If you need to lose weight, how do you do it without making your family miserable in the process?
That’s what a reader recently asked me:
I feel like I have an addiction to food and I don’t want to constantly put my family on a special diet just because I want to lose weight. I also don’t want them to go through my many ups and downs. I don’t want to make a facilitator of my husband by asking him to go buy me ice cream and I don’t want to be angry at him if he says no. It’s a struggle of mine and I feel like it’s one of the things that can hurt my family if I become to focused on my addiction.
I understand she has a food addiction. I understand that she is battling it and doesn’t want her family to suffer.
But let me ask you this: Could she be asking the wrong question? And if she is, could THAT be the actual root of her food addiction?
Here’s what I mean: we think “I’m overweight, so I have to watch what I eat to lose weight, whereas my family isn’t overweight, so they can eat whatever they want.”
What if that assumption is wrong? What if the problem is not weight at all?
Here’s a picture of me and my husband, taken on the Baltic cruise we took the family on this summer:
I look healthy, right? I’m not overweight.
But I’ve got a LOT of issues!
It started two summers ago. I’d get these horrible stomach pains, and they seemed like textbook gallbladder problems. The pain was worse than childbirth. I went to the hospital and they said it wasn’t gallbladder–but it was pancreatitis, which can be just as painful, and which doesn’t really have a cure.
But it does have a general cause for most people: alcoholism.
Only one problem. I’m not an alcoholic. Not even close.
Now my husband’s a physician and he works at our local hospital, so everybody knows us personally. And all the doctors are looking at me like I’m a closet alcoholic, when I’m not! It was super awkward. And I’m trying to assure everyone I don’t have vodka stashed behind random pieces of furniture.
But I do drink a glass of white wine when I’m making dinner.
That’s it. Just a glass of white wine occasionally.
I’m a light drinker by any standards, not a heavy one.
But that one glass of white wine was causing incredible strain on my system, because for whatever reason my body can’t process alcohol like other people’s bodies do.
Then I had an MRI to check on gallbladder issues and you know what they found? The beginning of fatty liver disease. For pity’s sake, I don’t eat fatty foods and I even make my own chicken stock! I don’t eat white bread. I don’t eat chips. But I’ve got the beginning of fatty liver!
Oh, and my cholesterol was high, too (it runs in the family.)
Keith’s levels are all a-okay. But me? Nope.
Plus I was having some major hormonal issues with perimenopause. A lot of pain, a lot of headaches, and a lot of anemia. And after reading a lot of material from the Ultimate Healthy Meal Planning Bundle two years ago, I realized that this wasn’t just a part of life I had to settle with. This was something I could do something about!
I had to really change the way we eat. We stopped going to restaurants very much. I had already quit Diet Pepsi a few years ago to get rid of some chemicals in my body (and my system did start to work much better after that). I went down to 1/2 a glass of wine occasionally, and the stomach pains stopped. And Keith’s getting healthier, too.
And I started addressing some of my hormonal issues with proper teas, some essential oils, and exercise at the right time of the month. It’s amazing how much it has helped!
Most of you probably don’t have issues like I do. But I still think that we’re missing the bigger picture.
It’s not about what we weigh. It’s about what we put into our bodies. It’s about being healthy, not just skinny.
And our whole family needs to be healthy.
Everyone. Not just the people who are overweight–everyone.
When your children grown up, if they are used to eating high calorie processed foods they will keep eating high calorie processed foods, and they will end up with a weight problem, too. But they will also end up far less healthy.
Too often we think of food as the enemy, and that we have to beat our bodies into submission.
Let me be clear about this: Trying to lose weight by limiting your calorie intake drastically will work in the short term. But you will quickly regain that weight back.
What I’ve realized over the last few years is that I need to stop eating to satisfy cravings and start eating deliberately because my body needs things. Food isn’t the enemy; food is actually fuel!
So it’s not about dieting on a temporary basis. It’s a life change that will make you feel so much better.
It’s about I never put a lot of stock in the all the “detoxify” things I’d hear friends talking about. It seemed like everyone was claiming that EVERYTHING caused cancer, and maybe we all just needed to calm down.
But after realizing I got migraines every time I cleaned my bathroom, and that my stomach problems went away when I stopped eating bad oils and stuck to good oils (while also stopping the white wine), I thought that maybe there was something to it.
