125. Avoiding food waste as an intuitive eater

It’s food waste action week. Reducing food waste is a great thing for us all to strive to do, but as someone coming out of dieting and trying to make peace with not having to finish everything on your plate to do this can be quite difficult. It can plunge you straight back into a dieting mentality.

There are many reasons why we might be uneasy about wasting food. Let’s chat about why that might be, and then let’s find ways to reduce food waste without compromising on your intuitive eating habits.

Here's the food sharing app I talk about: Olio
There may be others, but this is the one I have experience in using.

Get 'Eat From Within - The 3 Steps To Food Freedom' course totally free!

Transcript

Terri: 0:09

Welcome to the intuitive eating and body positivity podcast. I'm Terri and I'll be talking about all things intuitive eating, body positivity and health at every size and shaking off weight stigma, diet culture and food rules so that we can all have a better relationship with food and our bodies. Hi. Hello. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you very much for asking. I do like to imagine that you are having a little conversation with me whenever I talk to you. And I imagine me going,"Hi, how are you? Are you having a good week? Are you well?". And you're going, "Yes, how are you Terri?" I'm fine. I'm good. I'm all right. Thanks. Yeah, all good here. Um, nothing to complain about really, which is good, isn't it? All fine. Um, it is, Food Waste Action Week, at the time of recording anyway. If you are listening to this in kind of real time, as just after it gets released, it'll be Food Waste Action Week. And the point of this campaign is to make people aware of how much food they're wasting and try and rein it in a little Stop Unnecessary Food Waste, that sort of thing. And I am All for it. I really am. I think it's a really good thing to do to consider what you're wasting, you know, what you're binning, what you're just kind of letting go by the wayside food wise, because nobody really likes food waste, right? But, but as an intuitive eater, this can be a very difficult thing to balance. And if you're quite early into your intuitive eating journey, it might be that this is going to be something that you struggle with because There's lots of things that come with food waste. There's lots of things that come with the amount of food you put on your plate and how much you eat and how much you don't eat, that sort of thing. Maybe you would really like to get involved in food waste action week, but you're worried about how it's going to trigger the dieting thoughts and guilt and things like that, because let's face it, hands up, if you. Grew up having to eat everything on your plate. You know, you couldn't leave the table until you finished everything on your plate. I was definitely in one of those households. It is a tale as old as time. You finish everything on your plate. In intuitive eating land, we call that the clean plate club, um, just to kind of give it a little bit of a fun name. It wasn't funny at the time, was it? It was just a bit of a nightmare if you're a child like me. I have got a hearty appetite. I always have had. And When I said I couldn't finish the food on my plate, it's because I really didn't want to finish the food on my plate. Not because I was messing around. Not because I wasn't hungry. Uh, you know, not because I just wanted something else. It was because I genuinely had had enough food. So that became very stressful. It did become very, very stressful as a child to be having that kind of messaging and you carry it forward, don't you? It's the message that I reinforced with my own children and it's only in my years as an intuitive eater that I've realized that that was not the way forward. That is not the way to encourage kids to eat. That is a completely different topic for another day, right? We'll come back to the whole talking to your children about food at another point in time. Today we're just talking about the reasons why we might have issues with food waste. So it might be that you grew up in this household where you had to finish everything on your plate. And then alongside that comes the message of Money does not grow on trees, you know. Do you recognise that one? Money doesn't grow on trees. I didn't buy that food for you to put it in the bin. I did not cook you that meal for you to just throw it away. And then, and then comes the message of Uh, what was it? There are starving children in Southeast Asia or Southeast Africa or wherever it was that I was being told there were starving children. There were starving children in the world, you know, that would like my food, which then, you I'm sure I must have said out loud at times. Well, package it up and send it to them. That's your natural thinking as a, um, mouthy young child, not mouthy, but you know what I mean? As a child, your head is going, well, fine. Send it to them then. Just send it to them because I don't want it. But that was a message, you know, there's other children in the world. There's other people in the