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My Family Diet

13th February, 2011 - Posted by health news - No Comments

As I approached my fortieth birthday, I looked around at the different things in my life. 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. Things seemed to be turning out the way that I had hoped when I was younger.

Unfortunately, everything was not perfect. I felt like I could lose some weight. My waistline seemed to be growing every year. It was not something I wanted. But as I looked around I noticed something. The whole family could withstand losing some weight. Although we all had some issue with our weight, it could not be considered a severe problem for any of us. 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.

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. 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. It began with a look at the food choices that we make. 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. It would always be healthier to eat a home cooked meal. 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. 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. The second thing we agreed on was to stop buying all of the snack food. Instead we would stock the house with more fruit and vegetables. 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. 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.

Our family has been making healthy choices for around six 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. I could not be happier that it did.