The PB & J Factor: How Much Are You Consuming?

By Audrey Dyson:: EEW Magazine Health

I’m a busy mom of three, so I’m always on the go. There are constant appointments to keep, homework assignments to review, extracurricular activities to oversee, on top of ministry roles to fill.

I have mastered the art of multi-tasking. With the phone snugly tucked between my shoulder and ear, I answer calls. With my foot, I kick a cabinet door closed, while spreading peanut butter and jelly on wheat, and reading over spelling homework, and pointing out any errors at the same time.

I’m bad with it!

If there was such a thing as the “Mom Multi-Tasking Awards” I would win one, or at least, be in the running every single year.

Because of my high volume of activity, when I started noticing my waistline expanding a while ago, I was confused. How could someone as busy as me, with an active lifestyle and lots of energy, keep outgrowing my clothes.

At one point, I was sure it was a conspiracy: someone had to be shrinking my garments, because there was just no way I was gaining that much weight!

Wrong.

Yes I was.

Feeling frustrated and confused, I asked my doctor what could be the problem. Was something wrong with my Thyroid?  I wondered. I worried.

“Oprah said something about her Thyroid,” I told the doc. “She was gaining weight and having issues, and had to be put on thyroid medication. Do you think I might need that?”

I must have looked like a wild-eyed crazy person, but I was 100 percent serious. Something was up, and not just my weight.

Seeing that I was very anxious, he recommended that I go see a nutritionist, Emily Mitchell, whom he called “the best.”

After we ruled out any possible health challenges, I began discussing my diet with Emily, talking through what I consume throughout the course of the day.

I’ll spare you the lengthy process. It took a while, but we nailed down the problem. Emily calls it “The PB & J Factor,” which she says trips up a lot of women.

Here’s how it works: we nibble as we make breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for the kids.

We make the PB & J, and then, lick the knife. Do you know how many calories peanut butter has in it? Two tablespoons of Jif, a serving size, has 183 calories—139 of those are from fat.

Then, when the kids leave scraps on their plates, depending upon what it is, we eat the leftovers. We taste, taste, taste as we cook, and then sit down and have a full size meal.

“Women can be nibblers,” Emily says. “We don’t realize how many extra calories we consume, just through tasting or packing things in our mouths on the go that push us above the recommended caloric intake.

One of the things that helped me is adhering to Emily’s advice not to think of myself as “a human trash receptacle.” In other words, the scraps that might have gone in the trash, were winding up in my mouth.

Therefore, I replaced the garbage by becoming it.

Tough to hear.

That’s not a pleasant image, I know. But it was a perfect description to get my attention.

For someone like me, who hates wasting any food, tossing anything is very difficult for me. Growing up, our family didn’t have a lot of money.

We cleaned our plates. Wasting what was already scarce, was out of the question. In addition, our parents did a good job of helping us to envision “all the starving children in Africa that wished they had food to eat.”

But I was hardly curing world hunger by eating off everyone else’s plate, nor was I helping myself, by consuming their helpings myself.

Proverbs 25:27 is right: “It is not good to eat much honey…” or peanut butter and jelly.

What about you? How much are you consuming? Can you relate to the PB&J factor?