world who would be very grateful for that food, and here you are, you ungrateful person, just throwing it away, just being very flippant about your food, you know, that kind of message. That's hard, isn't it? That's hard messaging to get away from. When it's your upbringing, when it's the people that are, um, Raising you, telling you that this is how you behave around food. That's difficult to break away from. Maybe also it's because of food scarcity. You know, maybe you grew up in a house where there wasn't a lot of food. So that messaging wasn't really around because you just didn't have enough to eat. And this can go on, you know, into adulthood as well. So maybe as an adult, maybe as a teen, maybe as an adult, you have had times where you haven't had enough food. Maybe you didn't know where your next meal was coming from. Maybe the food shop got done and lasted a couple of days. And then as the week went on, there was less and less food available. And so when you do have food in the house, You feel like you can't waste it because, you know, sometimes you don't even have enough food. So when you do have enough food, you have to eat it all. Does that make sense? Or maybe it's the completely opposite side of that. You put a lot of food on your plate and then somebody says, that is a lot of food. Are you going to eat all that? And then in your head, you think, right, well, now I have to eat it. Cause I have to prove that that was the right amount of food for me. I have to prove that I chose an appropriate amount of food for my appetite. And so even if you got halfway through and you're thinking this. It's a lot of food, but now I have to eat it because I've said it was the right amount of food. And so you plow on through and you make yourself really uncomfortable because you have said you're gonna eat it, so you're gonna eat it. Hmm. Been there too. Maybe it's because of your culture. So there are definitely cultures of the world where it is seen as offensive to the chef or to the person that cooked the meal if you leave food on your plate because it makes them think that it wasn't good enough for you to eat it all. But then there's also cultures of the world where it's important to leave food on your plate because then they know that they've given you enough food because if you finish all your food then they haven't fed you enough, they haven't been hospitable enough. What a blooming minefield, huh? How are we ever to know? How are we ever to know what is the right amount of food to eat if we go by all these messages? And then there's environmental factors. So maybe your reason for not liking wasting food is because you don't like how landfill contributes to, um, you know, the, the state of the world and the state of the atmosphere and all of that, um, maybe you don't have the opportunity to compost leftover foods, that sort of thing. And so every time you bin food, it has to go in the bin and it goes to landfill and that really upsets you. Maybe it's the manufacturing process and you feel guilty because It's like you've bought too much food or you, you know, you've got too much food and the process of getting that food to you from wherever it started has not been an environmentally friendly process and now you feel bad for that. So there's loads, there's loads and loads of reasons why you might feel guilty for leaving food or binning food, wasting food, you know, that sort of thing. So I thought we would have a little chat about this because As an intuitive eater, what we don't want is all the guilt around food, do we? We don't want to be guided to eat an amount of food based on things like not putting it in the bin. What we want is still to be intuitive eaters. But not having much food waste. That would be the lovely balance, wouldn't it? That would be the perfect balance to be able to eat intuitively, always know how much of what type of food you're going to want to eat, never bin any food. I mean, that would be the dream, but it's also an impossible dream. You cannot possibly both sides of that seesaw. You know, there's always going to be one side a little heavier than the other, and that's not because you're not trying, it's just the way it goes. You cannot be totally intuitive about your eating and control, I suppose, the amount of food that you end up binning. You can minimise it though, you can do things that will help. to minimize the food waste, but we need to do it in a way that means you can still be intuitive in your eating. You're not going to be all consumed by this. You're not going to be worried about it and you're not going to change your eating habits based on whether you put things in the bin or not. So let's start by saying food on your plate then going in the bin is very different to food going bad. It's two different food wastes there. So if you have a household like mine, there's always a banana or two that will go black and that is because in our house We like the bananas at the stage where they still have a tiny, tiny bit of green to them. They are just coming up to ripe. As soon as they get past the stage of perfectly ripe, and they start going