There’s a tip I’ve been giving to my clients lately with regard to fat loss.

It’s easy in theory and it takes practice in execution.

Be willing to walk away.

Walk away from food on your plate.

I know that flies in the face of those who grew up encouraged to be members of the “Clean Plate Club” however, you’re not a child anymore and you don’t have to play by the same rules.

Those who were raised in the CPC often look at their plates with views of: “Waste not, want not” and “I paid for it, I’m going to finish it” and that’s virtuous but it doesn’t often serve you well for fat loss.

We frequent restaurants where portion sizes are routinely 2-3x the size of what the average adult needs. We then add drinks and/or appetizers and/or desserts and what we consume easily meets the maintenance calories of an individual for a day (which doesn’t take into consideration everything else already consumed that day).

Walking away is perhaps the best tool you’re not using for fat loss.

It requires no calorie counting.

It relies on no macro tracking.

It doesn’t even hinge on food deprivation.

Because with walking away, you can have what you want, you can enjoy what you want, you just aren’t required to finish every solitary morsel of what’s there.

“But that sounds so wasteful!” I hear you say…

And, that depends on what you consider waste.

Is it a waste that you spent money on something you didn’t finish or that you consumed more than what your body (or mind) needed?

Table that thought for a moment.

Walking away isn’t just about food and it isn’t just about fat loss.

It’s a philosophy for life.

Walk away from a conversation that no longer serves you.

Walk away from a relationship that takes more than it gives.

Walk away from people who degrade you.

Walk away from a job that’s destroying you (you might want a back up).

Walk away from sunk costs.

(I probably need to explain that last one).

If you don’t know the term: the “sunk cost fallacy” describes our inability to walk away from something because of the time, money and energy we’ve expended on it. Often, we may stick with paths in our lives because of what we’ve invested in it, despite signs that we need to move on.

There’s reason to believe (a correlation, if you will), that members of the CPC also spend too long around people and circumstances and taking in unnecessary influence from places which no longer serve them, serve to benefit them, or could even be mutually beneficial with other parties involved.

Allow me to at least plant the seed: Look at areas of your life where you need to work on the skill (and it is a skill) of walking away.

Shown below, about once a week, I go to a restaurant for a rather large pulled pork sandwich. I’m not crazy about most of their sides but I do like their french fries. I’m not sure about you, but fries, as delicious as they are, are extremely easy for me to over-consume. So, I practice walking away with this meal. I eat my sandwich, I pick at some of the fries, enjoy them, acknowledge that I could easily demolish the entirety of them, and then I push my plate away, get up and leave the establishment feeling neither deprived nor wasteful.

It’s a conscious decision but I never look back on my meal saying: My day sure would have been better if I had finished that plate.