take away sports. Of course. She had some other rules which I can't remember, but the punishment for breaking the rules was to eat a piece of candy or junk food. Seriously! And she couldn't fathom why the dad was upset with her over it. And during the first week, she just moaned and complained so much that all there was to eat was healthy food.

I just couldn't believe how obsessed this woman was with food. Food ruled her life. All she thought about and talked about was food.

And that's something I've noticed about most of the overweight wives on this show. The first thing they do is take away sports and let the kids eat anything they want. It's sickening. And I saw so many kids CRYNG over not being able to play sports, and that's just cruel, and they couldn't FATHOM wanting to play sports. It was just so sad.


For me, it goes day by day. Some days I just don't care to eat nor do I care what I eat. I just eat when I'm hungry and have like a sandwich. But other days are worse, and I'm learning to take it in stride.

How can you not feel like another cookie? I always want another cookie!!!

I feel guiltly throwing away food, even at resturants. When I cook for me - I make just enough that I will eat. No more.

I think we will never break the mentality of the clean plate club - but it's something we CAN work on and change our habbits, maybe our mentality will follow.... who knows.

New habbit to change; ditch the clean plate club, just because it's there dosen't mean you have to eat it.

hmmm.

Also, I realized that when I go out to eat, if I order something I don't absolutly love - I won't over eat as easily.

I think from now on too, I"m going to stop taking my leftovers home and try not to feel wasteful. Resturant food is good for a treat, but not for 2 days worth of treats you know?

There's a scene in The Patron Saint of Liars that describes this perfectly:

"The cheesecake is good," she said. "You're skinny, you can eat cheesecake. If you have the room, you should think about it."

There was something about the way she talked, her easy manner, that made the silence singularly unbearable. "I'll just have coffee," I said.

"That's why you can eat cheesecake," she said, and sighed. "Because you don't. That's the way it works."

I Wish!
 

While a lot of it is about portion control and exercising there definitely are some people out there who can eat anything and not gain a pound. I don't blame them or anything, but why couldn't I have been blessed with that too!? It's a lot harder for me to control my eating habits when I'm around people who can do that, like my boyfriend. He always eats about twice as much as I do and it always looks so good so I eat a little more. Yet somehow he's still a stick. Hmmmm.....

My fiance and myself both started dieting at the same time (July 6th). His idea of dieting is COMPLETELY different from mine. I've been counting calories and doing tons of research as well as writing down every single morsel of food I eat. I've never gone over 1200 calories a day since starting this diet. Well my fiances mentality is to try and starve himself and only eat once a day, which in my opinion is extremely unhealthy considering his choice in food but no matter what I say, he doesn't listen. So starting out he was at 160lbs (he's about the same height as me, 5'5") and is down 15 pounds already, whereas I started out at 152lbs and am down only 6-7 pounds at 145-146 lbs. I just don't get it!

One thing that's really helped me is to eat slower. Leaving food on my plate doesn't bother me, per say, because I try to only take little bits at a time. What gets me is that I scarf down food and go for seconds without giving my stomach a chance to realize HEY I'M STUFFED STOP IT. So now I just eat slower. I only take a little bit at a time, and I wait between helpings. Like last night, I went to the gym, and had a sandwich when I got home. I thought I might still be hungry (it was only a 2 point sandwich) so I waited about 15 minutes. When I was still ravenous, I had another one. In the past I would have just made 2 and be done with out, without even thinking about it. This has been a HUGE change for me.

You know what really has helped me in terms of not overeating (or feeling like I have to be a part of the clean plate club?) I put my food on salad plates. My husband and I did this when we went to an all-inclusive resort with tons of buffets and food available 24/7. Every time we ate - breakfast, lunch or dinner - we'd grab the smaller salad plates and use those. Amazingly I NEVER went back for seconds. We will also eat off of them at home... for me it helps with portion sizes as well as that mental component of feeling like I got enough to eat.