a little speckledy, no one in the house will eat them. I don't like the texture of it. I don't like a banana that's gone past that perfectly ripe stage. I like them to be still with a little bit of bite. I don't like mushy bananas. And they go a bit furry, don't they? I don't like a furry banana. Um, some people absolutely love them like that. I do not. So there's always bananas in our house that are just tipping over into not okay to eat. There's lots of foods that will be like that. And that is a different kind of food waste to cooking too much food, putting too much food on your plate, and then having to You kind of overestimated how much you wanted to eat at that meal. But we can soon address both of those issues. So I'm going to give you a few tips on how to, how to navigate food waste. As an intuitive eater. So first, start small, right? Start small when you're eating and start small when you're tackling food waste. Do not all of a sudden change all your eating behaviors because you're, you're just all of a sudden going to not have any food waste. And by that, that means you're going to change how much you buy, how much you eat. Everything gets massively overhauled because if you do that, you will not be intuitive eating anymore. You'll be putting so much focus onto the amount of food that you will not start listening to your body when you're eating. You will not recognize your hunger and your fullness and your satisfaction because you're too busy thinking about the amount of food that you're going to throw away. So let's just start small with everything. You can build up. You don't have to have conquered this. Right from the word go. Remember through all of this, every little bit helps, right? Every contribution, every thought, every step towards reducing your food waste is good. But let's do it gently. So, I quite like the approach of starting with smaller portions. Now, don't get me wrong, this is not about reducing the amount of food you eat, okay? So this works really, really well for things like packed lunches, that sort of thing. Um, cold snacky lunches, sandwiches, Breakfast, it works particularly well for, it's a bit harder with a cooked meal, but it's, it's still doable. Uh, start with smaller portions. So, start with less food on your plate than you think you need to eat, but give yourself absolute permission to have more if you're not satisfied and you're not full yet. So, you might make your sandwich, right, on an ordinary day. Let's rewind a bit. On an ordinary day, maybe your lunch, if you're at home, would look like, um, a sandwich, a bag of crisps, a pork pie, um, what else might it be, um, a few slices of cheese, maybe it'll be cold meats, maybe there'll be some pickle, I don't know, whatever it is, maybe you like quite a big lunch. And you get halfway through your lunch and you're thinking, Oh, well maybe I could have done with half a pork pie, but I've kind of bitten into it now. And so I can't really put that back in the fridge. And I didn't really want a whole bag of crisps, but there's half a bag left over and they won't keep. They'll just go stale. So I'll, I'll bin those. And do you see what I mean? So if you started small, maybe that would look like, Make a sandwich. And then maybe you would cut half a pork pie or quarter of a pork pie and put that on your plate and then maybe a slice of cheese. Uh, maybe you get some crisps from a sharing bag or something like that and you put that on your plate. And you sit and eat it and then you think, am I still hungry? Yeah, I'm still hungry. Okay, cool. Maybe I'll have more pork pie. So you cut yourself another bit. Maybe I'll have some more cheese. So you cut yourself some more cheese. Maybe, uh, then you want a yogurt as well. And nobody at any point is saying, What you put on your plate to start with is where you must stop. You started small, you put smaller portions of each food on your plate, but then you knew, absolutely, that you could have more if you chose to. That way you get to eat the right amount of food for you, you don't end up binning any of it, or if you do it'll be very, very small amount. And you know, winner, winner, less waste at dinner. Oh my God, that was terrible. Wasn't it? Oh, I am sorry. You can definitely do it with breakfast. If you're a cereal kind of person, maybe you start with less cereal in your bowl. Um, maybe a bit less milk in your bowl and you have another portion. If you want to, maybe if you like to have cereal and then toast. You do the cereal first, see if you're still hungry, and then you put your toast in. Maybe you put one slice of toast in instead of two, see how that goes. No judgment on the portion sizes here, these are just obviously my suggestions of comparisons. I'm not saying you should only have one slice of toast for breakfast, if you want to have half a loaf, have half a loaf. But. My point is, start with less than you think and then have more if you want to. It is a little bit difficult when it comes to hot food, right? I, I do acknowledge that. It is trickier when you've got hot food. Because you cook the food and then to say, well, I'll just