So, Daryn has given me permission to write this blog. Weight loss is a hugely touchy topic for him so I was surprised when he said yes, but that's also encouraging that he's adjusting his feelings on the topic.
Here's the thing: If you know us, you know that Daryn has always been a big guy. Even when he was in great shape, he was still big. Also, when he WAS in great shape from hiking, wrestling, football, rock climbing etc, he didn't worry about what he ate. So, when he stopped being so active, he still had the same eating habits. He also had some other unhealthy habits (drinking, smoking cigars) for a couple of years that added to his unhealthiness. Top it off with being an emotional eater, and he gained weight fast. Anyway, my point is that I love Daryn despite his unhealthy weight. I have never pushed dieting on him because I think his looks are unappealing or embarrassing. I don't think those things. In fact, I've actually done my husband a disservice by not pushing the issue sooner. I didn't want to fight about his weight, because I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't think I had the right words to say to help encourage him to eat healthy. That's the thing though - I DON'T have the right words. But right now I'm learning to ACT the right way.
That's what this post is about. So any of you out there who have a loved one you wish you could help lose weight, I'm with you. Maybe we can help each other - at the very least we can warn each other off of things not to do. Right now I have more don'ts than do's, but hopefully that will change.
Previous Attempts:
When we first got married, the apartments we lived in had an exercise room. I think I drug Daryn there twice. I encouraged him to work on different machines while I ran on the treadmill and tried a few other machines. I'm not terribly comfortable with exercise equipment, but I did what I could. We didn't talk about it much after, but we also didn't work to make time for it in our schedules. Also, I didn't do anything to help change eating habits. We mostly had sandwiches, pizza and hamburger helper. The pizza was most often consumed at 2am when Daryn came home from work, and washed down with a 32 oz root beer. I rarely placed veggies next to the hamburger helper.Lesson: Working out with a skinnier, healthier person can be discouraging. Also, pizza makes you fat.
After that, we moved to Tucson and focused on school. At some point I decided that I would fight the School battle and wait on the Weight battle. Daryn is a very intelligent man, but school has never been his 'thing' - he is much more a hands on kind of person, not a read a book and write about it kind of person. Besides, I was taking classes and having a baby! I thought about working with him on "losing weight" together after I had our daughter, but that's totally not fair; Moms are designed to lose baby fat and at this point Daryn had been carrying around his extra gut for a couple years.
Lesson: Timing matters. If weight loss is not MADE a priority, it won't happen.
Daryn's talked about dieting multiple times. I always insisted that if he would eat better and exercise that he could lose the weight. But then I did nothing to aide in either of those categories. Daryn likes to cook (most of the time) and I don't, so cooking duties were almost exclusively his (since we were both in school, I insisted the house chores be broken up too, instead of solely on me) and he cooked what he liked to eat: meat, potatoes, oh and we need a vegetable! Corn. : p Yeah, that was pretty much what we ate. Oh, and pizza. Man, we looooove pizza!
Lesson: Talk is cheap. You must take action!
Daryn attempted attending the gym with friends here and there, but often his friends flaked out on going with him consistently and he just didn't have the will power to get himself to the gym alone.
Lesson: You need to be consistent!
In the most recent years, Daryn started talking about a rather extreme diet that relied on "supplements" and severely restricted calories. I was NOT happy. I did NOT support it and refused to even talk to him about it other than to say no. Well, he went ahead and purchased the supplement and started using it the week I was out of town with our children visiting my parents. He lost more than 10 lbs that week! But the diet was so restrictive! He didn't like 1/2 of the foods he was allowed to eat (fish, mainly, but also vegetables) and so he didn't even eat everything he was supposed to eat. Add to it that I still had to make real food for the rest of the family, and he was dying. One night he told me that generic noodles and tomatoe sauce from a can had NEVER smelled so delicious before! He attempted this diet again once or twice, but one time there was a party we went to that spoiled the diet (you can't really cheat on this one or it messes with the supplement) and the other time the supplement had spoiled and it made him terribly sick. :( I'm pretty sure he gained back almost all the weight he lost while on it. The second and third tries, I really wanted to be supportive, but I just didn't know how to be. Most times I would talk about weight, Daryn felt like I was nagging - which I DO have a tendency of doing - and he'd just shut down. After all, it's not like he LIKES having all that extra weight!
