Nearing middle age gave me a reason to take stock of where I was at. I had a good family with my wife and kids. Despite a mortgage, we still enjoyed our house. 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.
There was one thing that was bothering me. I was not happy with the shape of my body. My waistline seemed to be growing every year. I would have preferred that this did not happen. It was something that I was not alone in facing. It would not hurt my children or my spouse to look in the mirror either. 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. As the head o the household it was up to me to get my family to make the right choices about how to treat their body.
Deciding that it was time to get healthy as a family was not difficult. The road that we were going to have to follow to accomplish this goal was not going to be so simple. Getting my wife and children to agree that we should all do this was the first thing I had to do. After that, it was a matter of determining exactly what healthy choices were. It was something that would have be decided together. We discussed how to follow a healthy diet. We decided to keep track of exactly what food choices that everyone was making. As we tracked our meals, the theme of eating out kept reappearing. 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. This would eliminate some of our fast food habits. By planning family meals, we could choose things that were better for us to eat. Sitting down for a family meal allowed us to talk more and to discuss things that were important to us with the people we cared about the most. We grew as a family as our bodies shrank. We also went and emptied the cupboards of everything that we should not be eating. instead of chips and ice cream we chose apples and carrot sticks for things to eat between meals. If you do not see something that is not healthy, we decided you would not eat it.
Besides changing our diet, we also needed to get some type of physical activity and chose walking as our activity. The length of the walk was not what was important. Doing it as a family is what made it work. We found a lot of support by doing it together.
Our family has been making healthy choices for around six months. Our health has improved somewhat. But what has really improved is the bonds that we have with each other. I had no idea when this started that that would happen. It is something I would recommend for anyone to try.
Friday, January 28, 2011
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