cook a small amount and then I will cook some more if I'm still hungry. Well, that kind of doesn't work because nobody wants to wait half an hour or so between each portion of their food. Your mealtime could last hours if you did it that way. And it's not practical and it's not reasonable. So what you can do is cook the same amount of food, but decide what you're going to do with the food That you don't end up eating. That could be leftovers. Have your leftovers for lunch. If you cook a meal that will easily reheat, why not have it for lunch the next day? If you don't fancy that, can you freeze it? Freezing stuff is really good as well when it comes to ingredients. So say you chop up a couple of onions and then when you go to put it in the meal you think, Oh, that's too many onions really. Instead of bidding the onions, what you could do is Put them in a freezer bag, label them up, put them in the freezer, and then next time you've got a recipe that calls for onions, you can get them out and put them into your next meal. So freezing things is brilliant. Fruit, veg, whole casseroles ready made up. There's so much stuff that you can do with a freezer and batch cooking. I mean, if you're into batch cooking, it's such a good way of doing some food prep and then having the right amount of food, you know, taking the right amount of food out of the freezer. For what you need it for, when you're ready for it. I really do know though, that things like batch cooking can feel like a diet thing. It's what we're encouraged to do, isn't it? When you're dieting, well, batch cook, make a whole freezer full. of fat free, low fat, low sugar, low whatever food. And, oh, if you're anything like me, it felt good when you were making it and portioning it up and putting it in the freezer, but it sat there for months because I never wanted it again. Um, so if batch cooking feels like that for you, then just don't do it. You never have to do anything that puts you back into a dieting mindset, but it's an option. So if you find yourself prepping too much stuff to go into a meal, either batch it up and make some more meals for another day, or just freeze the ingredients. If you are eating out, it's a little harder to control, isn't it? But if you are eating out, what you can do is ask them to package up whatever you've got left over. You could say, could you, could you box that up for me and I'll take it away? It works with all kinds of foods. And I've worked in several restaurants and kitchens, you know, pub kitchens and things. I have not been in one yet that has not had a container. That it could put the leftovers in, even if it was not a place that did take away. These kitchens have always got tubs and things knocking around. You can ask for it to be boxed up and taken away and they will not bat an eyelid. They will not think anything of it. Honestly, the plate goes through to the kitchen. The waitress or whoever it is says, can this go in a box? They want to take it home and someone in the kitchen will go, yeah, no worries. Job done. There is not a, there's not a thought of what that means for anybody other than it's not going in the bin, it's going home. That is it. So don't ever be embarrassed to ask for that. Uh, now let's talk about meal prep. So again, this can be tricky because meal prep can put you back into that dieting mindset. It's just the same as the whole batch cooking thing, isn't it? It can be. One of those things that puts you back into dieting in your head. So, as always, if it doesn't work for you, just don't do it. But, you can use meal prep to your advantage when it comes to food waste and reducing food waste. Firstly, if you can do a bit of a plan of what you're going to eat through the week, it means that you buy a sensible amount of food according to what you think you're going to eat through the week. And you can meal prep as an intuitive eater. There are ways to meal prep and still flex it so that you're eating intuitively. There is another episode on that, so go and find that. Uh, can't remember what the episode number is off the top of my head. Um, hold on, stay right there. I'm going to find it for you. Hi, I'm back. Did you miss me? I should have played some hold music there, shouldn't I? Episode 41. God, that was a long time ago. Episode 41 is about meal prepping as an intuitive eater. You can do it and you can do it while still being very intuitive about your eating. So, go back and have a listen to that. But you can meal prep and reduce your food waste. You can have a bit of a plan of what you're going to eat through the week and then you can buy the, the food that suits. those meals that you've got planned. And it means that you only buy the quantities. I think that's key in a lot of these cases is that quite often we just buy too much food, don't we? And then it ends up going off, it goes to waste, it doesn't get used. Um, meal prepping is a really good way to reduce that. Buy frozen as well. There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying frozen fruit, veg, meat, whatever it is. There's so much good quality food out there that is frozen and it