Eat The Part You Like!

I happened upon a great method of weight loss a few years back, when I made friends with a woman at work and we started having our lunch together. We quickly discovered we liked different parts of the same dishes in many cases: she liked the chowder and I liked the clams; she liked the chocolate chips and I liked the cookie; she liked the apple pie filling and I liked the crust. We started to share certain foods, realizing we were only eating half as much as we would have been had we ordered the food by ourself! We would share a slice of layer cake at office birthday parties, she taking the chocolate layer and handing me the white which I preferred.

This is a great principle I have developed and used by myself in the years since: only eat the part you like! Even though I don't work with this woman any longer, I remember that I didn't miss the apple pie filling when we split a slice and I ended up with a plate of just apple-moistened crust. I now order hamburgers in restaurants without the bun (I don't care for the bread, but enjoy the meat patty) and salads without the cheese or croutons; I remove the crumbs from breaded fish and pick the meat and green beans out of beef stew, leaving the carrots and gravy behind.

I leave things on my plate that aren't my favorite instead of feeling compelled to eat the entire dish. And then I count the calories left behind, adding them all up in my head to calculate how much weight I won't gain this month because I didn't eat the part I didn't like!

What can you leave behind to save a hundred calories?