I have found the key for me eating out is to not let myself get extremely hungry when we go. If I'm not starving then I am less likely to make bad choices at the restaurant.

I have been doing this, too! If I finish one serving and think I need another, I make myself wait for 20 minutes or so and then evaluate if I'm really still hungry. The food will still be there in 20 minutes if I'm still hungry.

I'm also a member of the clean plate club and don't think I can break it. So for me the easiest solution is small plates and bowls. One serving of cereal fills up half a regular bowl but fills a small bowl up to the top. So I take the small bowl and I can never accidentally eat too much without realizing it. And I take a smaller amount, and take more later if I want more. If I take it, I HAVE to eat it, I can't stand leaving any, so I take less. If I really do end up not wanting it, I pass it off to my brother. Can't stand to leave it though. It just NAGS at me.
Restaurants are tougher though. At a restaurant I have to split the meal in half if I don't want to eat it all, or I will. Like split it in half and divide it and clearly make one side "will eat this" and the other side "will not" and pretend the other side isn't there. But merely eating it and being able to leave a little bit.. I can't do that. However, one thing I found helped me at restaurants is no appetizers. We usually get bread at restaurants but I won't touch it. To me, that's empty calories! I avoid meals with tons of sides to them. If I want a sandwich, I get that... JUST a sandwich. I don't get pop, or iced tea with it.. just water. Sometimes a small cup of soup with it. Then, if I eat the whole meal, I'm not actually eating THAT much food. It's all the things on the side that really get you!

I was so proud of myself yesterday! I was with my BF and she and I were watching her sister. On her counter was a HUGE plate of chocolate chip cookies and thanks to TOM they smelled like heaven. So what do I do? Once I got hungry, I had ONE smaller cookie and a bit of milk. Ate it slowly and savored it, mmm yummy! and go me! lol

Wow! This thread was so ... I don't know. I'm glad it exists because I've felt this way about myself for a long time. I have such a hard time with the whole idea of leaving food on my plate. I've found that if I use a smaller plate ... I do a much better job of not overeating. I am proud of myself for abandoning the empty plate, butttt ... I think I'll have more. That was NOT a good time in my life. It's SO hard. My husband is so much like the rest of yours. Tall, thin, and eats like a HOG when he gets home. I'm talking 4-6 White Castle cheeseburgers, a can of Pringles, some Hohos, some Fritos, and some taquitos. Oh, and a hand full of Reese's or two. UNFAIR!

I woudln't say it's not fair. You would eat that and gain weight, right? And he wouldn't, so he's lucky? Nah, I don't think so. I think YOU are. You had a reason and motivation to eat healthy. Just because you don't gain weight doesn't mean you're healthy. That stuff is BAD for you. It's not just about thin, it's about being HEALTHY, and you're the one who's better off in the end.

:dizzy: I completely relate jelbb!

wow... I'm so glad I joined this community. I only recently realized that I live to eat.... I don't eat to live. I love food and I can't seem to get around that ? I am glad that there are others who are on the same page as me. Food makes me feel good, I love the taste... at the same time I hate it because I have to think about it all day long. It kind of irritates me to see my friends and family, as you guys have mentioned, going on living their life and not thinking of food until it is time to eat. Maybe a little portion is because I feel I have to be prepared.

I also have that little problem where I can't leave my plate with food on it. I feel like I have to eat it... I don't know how to get beyond that but I am trying.

Anyway, I can't believe there are so many who have the same problems.....

Your boyfriend is basically following The Warrior Diet without knowing it. The prinicple is to undereat during the day and overeat at night. Most people that follow the plan try to eat healthy; some don't. From experience, I can say it's hard to not eat a lot of junk in that one meal. The great thing is that eating one meal a day can be very healthy but it takes discipline to eat healthy in one meal. It doesn't make any difference when you take in calories and the six meal a day thing is unproved (except 6 meals a day may burn 50 calories more a day for the first few weeks!).