I was at work the other and was starting to get hungry. Fortunately, for me, we have a little café that offers some reasonably good food. Unfortunately, it was last Thursday and the café only gets food deliveries Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. To make matters worse, it was 12.30 on a Thursday, so I knew much of what was in the cooler that morning, was now gone.

As it turned out, there were a couple of wraps and one spinach salad left. Even as I let out a relieved sigh that I would be able to grab a quick lunch, there was the sneaking suspicion that I was not going to be happy with the salad.

I have to, at this point confess, I was actually craving a good salad -- I had not eating many veggies last week and they just sounded good! So I took the last salad, grabbed some dressing, and headed back to my office to eat.

The thing about a salad, for me, is that it is very hard for me to eat it at my desk and do anything else. I don’t like spilling the dressing anywhere it shouldn’t be (desk calendar -- for example) so most of the time, the salad has its own built in Mindful Eating approach.
I prepped the salad (cut it up and tossed it with the dressing) and sat down to eat it. I do not know where my mind was as I started eating, but at a certain point (before I had started to feel the even the least bit full -- so a definite 7), I came back from my mental musings to notice that my salad did not look very good. Somehow, I had gotten too much dressing on everything (which is weird because the dressing was prepackaged as a single serving and I never feel like that is too much) and so now the spinach was all coated and the whole thing (even the tomatoes) looked gross!

The interesting thing about this situation was I still wanted to eat the salad. I was no longer hungry but my mouth hadn’t been satisfied. The salad should have tasted good -- this salad has always been good in the past. But…for whatever reason, it didn’t look good and it didn’t taste great.

It was hard to make a decision at this point. Should I eat the rest of the salad because I had a long afternoon ahead of me (even though I was no longer hungry and wasn’t happy with the look and taste of it)? Or should I practice what I preach and throw the salad away knowing I could eat something else in the afternoon if I got hungry?

The problem was my expectations were not matching up with my actual experience. I was looking forward to the vegetables, I have liked this salad in the past, and I was physically hungry.

Well…I decided to practice what I preach. The salad went into the trash without even eating one last bite of dressing-laden bacon bits (challengine for me). I made it through the afternoon’s activities without getting so hungry I couldn’t stand it.

What I have learned (or relearned) is that paying attention pays off. My life was not made better by eating a salad I didn’t really want -- my physical hunger was taken care of by what I ate -- and I saved the rest of the salad’s worth of calories to be used later on something that actually added value to my life.