Lesson: Super strict diets can be very hard! Don't just diet - change your habits.
Also - I watch Biggest Loser. Daryn hates that show. I've heard some pretty not cool stuff about what the contestants do behind the scenes, but part of me wondered if it wasn't the kind of extreme action Daryn needed. Maybe not that show, but some kind of place where he could go without the family and focus ONLY on eating right and working out. When Jillian started her spinoff "Losing it with Jillian" I thought how maybe we should look into having a dietitian come to our house and help us change our ways. I also liked the looks of "Extreme Makeover - Weightloss Edition" mainly because it was someone coming to your home and helping you make adjustments over an entire YEAR. (Also, they help with the costs of skin removal surgery after the extreme weight loss, which is something Daryn might need when he's lost all the weight he needs to lose. Hopefully not, but we'll see.) Only, we don't have the money to hire a personal trainer/dietitian, and Daryn certainly did not want to put his weight loss journey on public television. Partly because of the image he felt it would leave of him when it came to future employers, partly for obvious privacy concerns - that and he hates drama!
Lesson: Wishing for an easy fix is not the way to fix things.
Now:
One of my girlfriends recommended Weight Watchers. This was about the time of his 3rd supplement attempt (around the beginning of the year). I gave the recommendation, but left it at that. Previous fights and multiple conversations with friends and family about dieting had told me that I just had to let Daryn decide to change on his own. Around the time he started trying supplements, I was trying to change the way our house eats, since I've taken over the cooking. As I've said before, I'm basically learning to cook and learning to manage a 2 child family at the same time. Not easy! Sure wish I'd realized how bad a cook I was when I first got married instead of 5 years in!
Lesson: Offer options. Support their (good) choices.
Anyway, our eating habits have slowly been improving, but it did little to nothing for Daryn's weight. Then, a couple of months ago (beginning of March?) Daryn said he wanted to join Weight Watchers. I told him I'd do my best to make room in the budget. A month later I told him we could swing it (thank you, tax return!) and he said he would join. Except, the littlest things would get in his way! First, he couldn't decide if he was going to do the in-person or online. He decided to try in person, but the meeting time was a little too early for him to get to on time (and you're supposed to go early to weigh-in). Then his schedule changed! (Yay!) Only, he started booking other activities on Thursday nights! I partly understand why those events happened on a Thursday, but part of me suspects he tried to do it on purpose a little. On April 26, Daryn came home from work at 5 and we didn't have any plans, so at about 5:30 I turned to him and said, "Hey, isn't it time for you to go to a meeting?" He stared at me, and I could tell he was thinking of why he shouldn't go, but he went. :)
Lesson: Encourage good behaviors.
So, he went. He came home with a baggie full of books and pamphlets. I read all of them. Then I talked to him about them. Then I registered him online and talked to him about the online parts of it.
I told my friend. She gave me websites:
http://www.skinnytaste.com/2008/03/recipe-index.html
http://pointlessmeals.blogspot.com/
http://www.emilybites.com/p/recipe-index.html
Daryn and I chat online when he's on breaks at work. I gave him the websites and told him to pick meals for us to put into a meal plan. We bought the food and planned it out. He was SO happy that I was being supportive. I was so happy that he was trying again. Plus, my kids need to eat more fruits and vegetables (and so do I) so I figured this was a great way for all of us to eat healthier.
Lesson: Make it a family thing!
