The first thing we need to keep in mind is what's in our mind when we belly up to the table, or counter, etc. for some viddles. Whether we realize it or not we have a pre-conception of how much food we think we need to eat at any particular time. Most of the time it is an inflated idea of what we really need in order to achieve the feeling of fullness that we all strive for when we sit down, or maybe stand up, in this busy hurry-up world we live in now, to eat. Why is it usually an inflated image? Simply because food is good, and, let's face it, 99.9% of us enjoy eating, and we want to maximize every opportunity to do so for optimal enjoyment. So we let er rip! We would rather have or order too much food than be left wanting when the plate is cleaned. Understandable. That's just human nature. Where we go wrong is that once we dig in and we're making our way delightfully through what we've allotted ourselves we get this message from our stomachs (usually that is) that, whoa now, we are getting full or, worse yet, are full. Bummer! We could or should probably stop there, but no, because we are longstanding members of the clean your plate club since we learned how to please our mothers ( and fathers for that matter, mothers shouldn't get all the blame for our excesses) at an early age, we press ahead and make sure we force every last morsel into our mouths. We simply do not stop when we get the signal from our stomachs, because the signal does not jibe with that pre-conceived notion we had when we sat down to take care of this wonderful business of feeding our face. That's right the pre-conception usually wins. No surprise there. The thing we have to do if we are ever going to get this weight thing under control is lower our expectations about the size of the package we have coming when it's time for us to eat.
Now I know that how much a person thinks they need to eat at any one time depends on how hungry they are, how physically demanding whatever it is they've been doing or are about to do is, how big they are, etc., etc. The point I'm trying to drive home hear is don't be too ambitious when you are deciding how much food you need to allot yourself at a meal. Don't let your eyes get to big and just scale it back a little at first. This might just mean not "Super-Sizing it". Common sense weight loss is about being sensible in your approach to food, and the first place to start is exercising some discipline and not biting off more than you need to chew, so to speak. Ergo the "Lower Your Expectations" in the title. If you think about it, elevated expectations is the cause of probably 99% of the disappointment in life. If we just did not expect so much in the first place, there would be much more contentment in the world.
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