A lot of the new habits I’ve learned came from The Ultimate Healthy Meal Planning Bundle, a bundle of ebooks, courses, and bonuses that are offered for just 5 days every year.
The 2016 bundle launched this morning, and it is the BEST one ever. It has resources on weight loss, balancing hormones, green cleaning, special diets (like gluten free!), making the real food switch painlessly–even beauty recipes! And this bundle has so many courses that walk you step-by-step into creating a healthy lifestyle for you and your family, so you don’t have to put up with migraines and feeling tired and feeling bloated and having low energy anymore.
The bundle’s value is over $2400–and it sells for just $29.97.
Here are just a very few of the products that will teach you how to make food your friend: (The book Secrets to a Healthy Metabolism especially is AWESOME. I’ll be talking about it more tomorrow because I think it would really help our reader with the original question)
Find out more about the bundle here: The Ultimate Healthy Meal Planning Bundle!
I’m so excited about it I already bought a copy for my oldest daughter who has been struggling with hormonal issues for years. The courses on it look amazing!
Here’s what’s in the bundle (cause there’s lots that isn’t in the pictures):
Resources and courses on:
- Fitness
- Hormones
- Real Food and Nutrition
- Paleo Recipes
- Gluten Free Recipes
- Alternative Health
- DIY Beauty and Skin Care
- Essential Oils
- Gardening & Homesteading
- Healthy Kids
- Healthy Lifestyle
The whole Bundle is worth $2,417.58.
- 58 ebooks & printables
- 25 ecourses, videos & audios
Plus you get $251.95 in bonuses
- 9 physical bonuses
- 2 digital bonuses
- 5 bonuses that ship internationally (plus one more to Canada)
There are 12 brand new products that have just launched
- Plus another 12 that aren’t available for purchase outside of the bundle
- The vast majority of these products have NEVER appeared in a bundle before
9 weeks worth of meal plans
- 1400+ recipes
- Plus 280 health & beauty recipes
And the Bundle is totally worth the $29.97 price tag.
- 8 products worth $97 or more (just one of these makes the bundle a no brainer!)
- 17 MORE worth $29.95 or more (any of these justify the purchase of the bundle!)
- 22 MORE worth $14.99 or more (two of these cost more than the bundle itself!)
- *That’s almost 50 products that more than justify the purchase of the bundle!
What if our food addictions are mostly because we don’t THINK about food the right way? What if it’s not about food, but really about the whole picture of health?
And what if small, simple changes could actually change everything?
That’s what this Bundle can do for you. But it’s only available until Monday night at midnight!
And here’s a great bonus: If you buy the bundle TODAY or TOMORROW, you’ll get a free upgrade to the ereader format of your choice (so you can read the ebooks easier on Kindle, for instance). But even without the upgrade, all the resources can be read on a computer or tablet or even transferred to your Kindle as they are.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m in my 40s now and I feel like my body may be wearing out, or if I’ve just done things wrong for too many decades and it’s taking its toll. But over the last few years I’ve realized that I can’t ignore “health”, even if my weight is okay. It’s about so much more. And I want to be here to live a big life with my grandkids one day! So I’m a big fan of this resource, and I know that it will help you, too.
And tomorrow I want to talk more about how to help your family get healthy and get on board by rethinking the way we approach weight!
Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
It’s so true that it’s not about weight, but about health! I know lots of believers who don’t care and don’t want to hear anything about healthy eating. But after all I want to feel good and I want to be as healthy as I can in order to serve God with my full physical potential, We are not religious about what we eat, but I don’t buy certain things. (I will eat whatever is served if we’re invited somewhere or if something brings a dessert to our house that is made of ingredients I don’t buy anymore I will not say a thing except an honest Thank you!… An occasional bit of white sugar won’t kill us after all and relationships are more important than food choices!) The thing is where we are today was not a huge dietary overhaul, it was a series of many small changes…I started learning more about how some of our foods are made and it grossed me out so much I had to make changes. It started with switching to healthy oils (coconut, olive, butter) I haven’t bought yellow oil in 4 years… Then I switched to brown sugar and we started to buy all the sugar free natural options and add sugar as we needed. I tell you this was an eye opener as to how much sugar we used to eat that was hidden in ready options like flavored yoghurt, cereal etc.
Then we cut all msg, artificial flavoring, food coloring.
We switched to mostly whole grains.
Sea salt and Himalayan salt instead of table salt.
