3 Reasons You Need to Quit the Clean Plate Club

Finishing everything on your plate could be sabotaging your weight loss journey. Here’s why you need to quit the clean plate club.

My parents do not waste anything.

They have a compost pile for their fruit and vegetable seeds, cores, and skins.

They save, repurpose, and reuse just about everything (you should have seen how many Cool Whip bowls, empty salsa jars, and produce bags they had saved at one point).

And they carried that all-parts-of-the-buffalo philosophy into eating.

If you had food on your plate, you were expected to eat it. Whether you were full or didn’t like a particular dish was irrelevant because the goal of dinner time was to clean your plate.

I appreciate my parents’ efforts, but now that I am an adult, I certainly have no desire to be wasteful, but I have also learned that I needed to quit the clean plate club.

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Why You Don’t Need to Eat Everything On Your Plate

#1 – It Forces You to Eat Extra Calories…And They Add Up

It doesn’t seem like a big deal to eat that last bite of casserole on your plate just because it’s there.

And it’s not…if you only do it once.

But the thing is, when you are in the mindset of feeling like you always need to clean your plate, that last bite is never a one-time occurrence.

It’s an every meal occurrence. If you are still hungry, then by all means, eat the last bite!

But if you are purely eating that bite for the purpose of cleaning your plate, I would challenge you to rethink it.

Let’s say that last bite was only 25 calories.

If you eat an extra 25 calories for every meal, 3 meals a day, in a week you will have eaten 525 extra calories.

In a month, you will have eaten 2,250 extra calories.

In a year, you will have consumed 27,375 needless calories, or the equivalent of almost 8 pounds.

And that’s assuming you are left with just one extra bite!

The little things add up.

#2 – It Encourages You to Mindlessly Eat Whatever Is In Front of You

It’s a dangerous thing to you train yourself to eat whatever is set in front of you.

Think about the restaurants that offer you bottomless chips and salsa or baskets of bread. Or at home, when you grab the whole bag of potato chips, box of crackers, or bag of mini candy bars.

If you are in the habit of eating until it’s gone, you are setting yourself up for a whole lot of empty calories and extra weight gain.

You are training yourself to ignore any of the signals your body may be sending you.

Your body could be screaming, “I’M FULL!” but you choose to ignore it because the empty plate is more important. The more you ignore your body’s signals, the harder they become to detect.

It’s really easy to let our eating get out of hand, so check in with yourself, pay attention to what you are eating, how much you are eating, and the messages your body is trying to send you.

All of those things combine into developing a habit of mindful eating, which is incredibly helpful in building a healthy lifestyle and making better food choices.

#3 – It Steals the Joy From Eating

I love food. I always have and I hope I always will. It’s not just fuel or sustenance for me.

It is a wonderfully tantalizing experience of different textures and flavors that I legitimately enjoy. When I bite into a chunk of roasted sweet potato, I want to savor the crispy and salty outside with the sweet and soft inside.

I don’t want to plow through my plate just so that I can check another meal off of my list. Eating is not a chore, it’s an enjoyable experience! I’ve found that when I slow down and actually savor my food, I don’t need to eat as much to leave me satisfied.

And I can surely remember many occasions when I ate far too much growing up in an effort to clean my plate and I was left feeling sick and stuffed instead of just happily satisfied.

Don’t let that goal of cleaning your plate steal the joy of eating from you.

Slow down, taste your food, and appreciate all of its goodness (even if that means leaving some on your plate)!