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! 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."

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!