So for the first week, Daryn did everything possible to reduce his points and ended up eating less than his allotted point value every day. He was VERY strict with himself. I went out of town for a few days, and after an entire week of being strict, he broke down and spent a day eating all sorts of unhealthy stuff - he still stayed within his points! But the quality of the food was not very nutritious. This was the same day he weighed in, so it was bittersweet. That first week (weigh in on 5/3) he lost 5.4 lbs.
Lesson: Moderation!
Moderation has always been tricky for Daryn. He's very extreme. All or nothing. It's just his personality. But this is something we're working to get a handle on. That weekend I lectured him for eating a bunch of crap and it really hurt his feelings. I don't blame him! He'd been working so hard and I had to focus on the one day he didn't do as well. He went from appreciating my encouragement to resenting my nagging and changed his password on his account so I couldn't watch what he put in his food journal anymore. The food journal is there to help him know when he really blew it, and that mistake was such an obvious one that he hated even thinking about it. He just wanted to move on, and I wasn't letting him do that talking about how he screwed up.
Lesson: Congratulate the success, move past the mistakes.
Since then I haven't been as hands on in helping Daryn with WW. We plan our 2 week dinner menu together and choose meals both from the WW websites and from our favorite meals. He gets enough points each day that he eats mostly things that he likes. The biggest changes are increasing his fruits and veggies and decreasing fats and portion sizes. Now he drinks skim milk (which puts 3 kinds in our fridge: whole for Josiah, 1% for me and Bekah, and skim for Daryn). He eats less bread/cabs, and snacks on carrots and hummus since he's downsized how much he eats for lunch and dinner. We also buy reduced fat cheeses, and Daryn uses less cheese, dressing, egg yolks and other things that are high in fats. He enjoys a Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich almost every night.
Lesson: Cut the fat and still enjoy some things you love!
After week 2, Daryn missed a meeting (5/10) because it was the only night he could see a friend. He weighed himself, though, and it looked like he'd lost another 5 pounds. :) But when he weighed in on 5/17, he'd lost 5.6 lbs since his last weigh-in. We talked about what changed (the weekend before that weigh-in, he'd done a done of physical labor and we'd expected to see a 10 lbs loss, 5 each week) and Daryn told me that he hadn't really eaten breakfast for the last week. Ah-ha! I'd always told him that he should eat a good breakfast to get his metabolism going, but now we had proof!
Lesson: EAT BREAKFAST!
So, tomorrow is his next weigh-in. I hope to see a good 5 lbs now that he's making sure to eat breakfast again. If not, though, that's okay. Daryn is really committed to this and it's working out well. No "binges" since the first after the one week.
Originally, Daryn was going to attend in-person classes for the first month (there's 3 introductory classes, and then they repeat, but they're taught at the end of the meeting, so the first part is for everyone and the second part is for new people) and then switch to just using the online tools. (It's 1/2 as much that way!) But he's decided now that the in-person meetings are good for him. They weigh him in, and they talk about successes and failures and even though the weigh-ins are confidential, they have a "group weight loss" number that's shared. Daryn likes being a significant part of that number. I think it's also good that he's talking to other people going through (or have gone through) the same trial he's going through. I honestly can't relate. I've never been fat. The closest I've come is pregnancy, but I never even really felt fat. I loved being pregnant, and lost the weight easily. At these meetings, Daryn isn't judged and doesn't FEEL judged. He's getting the support he needs.
He's happier. We're talking about adding some light exercise to this plan. I've tried to get him interested in my spinach smoothies, but he really still doesn't like most fruits or veggies. He's mostly focused on cutting back on fat and portion size, but if he can keep losing weigh that way for now, I'm happy. Maybe when he hits a plateau I'll try to encourage introducing a few new options.
So that's where we're at. Daryn has started blogging about his journey on Weight Watchers. I have permission to remind him once a day to write in his food journal. Perhaps once every couple of days I'll remind him to write on his WW blog, too.
If you have healthy recipes you love, I'd love to hear them! Share websites, too! Daryn is more than happy to try new things. (in fact, I'm terrible at trying new things, so he takes a sick pleasure in making me!)
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