means that you can buy bags of stuff or boxes of stuff and just take out what you need and then you're not having all this leftover stuff that you don't know what to do with. So that's a really good option. Go shopping when you're not hungry. We always, always buy more food when we're hungry. And again, the message here is not, don't eat more food, buy less food so that you eat more food. That is not at all it. It's about not buying excessively so that you don't have the, the wastage, you know? So you can do your meal prep and then you can do a shopping list. According to that, make sure you're not hungry. Go shopping. Easy. Unless you're me. I hate food shopping. You know this by now, right? But always go with a list, even if you don't do the meal prep, go with the list. It really does help you to not just go, I'll have some of that and I'll have some of that and I'll have, I'll have a few of those and, Ooh, that looks good. You know, you just end up going home with a load of stuff that. You don't really know what to do with. Adapt your meals as well. So, if you are doing a meal one night, say you're doing spaghetti bolognese, like a spag bol. When you're doing spaghetti bolognese and you go into the cupboard and you get your onion out and you're chip chopping that up and that's going in and then you go in the fridge. I put things like carrots in my spag bol, do you do that? And just say you go into the fridge drawer to get the carrots, and in there is a courgette that's not been used because you bought it with good intention and then didn't really have a plan for it, or you bought too many courgettes and now there's one left over and it's, it's not going to be long before it goes over, you know, it starts to lose its freshness. Or it is going into its point where it's not really suitable for anything much anymore. We'll chop that up and throw it in because foods can be really well hidden in a lot of meals. Casseroles and things, stews, things like that are a great way to do that. Chuck them in! Chuck all the ingredients in. Um, things like risottos, uh, they're a really good thing to just lob stuff in. Curries. Even burgers, you could make burgers and chop up some veg real small and throw that in. I say veg because it's quite often the vegetables that are the wasted stuff. It's always the veg that loses their freshness and gets left in the fridge and then doesn't get used. So, you can chop that in to lots of different meals. Just throw it in. Get a bit experimental. Chuck it in. Get some storage as well. If you don't have Tupperware boxes. And things like that. Well firstly, where have you even been? I, I am sure that every household must have this abundance of plastic tubs. Probably mostly with no lids, but definitely a load of plastic tubs. I've got a stack of plastic tubs that look like, um, Chinese takeaway containers. I bought them in my dieting days because I was going to batch cook. I think I bought something like a thousand of these tubs. I'm not even joking, it really was a thousand. This big box of these tubs and I'm still using them. I'm still using them now. But it's fine because it means I get to throw things in them, chuck them in the fridge or the freezer, chuck them in my lunch bag. Not anymore because obviously I've got my lovely lunch boxes. You need to go back a few episodes to catch that story. But plastic tubs and things are really, really good for storing things in the fridge, storing things in the freezer. It means that you can keep things a little bit longer. So get some good storage boxes. And another idea is to have a clean out meal. Um, so by a clean out meal, I mean You could have one day of the week or the month or, you know, whenever you choose to do it where you think, right, what are the odd bits and pieces that I've got knocking around in the fridge in the freezer that I could turn into this meal? I was talking to one of the girls at the office. And she was saying that they do that once a, once a month or so, and they have random meals where they might have one fish finger each, one chicken nugget each, half a waffle, some chips, and they just have fun with it and have this mishmash of stuff on a plate. Because it's clearing out the bits and pieces. There's always some weird number in a box or a bag of something, isn't there? There always ends up being one or two chicken nuggets hanging around. A handful, there's always a handful of chips. There's always a handful of chips left in the bag. They never seem to make chips. of the right quantity in these bags. I don't know how it happens, it might just be me. Yeah, you can have these clean out meals where you go, right, let's have a bit of fun with this, and let's just throw a load of stuff in the oven, throw a load of stuff on a plate, and see where it gets you. Have a bit of fun with it. Now, it's really important, practicalities aside. To ask yourself where the thoughts are coming from anyway. So next time you find yourself faced with having to actually throw food away, to question yourself and see where those thoughts are coming from is quite a good exercise to do because it will help you