Eating Healthier Together

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. We had managed to get a nice home. I earned a nice income that was able to provide us with the things we needed. All in all, I had been able to accomplish what I expected to do by this time in my life.

I was content, but I knew I could do something better. I was not as healthy as I wanted. As I got older, I kept have to buy bigger pants. This was not an accomplishment that I tried to do. 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. The degree of fat was different, but it was there for the whole family. 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.

Setting the goal was the easy part. 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. Getting a family to agree on how they would accomplish the goals was a difficult task as well. A family meeting was called to decide what we would actually do. The first thing we talked about was food. To do this we wrote down what we had for meals during the past few weeks. 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. We made a commitment too eat more meals together. It would always be healthier to eat a home cooked meal. Cooking meals at home allowed us to choose healthier foods to eat. We would also be able to spend more time together to learn about each other’s lives. We grew as a family as our bodies shrank. Since we were in this together, we also decided to eliminate the tempting foods that were lying around our home. Instead we would stock the house with more fruit and vegetables. The best way to stop eating things that we should not eat was to get rid of them.
Besides changing our diet, we also needed to get some type of physical activity and chose walking as our activity. Whether it was around the block or at the park did not matter. We would all do it together. Again this helped both our body and our spirit.

We have followed our plan for several months. Our health has improved somewhat. More importantly our family has improved a lot. This was not a goal that I had when we started this plan. It was also the best thing that could have happened.