Waste Money or Waste Time
Collecting on the "Parent Tax" and "Finish your Plate" is costing you one way or another...
What’s more valuable to you, Time or Money?
It’s a great question to ask yourself. I believe most (adults) would say time is the most valuable commodity we have. And not to be the morbid one on this Thursday morning, but Death is the only certainty we truly have, time is finite. We do not know how much of it we have left and we can never create more than what the good lord has planned for us.
But what we can do is take action to help ‘free’ up more of the limited amount of time we have in this human experience.
Now this won’t be a post about how to prioritize certain activities, or to abstain from ‘x’ so you have more time to do whatever… I’ve written plenty on that.
This post will challenge your thoughts about certain actions or habits you may have concerning eating and working out.
I have the beautiful opportunity to work with parents who have kids at all stages of development. One of the biggest obstacles some parents face is working through the thought of “Hating to waste Food” that their kids don’t finish up. The reason they hate to throw it out is because they feel if they throw it away, they are throwing away $$$.
So instead of tossing whatever isn’t finished up or saving it as leftovers for a meal to come, they collect on the “Parent Tax” and finish off the plate for their kids.
Again, nothing inherently wrong here with thinking you are saving a few bucks but, saving those few bucks on those few extra bites is an extra 50-200+ calories you aren’t accounting for.
Do that night after night, that’s a couple of extra pounds of weight gain in a month.
Even if you’re not a parent yet, you may feel guilty or even have a deep drive to never throw out or box up the rest of the meal you don’t need to eat once you reach a point of satisfying your hunger.
You’ll overeat a few hundred calories to just not be wasteful.
Once again, I completely get it. But now you’re shifting to a different variable you may not realize you’re “wasting”… TIME.
The thing is, especially if you have struggled with losing weight and keeping weight off, those extra bites are now extra time you have to invest in working out to burn off the calories so you can mitigate weight gain.
Here’s a great infographic explaining what activities to do to accomplish a general calorie burn in 30 minutes:
If you’re already on a diet, finishing those few chicken nuggets off your baby’s plate is now costing you 30 more minutes that you’ll need to walk just to keep you on track.
Are those few bites worth the extra time its gonna cost you to mitigate weight gain?
If time is the most precious commodity we have, would it not be a better investment to just toss or box up those extra bites and save you from either spending more time to work it off or the inevitable weight gain that can and will come from consistently overeating on calories?
Just some Food for Thought here