My Family Diet
Nearing middle age gave me a reason to take stock of where I was at. I was in a happy marriage and loved my children. We had managed to buy a good home in a good neighborhood. Despite the rough economy, my job was fairly safe and allowed us to live the lifestyle we enjoyed. It appeared that my life was going the way that it should and I had most of what I needed.
I was content, but I knew I could do something better. I was not happy with the shape of my body. The scale showed that my weight was consistently going up. This was not an accomplishment that I tried to do. But as I looked around I noticed something. The whole family could withstand losing some weight. None of us had a big problem with our weight. But all of us had a weight issue of some kind to face. I think that I set a bad example that was being followed by the others and decided to do something about it, but I knew that it was not a case of me deciding on a way how to lose weight fast at home in a week, but rather a time for my whole family to start making better choices about how we were treating our bodies and decide on how we could improve the choices. I decided that we would all start to follow a nutritious diet and we would all begin a family fitness regimen.
Setting the goal was the easy part. But the hard part was what followed making the decision to get healthy. Convincing my family that we should all do this was one thing. After that, it was a matter of determining exactly what healthy choices were. We sat down as a family to discuss our options. We discussed how to follow a healthy diet. We decided to keep track of exactly what food choices that everyone was making. We all saw that the use of the drive thru was all of ours first choice. We all knew that too much fast food was not healthy and changing this would go a long way in improving our diet and although cutting it out would not help us learn how to lose weight fast it would help us start to lose some weight if we were able to combine it with other changes in our lifestyle, and we had to figure out why we had become dependent on things like fast food and snacking to keep us full.
Our schedules were busy, but not so busy that we couldn’t make adjustments. The first thing was to eat together more often. That helped us stop depending on the local drive thru for dinner. One of the keys to eating right is to know what is in the food that you prepare and we accomplished this by eating at home more often. We would also be able to spend more time together to learn about each other’s lives. As we got healthier, we learned more about each other. The second thing we agreed on was to stop buying all of the snack food. The things that we snacked on wood have to be healthier to remain in our home. If you do not see something that is not healthy, we decided you would not eat it.
After dinner we came together to take a stroll as a family. Whether it was around the block or at the park did not matter. We would all do it together. We found a lot of support by doing it together.
We have followed our plan for several months. Our health has improved somewhat. The amazing part is that we get along even better than before. This was not a goal that I had when we started this plan. It was also the best thing that could have happened.