to tackle them going forward. So if you realize That, yeah, these thoughts are coming from me having grown up with these messages about how I have to clean my plate before I'm allowed to leave the table, then you can start to tackle that. And by tackle that, I mean, you can start to have this internal conversation with yourself that corrects that line of thinking. And whether that is you being compassionate. And kind to yourself and saying, Do you know what? Those are old messages. It's fine. I don't need to listen to them. I am an adult now, and I can make a decision based on what I want to eat and how much I want to eat. Or you can say, um, yeah, I'm a great, yeah, you could, you could take that to, to a fun level and be like, I am a grownup and if I don't want to eat my last potato, then I'm bloody well not going to eat my last potato. You know, you can have this conversation with yourself in whatever way you want to, but to question where these thoughts are coming from and understand them and then know how you want to think about it going forward. It can help you to change it. You don't have to live by that message and that belief that says you have to finish all the food on your plate because there are people in the world who are starving. And how do you think they would like to see you putting food in the bin? Well, you don't have to live by that belief. That can really be reframed as, There are people in the world who are hungry, and me choosing to put this last bit of food in the bin will not make a difference to that. Me choosing not to buy that food in the first place, not to cook that food, not to pile up my plate too much, is not going to impact on those other people, the other side of the world. Who are very, very sadly in poverty and not able to eat. It really is kind of, you really do have to, to be thinking along those lines because you can have care and kindness and compassion for those other people. You can sympathize with them. You can give to charities that will help. To feed those people, you can make a commit, uh, not a commitment. You can make a contribution elsewhere. I will quite regularly at the supermarket, buy foods and put it in the food bank collection point. You know, that sort of thing. There are ways to contribute, but feeling guilty about putting some scraps in the bin is not going to change. what life is like for those people. So it really is important to see where your messaging is coming from, understand why you feel the way you do, and then you can start to change them. Remember the food police? That's what this is. This is those messages in your head telling you what you should eat and how much you should eat and that sort of thing. And we challenge those food police as intuitive eaters. As we said earlier, start small, right? When it comes to tackling this, start with the things you're not triggered by first. Don't have to do it all at once. So if you can just start with, um, going to your fridge, seeing what food is about to go past its best and figuring out what you're going to do with that, whether you're going to put it in tomorrow's meal, whether you're going to chop it up and put it in the freezer ready for another day. If that works for you to start there, then do that. If you can't yet focus on leaving food on your plate at the end of a meal, fine. Maybe it's the other way around though. Maybe you think you could handle leaving food on your plate. But you couldn't handle food prepping because that's too much like dieting. Well, that's cool too. You know, do it whichever way you need to. When it comes to doing the clean your plate, a nice little tip to start with there is you can leave just one forkful or one spoonful of food. If this is something you need to work towards, Then you can start by at the end of a meal thinking, am I full? Am I satisfied? Yes. Okay. I'm just going to leave. a small spoonful of food, because that small spoonful of food is probably a lot easier to deal with than leaving a quarter of a plate's worth of food. You know, that small fork or spoonful is much more reasonable, isn't it, when you try and think about it in those terms. So, you can start really, really small with these things. You don't, you don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to conquer the world of food waste all in one go. And you know what? There are going to be times where food goes in the bin. There are very, very few people in the world that are able to have zero food waste. I mean, everybody could do it. I think, probably. Not everybody has the resources, focus, time, ability to do it. So, I think if you are taking steps to reduce your food waste, that's a really good thing. But you don't have to be feeling bad for not managing everything. So, it is okay for food to go in the bin every now and again. It really is because it's not all the time. And if you're not being intentionally wasteful and you are being mindful, then that's, that's closer than somebody who's not thinking about it at all. Do you know what I mean? My words are escaping me. I very much like the line that starts on the whole or for the most part. So