We drink only water, well and coffee (1-2 cups a day)
Organic eggs and chicken as much as possible (not always available here, as well as organic beef… Hard to find!)
I started to read all labels and I found the best choices for ready foods like pickles etc with the least amount of additives possible. Funny thing is they were often the cheapest!
I don’t like to follow a diet with rules, like paleo or whatever but after all I learned we eat what I call common sense diet.
There are essential fats and essential amino acids (proteins) that our body needs to get through food, but there are no essential carbs. The right fats and proteins are healthy, carbs should be consumed with as much nutritional benefit as possible (vegetables and fruit – which make up the largest part of our diet) we eat more protein then before for longer stable energy supply. Grains and added sugar/honey are an addition in moderation.
It just makes sense to feed your body good fuel and cut out the “poison”.
I think most of the health problems we face are s combination of lacking the right nutrients and a junk overload in the body (through all the additives in food, chemicals in body care and cleaning products, and other environmental exposure like endocrine disrupters in plastic that leach into our food, water etc)
Unfortunately much of medicine basically then treats these health issues with adding more chemicals to the body through medication instead of removing the junk and encouraging healthy nutrition.
I totally agree! I really like a Paleo based diet (I say based because I love pasta and potatoes too much to give them up!) Plus you have to look at true portion sizes. Most Americans eat 3 to 5 times the right portion of food! As for soda? Beer and wine are much healthier, surprisingly. You can find non-alcoholic versions. And I’m a HUGE fan of working out! I hate the word exercise. No one wants to exercise! But a good “workout”? Love it! Need it! Try to focus on being strong and capable instead of a certain size or weight. 🙂
Hey Angie (and others), if you love working out, check out Revelation Wellness – it’s a faith based workout program and the trainer really works on getting to the ‘heart’ of the issue, not just getting you to a certain size!
She also has a podcast called Revving the Word, it’s like a worship session and ‘exercise’ all rolled into one. I have just started listening to it and I found it really motivating and thought provoking.
Interesting! I’ll have to check it out! Thanks
Absolutely. I do have to be more restrictive with my diet because I’m diabetic, but I’m not going to make separate meals for my family and myself. So I find ways to cut my carbs and eat what I know makes me feel good, while also choosing healthy choices all around. I’m a work in progress. I’ve struggled with blood sugar my entire life so it’s nothing new and sometimes, diabetes decides to change things up on you. It’s frustrating but I’m going to keep fighting! And my kids do NOT eat crap. That’s just not acceptable to me.
I go to the gym twice a week and I always “check in” to Facebook while I am there. Its like an accountability thing. And I always use the same hashtag- #fittoservehim
That should be our health and fitness goal. Not necessarily to look good, although that will be true too, but to be fit, long-term, to be able to serve God.
I have been blogging about my progress here.http://stilllearning72.blogspot.com/
Absolutely. The junk doesn’t come through the front door. My husband is in full agreement with me on that but I have friends whose husbands still want the junk food. So they eat it at work or while they drive home. I’ve read that some husbands have a locked box for their junk food in the garage.
We need to protect our homes and keep them as safe havens of spiritual, emotional, and physical health. We wouldn’t give our families unrestricted access to the Internet or let random people through our front door. We wouldn’t let a teen read a book that had questionable spiritual advice without a firm foundation of Biblical teaching in childhood. So we also must restrict what foods we bring in the house. And the younger we start our kids, the better. Embrace the glorious whole foods God gave us! Teach your children how to cut a pineapple, peel a potato, make homemade bread, make soup from scratch.
If you make a dessert for a birthday or a holiday, make enough for each person to have one serving. Don’t buy the huge bag of sugar even though it’s more economical. Buy the smallest bag. Feel free to throw away what you didn’t need for the special dessert. Your body is not a garbage. Let the garbage can be the garbage.
For a genuine food addiction, see a qualified therapist. If you don’t make progress (it shouldn’t take years) switch to a new one. Find one that doesn’t just focus on your childhood. Because while your childhood is undoubtedly a factor, you can still learn new habits to make progress right now.
A great book that has helped a lot of people is “Brain Over Binge.”
Great thoughts, Lisa! And, yes, I’d agree about the husbands. Look, if a guy wants to buy junk food while he’s out, that is entirely in his right, and we should never, ever try to control that. But we can certainly control what groceries we buy (if we’re the ones who do the grocery shopping). And keeping that food from our children is part of being a good mom, I think.