A couple years ago I signed up for Weight Watchers, went to meetings once or twice a week, and lost eight pounds. I gained it back pretty quickly, but the program was effective at the time. You count your points for everything you eat, you exercise and subtract some of those points, and you lose weight.
Instead of doing that separate thing for myself, isolated both in time (there really wasn't much chance I was going to count points the rest of my life as it's somewhat complicated) and within the family, I wish I had started to make other lifelong changes and involved my whole family.
I think that instead of mom going on a diet to lose weight, she would do better to make one significant, permanent change at a time and get the whole family on board with it.
Changes such as: we're all going to learn to read food labels and we're all going to aim for eating less than 12 grams of fat a day. Such as: we're all going to get pedometers and we're going to aim for walking at least 10,000 steps a day.
Or, if nobody else in the family is manifesting a weight problem, just bring only lowfat food into the house, cook lowfat food, and involve the whole family in exercise on a regular basis. And tell them why. She can be more intentional about it and lose weight herself, but her family will be learning healthier habits along the way and will have less risk of ever being part of the obesity epidemic.
But if one or more of her children are starting to have weight problems, it's best to get on it right away and make it a conscious effort on everyone's part. Not in an anxiety-producing way, but in a slow, steady, one change-at-a-time way. And make it fun, make it a challenge. If only I could go back and do it this way, my son never would have gained the weight that propelled him from "a little chubby" to obese.
Since he did become obese, we needed outside help, and that outside help was this camp. Everything I've learned from the Wellspring program is making me look back and know exactly what I would have done differently.
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I can't express the since of "breakthrough" I've had since you've given me an outlet for this conversation!!
First, I realize how much my "desires", "theories" and "solutions" about my daughter's weight -- and actually all three of my daughter's body-image issues -- are tied to my own. Yuck!! In the past two days, I've been thinking of those fundamental behaviors that I choose to ignore due to the hecticness of our life -- or maybe life is hectic because it helps me ignore them.
I introduced the concept to the family yesterday of the "How do I feel?" Thermometer: asking oneself "how would I rate my stomach feeling" before I take a bite. I shared with my family that this is something that I'm trying to work on because I've realized I've disconnected putting food into my mouth with my actual need for food.
Interestingly enough, it was my non-obese daughter ("Callie") who caught onto it immediately. Having the thermometer concept gave her words to express that sometimes we bring the "peas" or the "salad" to the table late in the meal and then insist she eat them. She said, "At that point I'm really full and it makes me sick to think of eating them.' I realized I'd never had THAT reaction to more food in my life and had never seen it that way!!
My "target daughter" ("Sadie") just came home from camp yesterday morning and I have not sat her down and said "this is something we are going to work on".
We are going to start with the Hunger Thermometer and getting her and her younger sister into swim team this week -- something that Sadie is very interested in doing.
Could you further explain the Thermometer or link me to where you found it?
okay, I really do know how to spell "sense" by the way...
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