Some of us love to eat, and there are the others who live to eat 🙂 Sharing some tips about how we approached weight loss as a family!
Earlier, every meal used to have an appetizer, 1-2 dishes in the main course, sweet dish and yoghurt at the end! A typical Indian meal would have a vegetable fry / gravy, lentils gravy, main course dish, variety rice, ay/not have non-veg, yoghurt (replace rice with roti as appropriate).
Well, our family had reached a point where I used to bake frequently. For those who do not know much about baking… you need to know only one thing
BAKING = BUTTER
Cookies, biscuits, gravy, scones, quiche, cakes, cupcakes, muffins… you name it and we would have tried it within the past week!
We came to that point in life where we decided as a family to move away from obesity to at least overweight levels (Yes… that was our goal). This is what we did methodically to get there!
- Reduce baking
- Decided to bake (usage of butter) only once a week. That cut down our cakes, cookies, dessert consumption at home down to one week.
- To wade through the first month, we made sure we replaced the baked desserts with Indian pudding, Ice creams and smoothies. We had to make sure we do not get back to baking more frequently
- Increase water intake
- Switching from coffee or sugary beverages, we replaced 1 drink in a day with water consciously
- We replaced morning beverage with Orange juice
- Wearing a Fitbit (Any fitness gear that monitors your steps would do)
- All of us started wearing a fitbit (we probably have tried all of their models by now)
- Competing with each other on who had the maximum number of steps in a day made us secretly walk another 500 steps that we would have never done otherwise
- Meals – One meal we switched to salad
- Breakfast – Milk and cereal, cereal bar, orange juice, banana, berries – Pick any two
- Lunch – No restrictions here. Normal lunch however we were eating, retaining as many courses and servings as usual
- Snack – We restricted our snacking to snack time only. This is the most hardest part which took us over a month to get there! Now, we realize none of us snack at home! 0
- Dinner – We decided to have a salad bar setup like below.
Every one gets to choose whatever they want and fill their plate. Rule was to eat only one plate – no refills. Two days later, we felt we needed a variety to fill our salad plates and started including boiled eggs, avacado, ranch, italian dressing and leftover rice. Some of us ate it as a salad focusing on just the veggies, some of us made a mexican veggie bowl out of it! This helped us sustain our diet. Leftovers were sealed and stored, remained fresh for next dinner as well!
It was not an overnight change for sure! It was slow and gradual, dinner started becoming our most favorite meal 🙂 After 6 months, we started switching between soups and salads during fall/winter season! We realized that we had changed when we went to a buffet at a restaurant and did not go back for a second helping 🙂
Each of us had lost about 30-40 pounds over two years and sustained it. That seems to have been the biggest family project we had undertaken and stuck to it for a long time!
One of my friends asked me to post about my weight loss journey and how I made it happen with my family! So, here you go!
If you are reading it and have any other tips to share that has worked for you, please leave a comment below!