I haven’t joined in with The Prompt (a wonderful linky from mumturnedmom) for absolutely ages but when I saw this week’s prompt [well, last week’s prompt by the time I’ve got round to writing this!] it immediately made me think it would be something I’d like to write about, because it is something which I struggle with every day.
Everything in moderation
I’ve always been an all-or-nothing kind of person. Whether it was eating my Easter eggs all in one go or listening to Babe by Take That a hundred times on repeat when I was a kid, or as an adult spending a fortune going to Tim Minchin gigs all over the country, finishing the whole tub of Ben & Jerry’s just because it’s there, or eating corned beef and salad cream sandwiches for lunch every day for five months (although that may have been a weird pregnancy thing!). Same goes for drinking (or until I had Toby at least) – I never just had one glass of wine, if I was drinking then I was getting drunk. But equally I find it relatively easy to not drink at all for months at a time, or avoid chocolate all together. I just can’t seem to get my head around enjoying just a small amount of something. I think some people just have the kind of personality where they are able to moderate their behaviour; my dad for example used to get a massive bar of Dairy Milk every Christmas and he’d still be eating it in May, a couple of squares a week. I, on the other hand, was given a 1kg bar of Dairy Milk as a leaving present from a job when I was about 23 and I ate the whole lot in about three days!
And so, enjoying everything in moderation is something I find incredibly difficult to do but it is something I’m really trying to do, especially now I’m a mum. I think ‘everything in moderation’ is important for life, particularly when it comes to food, and I really want to try and set a good example for Toby. I don’t want any foods to be ‘naughty’ or even treats. I don’t want to use food as a reward or a bribe (although I think that one might be harder to stick to!). I don’t want him to see me ‘on a diet’ (which, with my all-or-nothing personality I’m actually fairly successful with, it’s just that I tend to put all the weight back on when I’m not ‘dieting’ any more). Mostly I just want Toby to grow up with a healthy attitude to food and hopefully he can avoid all the issues I’ve had with my weight and body image over the years. Although, if the size of him now is anything to go by (he’s very long and skinny) he has inherited the same body type, and hopefully the same attitude to food and metabolism as my dad and brother – to them food is fuel, they eat when they’re hungry and can eat anything they fancy. They seem to have the built-in ‘moderation’ gene that I am sorely lacking!
So how about you? Do you find it easy to enjoy things in moderation or are you an all or nothing kind of person like me?
I am (now) pretty good at the everything in moderation approach. I do, of course, still have my moments, but on the whole I do try to not be too hard on myself and just eat healthily, with no foods being treated as ‘bad’. It’s taken me 40 years to get to that point though! It is tough, but like you, I want my kids to have a healthy attitude to food and drink and to choose to eat well, most of the time đŸ™‚ Good luck, I do think that having children is a wonderful motivator x Thanks so much for linking to #ThePrompt x
That is honestly the best way to be. I have always been like you and now am trying to be more mindful, which is hard! It definitely is not right to view foods as being good and bad – thats where you start to go wrong I think.