Setting Yourself up to Fail

I want to tell you how I set myself up this morning to overeat and be left with that uncomfortable feeling of being stuffed. We have to go back to yesterday when I was shopping at this small supermarket/convenience type store up the street from where I live. I was looking for some whole grain pancake mix, because I try to limit  my dough consumption to whole grain items as much as possible. Well I found this new product from an old-line company, Quaker Oats, and I decided to try it. I still had some blueberries left from my last purchase over a week ago, and I was looking forward to making a batch of blueberry whole grain pancakes with them. I love blueberry pancakes! The kind with the berries mixed in the batter. This business of sprinkling berries on top of your pancakes to me is the stuff of pretty pictures designed to whet your appetite. The blueberries are best mixed in the dough and cooked with it. This creates a flow of blueberry juice that you just don't get unless you cook them, because eaten raw they are really not a juicy berry. Tasty but not juicy. I load up the batter with em so that when cooked there's enough juice released that that you don't need to adulterate your cakes with any cloying syrup of any flavor.

So how did I set myself up for a stuffing? It was just the idea of having this new product that looked exciting, and I was invested in the idea of enjoying a nice batch of them with my blueberries mixed in. Where I went wrong was I got carried away with how much batter I dolloped onto the skillet. Now I only eat a short stack, that's two pancakes, so I'm thinking in the back of my mind that I had the portion thing covered, but I let my eyes get too big and made the size of each cake a little to big. When I was adding the batter to the skillet my thought process was "Is that enough"? after the first dollop. In hindsight, the answer was a certain yes because I don't have the capacity that I once had, but, no, my enthusiasm got the best of me and I thought "nah, that's not enough", so I added another dollop, not as big as the first one, mind you, but in retrospect more than big enough. Since I was cooking two pancakes, I doubled down. All the while, knowing in my heart of hearts I was making a mistake and setting myself up for discomfort. You see, one of the results of portion control is that after a while you can't eat as much as you did when you were gorging yourself on a daily basis, because your stomach shrinks. Anyway it was too late, I had made my decision, and being a member of the "clean-your-plate club" I was duty-bound to finish what I had started. It's a curious thing when we delude ourselves into thinking what we are about to do will be alright even though in our gut we know we are on an ill-fated course. We just seem to turn a blind eye to our better judgment and forge ahead as if it weren't so. Well I can tell you with a great deal of certainty that it is always so, and as I sit here and punch these words out I can also tell you that I am  uncomfortably full still. The reason why I am  sharing this tale with you is for the moral to take away, so that when you are faced with a similar circumstance hopefully you'll remember this little anecdote, and you will listen to that inner voice and pull yourself up short so as not to set yourself on a self-defeating course that you are "duty-bound" to stay on. The moral is to be keenly aware of your inner voice, also known as your "gut feeling", because that is your built-in true compass in life, and what you should be obeying. If you can heed what it is saying you will not be setting yourself up to fail, and this applies to all areas of living, not just feeding your face.

Now make it a great day!

Refer to Tip #1