on the whole, I don't waste a lot of food on the whole. I try to use the food that's in my fridge and my freezer and my cupboards. For the most part, I don't bin a lot of food. For the most part, I find ways to, you know, and it, it really does help you to realize that most of the time you do make an effort. Most of the time you do try and that goes a long way to taking away the guilt. So if you can get to a point where on the whole, or for the most part, You are conscious and you're aware and you're trying not to have lots of food waste, then that's just brilliant. And you can start with a little bit and work up to the point where you can say on the whole. And remember that you can still be grateful for the food even if you're throwing a little away. It will be really helpful for you to acknowledge how it served you. So you might be throwing some food away, but do you know what? By having that abundance of food in the house, it allowed you to make peace with a fear food. Maybe you've thrown away, um, some avocado. For you, it might be that that's a good thing because once upon a time you couldn't have avocado in the house because you were too scared of it because you'd been led to believe that it was full of fat. It was very high calorie. It was, Not something you could have and maybe you love avocado and you couldn't trust yourself to have it in the house. If you're now at the point where you're throwing a little away, it means you've made peace with that food. So you can be grateful for that and maybe by having more food in the house, You've been able to get past your scarcity mindset. Those days where you were scared of where your next meal was coming from have gone, and you're in a place now where you feel comfortable and not worried that you don't have enough food. So maybe having an abundance of food has actually served you in some respect. And, uh, Although we do not want to be wasting food unnecessarily, the most important thing is you and your relationship with food. So keep that in mind first and foremost, and the food waste after that. And there's always apps like, um, I don't know if it's Oleo or Olio, I don't know how it's pronounced, but there are food waste apps out there. You can go on and you can offer things that you've got to give to other people for free. And basically, you get people on there going, I've got a loaf of bread, it's going out of date tomorrow, does anybody need it? And the person will come and collect it from your house. Um, it happens with lots of food that's kind of going over, vegetables, fruit, bread products, you know, things that have got a shelf life. But somebody hasn't managed to use, they might put it on the app. It might be brilliant for somebody else today. Somebody else might love a spare leek, a courgette, a couple of carrots and an onion that you have no use for. That might be the basis of somebody else's meal. So have a look at these apps and see What you can contribute to. They're also a great way to get little top ups. Once, let me tell you once I got, um, something like 15 catering size, chocolate roulades. I'm not joking. They were massive. And it was basically a lady who owns a catering company and they had bought them for an event. They didn't end up being used. So she was like, I've got all of these roulades. Does anybody need them? So I got the roulades. I took them to work with me and they went to the factories. They went around the offices. They went all over the place and made people happy that day. They got eaten. They didn't get wasted. No food went in the pen. Just brilliant. So have a look, see if you can find these apps. They're really, really, really good. And finally, remember the reasons why you're intuitive eating. You're doing it because you don't want to be eating past that point of fullness all the time. You don't want to feel uncomfortable. You want your body to guide you. You want a good range of nutrients. You want a balanced intake of food. And that's what intuitive eating gives you. You can't be intuitive and control. The quantity of food to the degree where, um, where, where we're trying not to have a hundred percent food waste. Uh, you know, where we're going for zero percent food waste, if you know what I mean. Intuitive eating has got to be your first focus. And then you can think about the food waste after. But I hope that's given you some tips. I hope it's given you some food for thought. Um, I hope it'll help you reduce your food waste. I really do. I really think everybody should think about that, but I don't want it to be a detriment of intuitive eating in the same time. So yeah, let me know what you think. Let me know what you think. Don't forget there's the um, new WhatsApp number. Well, it's not a new WhatsApp number, but it's a new option for the podcast. That will be in the show notes. Click the link and it'll take you to my WhatsApp. Um, and yeah, let me know what you think. I'm going to stop waffling. I feel like I'm dragging out my sentences. So I will love you and leave you. Um, happy thinking, happy food waste thinking. Let me know what happens. I'll speak to you soon. Bye.