Coming Together on Food

So over the course of a relationship, each person takes on different roles.  Recently, after some discussions, the man decided to turn over a big role to me – family nutritionist

I’ve always struggled with my weight, it’s just always been an issue, starting with an ankle injury in middle school.  Super active Kim had to settle it down and at the same time, puberty hit.  That started my weight struggle.  In high school, I started my first real diet  program,Weight Watchers, and the diet cycle began!  For years I had minimal successes followed by massive collapses trying to use the program to lose weight.  It worked for me but only to a point where I would get some of the weight off, but still struggle to reach my actual goals.

After a while of trusting the WW program, I realized that I needed to try something else and that’s when my world was rocked.  I realized that in my years of trying to diet, I never really learned about nutrition.  I was just eating the foods with the lowest point values possible so I could keep up the food quantities, but never really worried about quality.  The core program on WW tries to address some of these missing items in the WW flex point program, but IMO it really never worked for me because I never had a leader who knew enough about nutrition to teach me how to use it properly.

So  anyway, I’ve spent the last few years really learning about nutrition on my own.  Experimented with lots of whole food/real food programs and am finally getting it.  I’m finally learning how to eat regular food, not diet food, and lose weight.  I have a nutritionist now (sadly, I’ll only be saying that for a few more weeks before my time with him is up) and he’s really gotten me in the right mode of eating real food.  I do have protein shakes, which = not real food, but that’s mainly because of my desire to pretend I’m a real athlete and exercise like a nutcase at times.

The point of this back story – this is why the man has decided to put his food decisions in my quasi-capable hands.  I’ve become fairly smart with nutrition over the years.  I created a meal plan for him and he’s now eating much more real food than he ate when his meals were mainly processed and he’s enjoying it.  This was the first week on the plan so we are working out the bugs, but I’m very excited.  For one, we were BOTH cooking our own lunches and dinners (I was really committed to getting healthy, he wasn’t at the time) and two, now the amount of unhealthy things in the house (goodbye the constant cookie jar of Oreos) will decrease.  We are now doing this healthy thing together – which will make it easier.  Last night, we discussed our plans for the two bbqs we are attending this weekend and how we would stick together to make good decisions.  And he’s been giving me requests as to what kinds of things he would like to see changed or foods he really wants to try to work in there somehow so I can work on making the program something he can really live with.  We talked about cheating and the difference between a splurge (having 1-2 things that aren’t really considered healthy) and cheating (plan, what plan? ).  We are bonding during this, something I never expected.

Today is his first weigh in and I’m more giddy than he is.  I cannot wait to see how it goes.  I’m dying to know if I’ve done a good job with his eating program.  And I’m hoping that he finds joy in the success to give him motivation to stick with it.  Not just for him, but for us and how good this is for us.