Everyday Systems

Here's a short video illustrating how important the No Snack rule can be.

http://www.youtube.com/alicehenneman#p/u/6/8MHedeew4jM

Under my rules, free samples offered at stores and restaurants are snacks. So they're not allowed on N days, period.

Tasting something while cooking is important for making good-tasting food, but it can easily get out of hand. That's something I'm working on these days. You should taste food you're cooking with a teaspoon (no larger spoons), and the teaspoon goes with the dirty dishes immediately after the first taste. You don't do gross things like double-dip, or stick your fingers in the food to taste it. If you already know what something's going to taste like, it is not a taste. If you're finding that, by the time you sit down to eat, you're not hungry any more, your tasting while cooking has gotten out of hand.

I'm trying to convince myself that eating food "so it doesn't go to waste" is silly. If you throw the food out, the time and money you've spent on it is wasted. But if you eat it when you don't want it, not only is that time and money wasted, but you also get the extra costs associated with being overweight, everything from extra health care costs to a lower salary due to prejudice against overweight people.

One thing I'm doing to help with that is my rule that you can't eat unless you are sitting down. It's hard to eat food "because there's just a little bit left" without breaking either that rule or the "no seconds" rule.

Another thing that can help with that is to serve food buffet-style. That means there are no serving dishes of food on the table, all the food stays in the kitchen. We've been doing this for years, just because it means fewer dishes to wash (we serve the food directly from the cooking pots or pans). But it's also a good practice from a diet standpoint. It does make "no seconds" easier to follow, when you'd have to get up and walk into the kitchen to get seconds, knowing as you did it that you were doing something you shouldn't.

Great video. Thanks for posting and the timely reminder.