This sounds like the proverbial "No Brainer". I don't know if they used that phrase back in the proverb days, but you get the idea. It turns out that there are many people who make a practice of stopping for a "tune-up" after work or whatever when they know full well that when they get home they will be having dinner not long after they arrive. I don't know how they can do it. I know that's not something I can do for the simple reason that I wouldn't have an appetite were I to indulge in such a foolish thing. Then I'd be in big trouble with the person who went to the trouble of preparing a nice dinner. You can see then for someone to be engaging in this type of behavior on a regular basis that #1 they'd have to possess a gargantuan appetite, and #2 they most likely are super-size themselves. I first learned about this some five or six years ago or maybe more ( the years fly by so quickly ) while watching one of those news magazine programs like 20/20 or something. The journalist was following some of the people who had elected to go to one of these "fat camps". These people were all huge; easy 3-4 hundred pounders. They were large framed people with big bone structure to begin with, who had obviously been gorging them selves from early on. Maybe when they were kids they burned up a lot of the calories due to a young metabolism and the activity of youth, but by adulthood it had caught up with them in a very big way. So the reporter, of course, would interview them, and the camera would record some of the activities they had to engage in to burn calories like basketball, water sports, etc. Anyway they all pretty much revealed that they would stop off at their local fast-food restaurants as a matter of course before they got home and then when they got home would sit down to a large dinner! Women as well as men were guilty of this. Is it any wonder then why they were as big as they were? Let's face it, if you're that big there is only one reason why, and it's not glands. It's because you are packing away prodigious amounts of food! The thing about these people was that they had just become resigned to it. This was just something they had to do, well, because it was just the way they were. They couldn't help themselves. It wasn't their fault that God made them this way, right? Not that they didn't enjoy the activity of constantly feeding their faces. They absolutely love it! Who cares if your body image is grossly distorted. Not everyone can be a beautiful person. But what about health issues? Those don't come around, usually, that is, till after many years of overeating, so they feel like they're getting away with something. As far as they can tell, it's not really affecting them, so they feel like they're getting a free pass. Till the boom get's lowered on them with something like Type-2 Diabetes. Then there's hell to pay! Until that time though, baby, what a party! So what if you don't have a Speedo or Bikini physique? Those aren't real people anyway. They are the glamorous exception, and not the rule. But, man, you sure can put the feed-bag on! That's where you excel. You can probably out-eat the majority of the population. A wonderful distinction, to have. Wouldn't you agree?
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it does not take any discipline to do this. It's so easy anyone can do it, unless they really dislike eating, and I don't think there are too many people like that. So you're distinction is that of someone who cannot or, more aptly, will not restrain themselves from eating to a fault. Isn't it true though of any bad habit we engage in, that we do it because we can't see any immediate harm to it, like putting your hand over an open flame. So the harm being done is insidious, progressing unnoticed and imperceptibly behind the scenes. This is what prevents people from being all they can, and then one day after an undisciplined life of indulgence they are taken by "surprise" when the damage they've been doing to themselves under their radar rears its ugly head with a vengeance. When that happens, many times, it's too late, like the guy I mentioned in the post about eating yourself to death. So the question is whether you're going to take the blinders off or just keep on doing what you've been doing right along, because, hey, it's worked so far. If you're choice is to take the blinders off, so if Tip #7 is about you, then you need to knock off the pre-dinner stop-off, now!
