“Don’t waste that food, there are starving kids in China“. Did your parents tell you this when you were growing up, if you left food on your plate? Mine did.
The lesson didn’t make any sense to me then, and it doesn’t make any sense to me now. That correlation is not a correlation at all. Does forcing yourself to eat more if you are no longer hungry mean you are contributing to solving waste? Is that food going to go to someone who needs it more? Of course not!
Yesterday, one of my clients told me that she ate an entire cake over a week because she bought it and didn’t want to – you guessed it – “waste” it. What?! This thought is your mind rationalizing your behavior and making excuses again.
So I tried an analogy on her – if a police officer confiscated a big pile of cocaine and then put you in charge of disposing of it, would you think, “I don’t want it to go to waste, I’ll find an addict that can use it?”
Say it with me – of course not! You would just destroy it, like the cake could’ve been thrown in the trash.
So today I challenge you to remove the “waste” excuse from your mental vocabulary. We’re squashing that excuse once and for all, because it doesn’t make any sense. And we shouldn’t tell ourselves things that don’t make sense, right?
